by Jennifer Firestone
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

Going Places

             To Travel!
             To Change Countries

             To travel! To change countries!
             To be forever someone else,
             With a soul that has no roots,
                                  Living only off what it sees!

                            To belong not even to me!
                            To go forward, to follow after
                            The absence of any goal
                            And any desire to achieve it!

                            This is what I call travel.
                            But there’s nothing in it of me
                            Besides my dream of the journey.
                            The rest is just land and sky.

                                                                         –Fernando Pessoa

Depending on how you read the above poem, travel could sound like an illuminating experience, accentuated by actual exclamations and Buddha-like certainness: nothing ever belongs to the self, the self forever becomes someone new. In a sense this sounds appealing to me, as it also does to many others who seek to organize their lives by some tired but true maxims. Who could deny the allure of living without deadlines and responsibilities, without waking up every morning to roughly the same routine of coffee and packed lunch? It seems though, that there is a deeper psychology at work. On second look, the exclamations in the Pessoa poem read frightfully, “The absence of any goal / And any desire to achieve it!” Read in this way it sounds like the lament of someone who is stuck in the bell-jar. Perhaps the speaker who reflects that travel has “nothing in it of me” realizes something that most Carnival cruise guests don’t: the moral quandary of ourselves as empty vessels, humping further and further away to exotic places where some type of fulfillment will be beheld. Travel inherently poses existential questions to those self-conscious enough to notice.

Jennifer Firestone’s book Holiday acts as a travelogue documenting more than just the sights and sounds of far away places, as Firestone pays little homage to any place in particular. The book is divided into six sections, all without titles. Judging from the context and description of some poems, I understand when she is writing about a specific place, but without reference to mainstream tourist destinations, which Firestone more or less leaves out, it is hard to determine which small city she is wandering around in.

These poems make use of spacing instead of punctuation in most places and in turn offer no clear determination as to how they should be read. Each poem relays something different: a definite location full of references to Michelangelo, an imagined history of what may have taken place on the very street on which the speaker currently stands, overheard conversations of other travelers—there is almost no end to the differences captured in these vignettes. But regardless of this difference there is a certain kind of consciousness that pervades all the poems, one that is caught up with trying to understand the motivation behind “travel,” the exaltations of the uncertain soul seeking a sense of fulfillment, and how it is very different than “vacation,” or the guilt of leisure, gluttony, and consumption.

The voice in Holiday wavers back and forth between the silly exaggeration of “vacation[ing] the hell / out of things” and the very real disappointment in the way “other images / felt visited / always something letting you down: / at the artifact breath held / you whistles it out / assuming there was more / you were missing.” The conceit of the book manifests toward the end when a woman touring the same historic building is overheard as saying “Is it worth / going down these steps / are the bottom rooms worth it?” Such a question embodies the real tension of vacationing, or taking a “holiday” as the book is aptly titled, and the true sense of traveling as an existential experience. Is it true that traveling means the soul has no home? Or is it rather that the soul is open to developing into something that it would not have been able to had it just stayed put in one place? I’m not suggesting the book pretends to answer this, only that the poems in the book as savvy enough to recognize this moral ambiguity and that the poet thinks enough of herself and her experience to make record. The last poem in section 5 begins by saying “I can’t lose my body. I’m membered by its attachments,” reminding us that no matter where you are you are always there. Ultimately this is a lesson that everyone (traveler or not) comes to realize. Try as best you can but there will always be something of you in it, whatever that it may be.

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