by Maureen Alsop
Main Street Rag Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
Rain King
The cover of Maureen Alsop’s Apparition Wren is intriguing; it’s exciting, even, the colors, the costume, the sky and telephone wires. In addition, the costumed woman on the cover is upside down, unless I turn the book upside down. There are endless easy metaphors to be cooked up there. I’ll leave it.
The books starts with a poem called “At the Table of Longing.” The title, while setting an important tone—one of appetency and other strong subjective responses—is nevertheless frustrating. These thirsts surface in the verse itself; there is little use for such a frank title:
But this memory of salt
salvaged my thirst—
like a skittish horse
bearing the scars
of its own blood
Also, I’m not really sure how one can bear scars of one’s own blood. What does that mean? I’ll leave it.
More interesting than Alsop’s stake in horses is her concern with things female. In “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman & Bird,” we learn “quickly to pipe songs / which rose wildly upward / into the sky’s orange skirt…” These lines are fanciful, even visionary. But the preceding lines rob them of this spirit: “A woman, a soldier, a bird—all born / within cages.” I can imagine the womb being a cage, a bird’s egg being a cage, but these creatures are not born “within” these things. The act of being born is a breaking out, an escape from these things. The lines don’t sync up, not to mention the all too tired metaphor of cages, of a woman being born into a cage. I’ll leave it.
A more explicit “female” poem is “Isobella,” and though Alsop sometimes stretches nice images too far, there are some stunning lines in here. The poem is intimate but detailed; it delivers the affectivity of a failed pregnancy:
After what I believed to be a few bones, and much bleeding,
I buried what I could of her. I fingered
the remnant bulge between my hipbones—inside
would always be night now.
Beautiful, painful, but perfect. These first few lines of this poem are executed with precision. It’s the following line that again siphons life from the poem: “I shut out all the stars…” Overall, “Isobella” is powerful, but slips into some gynecology talk that doesn’t fit with the tone of the poem: “winter’s secret vulva. My callused fingers, speculum-cold.”
Alsop’s explicitness is sometimes welcome in comparison to her esotericism. In a previous untitled poem, Alsop offers these lines:
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
///////// /// ///// / ///// /////// ///////
//// /// ///////// / /// ///// //////
It goes on that way for four more lines.
All obscurities aside, several poems in Apparition Wren are stellar. Two of these are “Draft” and “Wolf in My Glass.” The former has an excellent title, especially in view of the subject matter of the poem, possibly a parasitic twin, another that didn’t make it. Here’s the first stanza:
For all my twin knew the white ink
on the white page
was the tremulous arc
of sun. A copper flare patterning
out of sound. The throaty murmur
of a bird trapped in a mason jar.
Perhaps the best of these lines are the last line and a half. Again, we have confinement and the need for escape. The image is lovely and offers a fine sense of urgency. The first lines of the second stanza are italicized, though the purpose of these italics are unclear: “What flittering garden spins / awake in us.” The italics, no matter their purpose, remind me of a theme from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Eugene Henderson travels into the deep African jungles and resides with a tribe that uses the phrase “Grun-tu-molani” to mean “you want to live.” It is the desire to live, the yearning for life that awakens in us all. The conscience that demands “I want, I want” is the conscience that drives us to the search for escape.
Admittedly, “Wolf in My Glass” makes me think first of Radiohead. But despite the associative powers at play here for any individual reader, the poem as an organism, rises above and becomes its own beast. The poem deals with death: “Is this death or is he howling?” The properties of death will always be elusive and as such they fuel an often incomprehensible desire within us to conquer death. As Henderson notes, “We hate death, we fear it, but when you get right down to cases, there’s nothing like it.”
Bellow’s Henderson also makes a claim about the nature of poetry. He claims that poetry is beauty and enchantment and that we must let it “reach” and “penetrate” us. Alsop’s poems are reaching and verge on penetration.
*
Tags: 4.5 stars, Main Street Rag Press, Maureen Alsop, Melinda Wilson
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