by Cecilia Woloch
Tupelo Press 2008

You Prob’ly Think This Book is About You

Cecilia Woloch’s chapbook Narcissus is divided into two sections.  The first of these is introduced by a quote from “Narcissus” by Patricia Hooper: “Didn’t I stand there once? / Didn’t I choose to go back?”  The inclusion of this makes me think that the author found more inspiration from Hooper than from the rather conspicuous Greek myth (thankfully).  True to form, the poems in this section highlight the selfsame nostalgia and wistfulness of Hooper’s quote; there’s reminiscence, desire, sentimentality in “Anniversary”:

And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?

Interspersed between lyric poems like “Anniversary” and “Greed” are prose poems written as postcards:  “Postcard to Kim from the Café Les Philosophes,” and so on. These missives catalogue the narrator’s emotional and physical peregrinations through her dreams, the Lower Carpathians and Paris.  My favorite is “Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea.”  Desire and sentimentality take a back seat in this poem, which depicts dream and dream images with startling immediacy:

“…Then our lost mothers hushed us.  A halo of bees.  I was dreaming as hard as I could dream.  It was fast, how the apples fattened and fell.  The country that rose up to meet me was steep as a mirror.  The gold hook gleamed.” 

The poem aims to say, not to convince, and its wealth of images speak compellingly for themselves. Whether the speaker is a Naricissus, is in love with a Naricissus, are gratifyingly beside the point.   

Mirrors, coins, glass, fire, water, hook glisten in Woloch’s poems. These points of light might allude to Narcissus, but I’m not quite convinced. The speaker in “Greed” is not obsessed with her own image; she is fixated on what the “he” in the poem affirms of her:

I was his, everything was his—

even my sleep belonged to him.

And later in the poem:

Sun tossed like coins across the bed,
and the glittering of birdsong, breeze
the cool blue of his eyes.  Even the mirror

where a woman, shining, turned
to kiss, be kissed.  Even the shallow, silvered glass
in which I dressed, undressed, was his.

The woman is again at the mercy of the spectacular male figure in “Return,” a poem in the second section:

moving near, and then more near, a shape I knew,
and when he stood before me, finally, I stepped, too,
toward the sky of it, the night around us, warm,
and let my head fall to his chest, and made no bones
about my joy.

The second section is primarily composed of what can only be described as quasi-“love” odes which are effusive in their glorification of the past; almost every poem features a poignant confluence between a younger self and a more experienced, more sagacious self, which peers admiringly and longingly at the girl she once was—or was to her male idol, who never vanishes from the scene. Whose vanity trumps whose becomes the question. 

It is easy to see why Woloch’s poems would be included Billy Collin’s Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times.  They are poised to touch and inspire the same indistinct but apparently broad audience. Her poems shine like teacups—“And he grew ravenous, enraged, / and all the spilt world poured / into the cup from which he drank.”

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