by Christine Garren
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy
Living Clarity
In Christine Garren’s new book, The Piercing, you will encounter some traditionally “poetic” imagery: leaves, ponds, old lovers, bits of garbage. Fortunately, Garren manages to make them her own in an impressively personal display. It’s poetry that looks and feels exactly like poetry but still offers a genuine poetic experience. How rare.
The book begins almost mired in nostalgia but soon moves beyond that narrowly subjective condition to examine the condition itself. The result is a set of small, sophisticated poems that exhibit that uncontrollable expansion and contraction of time in a person’s mind. The duration of a longtime friendship is comparable to a boy jumping off of a pier; an afternoon is comparable to a romance.
An instantaneous, paramount present hinges upon the massive action of a past that is constantly fading, synthesizing, and reducing itself into the small packages of “feeling” we are left with. “The Piercing”, which closes the book, emphasizes and solidifies this theme. Garren equates the loss of a loved one with an ear piercing:
…this
millimeter’s-width opening is for a decade to fit through.
Look, there you go. There I go—there our landscape goes as if
through a fantastical roof’s hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off—
our death is
flying over the city.
Garren’s images are more traditionally associated with concepts of objectivism or those transcendent moments when a social or natural experience pulls the author outside of him- or herself. She artfully confuses the moment and expansiveness of life:
…I felt
an insect step across my hand, across a vein
while my body was still closer to its birth than to its death.
There is a recurring suggestion that experience is formed in memory more so than it exists as an entity in and of itself. In “The Swimmers” Garren describes boys swimming off of a pier in early evening. Somehow, “from so long ago, this / has gained such force inside me.” The past is always abstract and overwhelming, but Garren has used precision and poise to control the depth of a lifetime.
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