by Kelle Groom
Anhinga Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Neo-grit
In Luckily, the 2006 installment in The Van Brock Florida Poetry Series, Kelle Groom picks up where she left off in her first volume, Underwater City. For her, the obsession tends to remain the same: people are characters, and there’s much to be learned from the way that characters interact, for better or for worse.
In what’s primarily a group of narrative poems that border on Oldsian neo-(post-?)confessionalism, Groom never shies away from the gritty side of human nature. Sometimes it’s grit that challenges us (“the medieval need to punish every cell / in a girl”), sometimes it’s the vomitous grit of Danielle Steele (“careless of the door’s window / of anything but each other’s mouths”). Groom’s characters come from all over; some seem made up (“Pinkerton and Butterfly Go to the Dollar Movie), others we know well (Jack Kerouac, Edna St. Vincent Milllay). She also shows an obsession with contemporaneity that might already have been irrelevant by the time the book hit the presses (I forget, has Natassia Kinski done anything lately?).
Though some of the poems just seem typical remembrances—loss of virginity, et al—some of them might give you a chill. If its unnecessary opening doesn’t turn you off, “A House Like This” has a matter-of-fact image that’s tough to get out of your head: “Her husband on crack, backed the car out, / hit their baby in the driveway.” Another poem is sad when our first person narrator, apparently suffering from substance problems of her own, describes coming out of detox:
At home, my mother threw herself
against the kitchen wall,
little orange teapots crying,
I can’t take her back.
And what would a book full of sad and horrible memories be without some tongue-in-cheek lost love: “he said we can’t do this anymore because i’ve been late to work / at the 7-11, three days in a row, they were docking my timecard.” But if many of her narratives show how careless people can be with each other, there’s also the triumph we’re capable of in the midst of it all. In “Half-Moon,” a friend’s boyfriend “sharpened the knife for three days” before breaking into the friend’s apartment and attempting to slash her throat. She survives the attack by sacrificing her hand:
…She’d reached
up, blocked his hand, her finger breaking over her vocal
chords, past the knot of her hand he’d slit the other side too, ear
to ear, except the very middle…
Later we learn “Four doctors held her head up while they sewed her neck shut.” But the horrors of that can intrude on us are as present in Groom’s poetry as the decisions we are forced to make in day-to-day life. The bulk of her stories extend from adolescence to adulthood, years when our narrator remembers, “I kissed my best friend’s boyfriend, Brian Unger,” years when foolish behavior helps develop an awareness of consequence. Like this period in anyone’s life, the poems are fast paced; and while about half get where they’re going and half don’t, you might find it’s worth putting in the effort to figure which are which.
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