by Yerra Sugarman
The Sheep Meadow Press 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Kind of Bag
Yerra Sugarman’s second collection of poems, The Bag of Broken Glass, is definitely absent of organizational problems. The poems are neatly divided into six sections with the apropos “Coda” acting as the final section. The word coda always strikes me as a poetic way of declaring the end of something, as that is what it is I guess, but it always does seem a bit fancy, too consciously musical. But my opinion on whether or not it works depends on what it is used in conjunction with, and the mood of the poems it is serving to finalize.
The heightened Poetic-ness of the word coda in this collection is more than appropriate, as Sugarman spends more than 100 pages writing poems infused with religion, death and disappointment. The poems are mostly narrative, mostly confessional, as the reader can infer by the book’s dedication, “For My Mother, in Memory Pearl Maler Sugarman (1919-2000),” and the completely heartfelt first section of the book, “Her Hands.” The poems in this section relay in pretty good detail the horrors of having to watch a parent die a slow and painful death. And because they are about the poet’s mother, many childhood recollections appear, as it is probably necessary to the process of grieving to make sense of the death of the person who gave you life. That said, is it horrible to say that while reading these poems maybe I was slightly bored and anxious to move on to another poem, which only in turn made me anxious to move on from there? Stanzas like,
Solitary my father—
the wool of his voice,the thinning part we could barely hear
death reel in,
raveling it and winding it around my mother’s dying.
in the poem “The Lamentations of the Crows,” appear again and again through out the book. And it is heartrending and yes, it quiets me with compassion and future fear but that may just be because I feel badly when anyone experiences hardship—not because the poems necessarily speak to me.
It may be though that the experiences she is drawing on are things I have yet to experience or that culturally, I cannot understand. Sugarman uses Yiddish phrases throughout the book and uses her family’s experience as Polish Jews during World War II as the basis of many poems in this collection. It is thoughtful of her to include the translations of certain Yiddish words at the bottom of the page, though at times it felt slightly gratuitous. This is not to take away from their obvious importance to this text. I think overall Sugarman works well within the framework she creates and I can see how people marvel at stanzas like this one from the poem, “Jounral: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv, July 2003”:
And what of our connecting
the body’s pain,
but also the soul’s,the mind’s, the heart’s—their pain
with the pain of the world
Sugarman’s poems are constantly trying to achieve the above. She is trying to understand the synergy of pain and suffering and life and love. A valiant task for sure. But speculations like “Maybe this is what memory is: / God wounds” make less sense than she wants them to. I can no longer suspend my disbelief long enough to posture the possibility of my memories being wounds from God. She’s strayed too far from the center; does this particular God have any particular motivation? The religious fervor and fatalism in this book leave me an outsider. I am sure there are many other people who are moved by experiences similar to the poet’s. I don’t really think that my being an outsider makes much of a difference.
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Maybe there is no way around making sweeping generalizations about the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize: winning this prize is unquestionably an honor; the fact that one’s manuscript is selected and will sit among the likes of John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich is something; most “younger” poets would be pleased to be selected.