by Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Mayapple Press 2008
Reviewed by Lanie Wilt
Brain Wins
Elizabeth Kerlikowske opens Dominant Hand with a drawing duel between her left and right hand, each vying for dominance. Their struggle is an exploration in perception, a mapping of the fight for dominance between two sides of the brain set in opposition. Music and mutability flow from the left hand as the right carefully orders and renders its surroundings. Conflict turns to climax when the right, frustrated by the leisurely wanderings of her partner, delivers the finishing blow, grabbing her “…perfect roses…by the…stems and [holding] them tight, thorns/ and all”—“That would hurt everybody.”
Instantly, the violence of domination slams mind and body into something singular; the struggle is over—perception united by pain that will punctuate the pages of the rest of the book. While “Dominant Hand” is foundational within the collection, its importance is only apparent after one has followed Kerlikowske into the intimate recesses of memory, brushing away cobwebs and clutter into the corners of a mind alive with pains and pleasures distinctly feminine. The power of the mind, its action on and against both body and its environment, is explored throughout Kerlikowske’s line, silhouetted in surreal poems like “Gestalt Primer” and associative streams of thought like “Morning, Asylum Lake.”
The most striking moments of the book are deeply invested in the bond between mothers and daughters. The apparent death of the poet’s mother at the age of thirteen weaves in and out of nearly every poem in the collection—a spidery “web of misery [that] glistens in the dark” (“Damage Ode,”), the speaker confessing, “I never stopped missing her” (“Persephone”).
Kerlikowske’s retelling of the classic myth follows her younger self through the loss of her mother at the onset of womanhood, the fumblings and grief of finding her way into womanhood alone, and the healing which the birth of her own daughter brings. The lines of the poem blossom with beacons of love and grief calling for mother to return, swaying in a landscape of waiting:
…I made nature
in her image: blue birds for her eyes, canaries
of hair, a monarch of lips. Every pansy
a cameo of her face. If she saw herself,
she might remember where she belonged.
I stuffed milkweed pods with fluff like the
down pillows we slept on, like the presents
she’d left on my chair, each of the twelve birthdays
she was there. I created prairie in the pattern
of our tablecloth, but by thirty, I knew she
wasn’t coming back.
Ultimately, the speaker experiences the pain of having to leave her own daughter, then concludes with an uncharacteristically hopeful passage describing a long-anticipated reunion in the underworld:
My heart beat fast and the light of wild
mustard and goldenrod burst into view, and there
was Mother, cleome smile, her loom, arms held
out at last for comfort.
Men occupy a separate sphere within the text. Many are menacing, hungry like Hades stealing away, this time, mother from daughter in the cycle of separation bound up in sexuality and flow. These are men, as in “The Days”, that rush “into vulnerable beds, destroying homesteads, / breaking up families, and carrying off beloved nouns: the / cow, trust, Sis.”
Other men are alluring and strong, for example, in moments spent admiring the strong working back of a “husbandman,” men allured and enjoyed by this feminine voice—embraced, then abandoned, “not forever but long enough.”
These moments of company, more than connection, crystallize as the warmer passages in the text. Solitude, however, dominates Kerlikowske’s meditations, stalked by death that’s a “petal practically transparent” (“Waiting For It To Stop”):
You want to spend time in your room alone
but they stalk you there,
the ways you might die,
one to each corner.
(“Your Deaths”)
In “Waiting for it to Stop,” the speaker is alone after a shower with her lover, looking out into the rain thinking of the husband and children who are off swimming “on the other side of the state.” The pain and hollowness of her existence vibrates on the page, while rain-cloaked we watch her settle her gaze on
…a bee husk on a windowsill.
You want to be that empty.
Ultimately, Kerlikowske’s lines live among the lakes and leaves of Michigan shorelines. Through the turmoil of marriage and lovers, death and injury, we see the poet solemn under starry skies, quiet, still and searching for a sign. Perhaps “After You Left I Observed That All Things Take Flight” is the most haunting and lovely of the collection, standing out as a spell and a song: the meditation of a heart that has penned lonely lines in the privacy of night, minus the melodramatics.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s, Dominant Hand, is a book about being left behind, seared by the death of a mother whose absence follows her into the weathered mattresses of marriage and out into blackberry briers. The collection is a thoughtful, adamantly feminine investigation of perception and pain. The poems take patience, but persistence will prove well worth the while.
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