The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
(Black Lawrence Press, 2019)

Reviewed by Nancy Takacs

In this superb debut collection, Sunni Brown Wilkinson offers poems of compassion and wonder. This is an accessible, yet wonderfully complex book. In many of the poems, Wilkinson focuses on family and the acts that bind hers together, such as her children finding a plastic turtle on a beach, naming it Crawley, and carrying it with them in the car to “all the lakes we know.” Likewise, while burying a dead bird her son finds in their yard, she writes, “We cradle its head a moment before / the darkness comes.” She remembers an unselfish act of her husband: “[We] are close and you are quiet / and more than ever that man who lifted / my dying friend last summer / into the sunlight and carried her in your arms.” Wilkinson is present too, cooking soup for its goodness, smell, and fairy-tale history. “Maybe I’m a witch,” she says, at night stealing out “onto the wet grass / and danc[ing] wildly under the stars / still smelling of soup.” While family and marriage are a polestar, the poet is also drawn to the lives of others, to myth, and to nature’s convergences.

The word “marriage” in the book’s title also implies her strong affinity for others around the world, from various cultural and religious backgrounds, from Chiapas, Vienna, Juarez, and Mozambique. Wilkinson shows much empathy for those who are ill, murdered, abused, or displaced. She weaves religious mythology throughout the book in some poems that spring from and value the stories, and in others revealing the hypocrisy in organized religion. It appears Wilkinson deepens her spiritual philosophy, which is that all life including nature’s, is braided, wedded, far beyond a cinching to our own families, religions, and beyond selfish concerns.

Many of those she writes about are female. “The Body Carries Its Own Light” is about an eight-year-old girl in Chiapas, who hails from a large polygamist family. Young Mary is eating unattended and chokes on walnuts, blacks out, and stops breathing temporarily. She suffers serious brain damage as a result. The poet tenderly brushes her hair much later on, when she meets Mary, as if she is brushing out the memory of the event: “Dark horses, Mary. Dark shoulders in the dusk of your long hair.”

 

Throughout the poem, Wilkinson nimbly weaves images of horses bred on the farm, alternating metaphors of death, birth, and strength. As the poet addresses Mary and unfolds her story, there are “Black horses in the darkness that covered the farm where your mother found you / slumped and breathless,” while a mare in the barn “lay back wearily” with a “strange sac / between her legs / torn and white / once encasing her foal.” The breathless foal appears reminiscent of Mary’s near-death state.

Although the sister-wives call a doctor who comes on foot to help, he cannot, and somehow Mary is brought to another country, to a care facility, where she meets Cecey, a woman recently having escaped her country in a truck under a tarp. Cecey lovingly tends to the girl, and believes Mary will walk “through the gates of Paradise / before us all, not contrite / but like a terrible horse, trampling the last embers of the dark/with your tiny hooves.” This reiterates what the poet believes—that Mary will be strong in her next life, embodying the fury of a horse, and carrying her own light, as the poem’s title states. The poem suggests compassion is a force in this life, not just a chore performed to lead us to the next.

The light in the book’s title carries many meanings. Although moonlight is associated with lovers, and is how one finds one’s way in the dark, it also creates shadows and hidden turns, like the dark turns in Wilkinson’s other poems about women’s lives. The poems stir these lives, these images, into a concentrate that is archetypal, illuminating the connections between myth and reality.

For example, in “Approaching the Threshold,” Wilkinson’s young son has questions as he reads myths about women, while she unfolds the story of a Juarez doctor, who places cut-up body pieces of murdered women in a chemical solution that restores them, so DNA can help identify them and possibly their killers. The doctor is paradoxically a savior and a Victor Frankenstein, one with misogynistic tendencies as he plays: 

               [ . . . ] ballads, love songs,

               woos and comforts dead women in a den

               of puce liquids and glycerin. “I take many girls

               to bed,” he jokes, holding their bodies at night, “but not

               the way you think.”  He carries them to the bath

               the way a man carries his bride

               over the threshold.

In an alternate section, Wilkinson’s son asks how Persephone, “trapped in the underworld,” got out. “Did she climb / underground volcanoes, swim up / the whole ocean, dodge the sea beast and pull / herself fingernail by shoulder onto shore? Or was there a door?” This poem’s collection of lives in myth and modernity make the irony clear: women have always been vulnerable to entrapment, or reduced to their body parts. Beyond the cruelty to women that has happened and is still happening, what is so striking about the poem is that the poet realizes her son, in his innocence, does not yet know some women will never find their door. 

Wilkinson also channels female voices in “My Possible Pasts,” in which she imagines herself as women from other countries. In section one, she is a Roma girl: 

I am two steps away from the sleep that turns me gray. 

Each nightfall, mother’s lanterns

hang in a neat row: faery lights,

she says, trailing

to the end of the earth.

In section two, the speaker is a Northern European woman: 

My unborn children lost,

my mother far away.

In the longest of summer days

I hear the fir tree seeding,

the reaching of each upright needle.

The planets sing their silence.

Earth is a coin

cast for luck. 

Reaching and reseeding like the fir trees, under the distant cosmos, or looking at her mother’s lanterns, each of these women looks to mothers or nature for comfort, amidst lives that appear to be unsatisfying. These themes of mothering, the unborn, and birth are crucial and recur throughout the book. 

Two poems reveal Wilkinson’s own emotional state while pregnant. “Nesting Dolls” begins with Russian Matryoshka dolls that nest inside one another, and how “the biggest one carries all that weight / inside her it’s a wonder / she doesn’t fall over.” This is a humorous start to a poem while her baby is in utero, and the poet’s protection of her family during a storm. She feels a “tap” from her unborn child, and hears another son whisper as he hears the train whistle, “Someone is calling your name.” As a mother, her nurturing is automatic, yet there is always that longing for self-definition.

In “My Son Says He Has an Owl Inside Him,” the poet is pregnant, and sees her baby in utero as a vulnerable orchid slowly unfolding during an exam, and she wonders about her unborn child, asking, “What will he find when he comes?” and “[ … ] all day I wonder / if the world is enough.” 

The last line in the book, “The owls inside us open their wide eyes,” suggests that she is also pregnant with a need for awareness, as an owl is aware, for the baby, and for her as his watchful mother.  I am reminded of a line in Sylvia Plath’s poem “You’re,” that addresses her unborn baby: “Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, / Trawling your dark as owls do.” The inhuman owl-baby in both poems is depicted as very much alive and strong, yet there is a loneliness projected by each poet on life in the darkness of the womb. 

Wilkinson’s love of domestic life is set against her own hunger, as in “Honey on the Bread, Bread on the Honey.” She delights in the natural while breastfeeding: “Flanked by his cries / I shift the T-shirt, everything in the way of the breast / that opens itself like a flower.” The poem’s wonderful tension comes as she sees herself rising like bread, like milk in her body, foods of this world associated with women and domestic tethering. She questions what happens to appetite,

in religious myth, after one rises from the dead:

                I’m practiced in the art

                of rising. Like my son, I’m hungry

                for what I don’t have.

                Jesus called death the sting

                and we understand. After he raised the dead,

                what would they eat

                the body

                and the spirit fresh with empty?

                . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

                In the end

                of the mouth it’s the tongue

                searching, the tongue

                that finds what’s sweet.

Wilkinson looks for how to live her life with kindness, a sweeping ethic, and her own continual search for manna in the language of poetry. I am taken by her honest depiction of women’s lives.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, a contemporary Indian poet, says in her description of good poetry: 

Of course the poet has to be sensitive and alert to the world  around her—its history, its politics, its ecology, its culture, you name it. But poetry is born when all that she has absorbed has been so deeply internalised that it is an utterance that arises from her marrow, her bloodstream. Poetry is verbal magma. That’s why it’s so explosive, so magical, so incredibly alive, and has to be handled with such care. It’s language that’s subtle and dangerous all at once.

This verbal magma is in Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poems; her readers will be both shaken and lifted by her luminous rendering of humanity and left with a hope for the spirit to have peace in some type of rebirth. 

Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown-Eyed Susans
by David Lee
(Wings Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Nancy Takacs

In his sixteenth book of poems, Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown-Eyed Susans, David Lee does something unique, while continuing to appeal to the big-hearted, the irreligious, and those with a funny bone. The book unearths his remembrances of women who lived in small-town west Texas, much like the one he grew up in, from 1948–1962, grappling with a Baptist culture. Several of the poems are in women’s voices, resonating with what women still have to deal with overall, but especially in rural America’s tight communities. 

“Poetry,” said Roethke, “is an act of mischief.” In his introduction, Lee warns us that this book will be so. He finds inspiration from his grandmother who wanted him to behave when he was four and told him to make up stories to keep himself from being bored. This is how he constructed his first tale. He dedicates the book to her.

Many writers and critics question whether writers of one gender can effectively get inside the mind of the other. Playwright Michelle Willens believes, “while women probably still write their own parts better, cheers for all who are daring to probe the ever-changing state of the sexes,” and literary critic Sarah Seltzer says, “[W]riting across gender may be harder, require more research and humility. We may fail or get ‘called out’ for letting our biases show…but the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.”

Lee has given himself this challenge, it seems, to not only know and put forth what women felt, but to champion their strength and wildness, and to show compassion for their struggles. We come to know women who easily outsmart obtuse men, feisty women who know how to steal time away from family for their own pursuits, and who defy culture and religion to be themselves. The book also shows how selves and dreams became lost, while revealing subservience as a veneer, that no preacher or husband can snuff out a woman’s spirit. Men are foils for the women, who take center stage. 

Take for example, the poem (astutely set in the parts of a Greek tragedy) about Amanda, who married the dull Reverend Strayhan. She chooses an “anonymous” name, Amanda Strayhorn, and becomes a famous erotic writer among the Ladies Literary Society, all unbeknownst to the reverend. Coincidentally, her bible-thumping husband suddenly finds his libido, having excused himself from his former belief that wanton sex is Satan’s evil. After drinking a Coors beer that is tasteless, he determines it is a sign from God that he can do what he wants, misreading bible verses to twist them to justify his sudden license while depending on the misogynist Apostle Paul’s credo, “That all things are possible in those who love the Lord.” 

There is much more to this long poem—gossip at the Brenda’s Curl Up and Dye Hair House, ironic references to bible verses, and more of the Reverend’s excuses to become libidinous with his wife. By the end of the poem, those verses are riddled with puns, and the reader is wrapped in the melee that results from the unveiling of Amanda’s new identity, the reverend’s horrified discovery, and sides-stories about sex that intensify the irony. 

Lee has said, “I don’t believe in a God who frowns.” He was a seminary student at one time, though he left the seminary and always thought it to be the worst mistake he ever made. His dislike of preachy-ness shows. In a prior poem, we encounter the voice of the town librarian, who finally puts the hypocritical reverend in his place, in the church parking lot after a service:

    she said All my life

    I have engaged in a love affair

    with the written and spoken word

    devoted myself as Custodian of Culture

    to honor the right literary, civil, and genial

    use of language which I have always

    considered deity incarnate

    until my contact with you

    I believed we had sufficient wordage

    such as malarkist, buncombe, vacuous troglodyte,

    lambent dullard, cornaptious miscreant

    all perfectly acceptable terms short of verbiage

    for the socially and intellectually execrable

    therefore I had never comprehended

    manifest need for the coinage and usage

    of the nominative cocksucker

    prefaced by the adjective stupid

    to create what seems on certain occasions

    the formation of a perfect inferior syllogism

    until now

    and thanks to you

    I shall never again be confused 

    by the etymological necessity […]

As this interaction shows, characters in the town intersect in at times, compounding our knowledge of their traits and how others interact with them. We get to know them, as if we live next door. In several poems, Lee seems to have to right something, especially between women and their husbands. “The Fish,” with its epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop’s same-titled poem, enjoys the plight of Arty Gill when he ignores his chores and goes fishing, comes home drunk, and dumps a load of fish in the sink, expecting his wife Modean to clean them. When she refuses and finally leaves for days, the fish putrefy, and Arty has no choice but to put on a gas mask and clean the stink out of the house himself, using a hose, and an elaborate mixture of odd cleaners. The epigraph lingers as the poem ends with Modean’s success: “…victory filled / from the pool of bilge / where oil had spread a rainbow […] / until everything is 'rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!'”  

“Post Mortem After the Obsequies” features Mary Lynn, who looks back on her past, after her insufferable, emotionally abusive husband dies. He had consistently put her down, calling her Merlean, and never filled her desire for anything. She lost her dream to sing opera, and felt trapped. The portrait of her is drawn in her own voice, “I’ve never known the taste of truffles / but I’ve lived a life / cramful with trifles […]”

Towards the end of section “7 Coda: Last Call,” is an exquisite passage in which Mary Lynn deals with what is supposed to be grief for the loss of this man, knowing her mother’s and dog’s deaths were the only ones she felt true grief for. Lee substitutes wistfulness for grief, as her mind sets to resolve, to hope:

    Lord God,

    it’s one of those alone

    hard red wine nights

    foreshadowing a bloodshot tomorrow morning sky

    spiral broken moon splinters scattered

    all over the floor and on the furniture, lying

    like breathing, open-eyed antimacassar

    daring me to come sit anywhere near

    pushing me out the back door scared

    into the big alone

    Oh, but breathe in the waft of a ghost rain

    under a waxing cat scratch moon

    floating through live oak

    listen to the memory of a waif cinder maid

    singing Una Volta C’era Un Re

    and beneath me
    exactly between my feet

    a perfect moon-scarleted primrose

    glistening in the rekindling of the night

Lee has mentioned previously that Mary Lynn’s voice is very close to his mother’s, and that the dead husband in the poem is his step-father. The poem appears to give Mary Lynn back a few of her losses, and to celebrate her life, even as Lee imagines what it was like for her to live much of it sadly. Still searching for herself in old age, the voice rings true, right down to the core of her loneliness, her fears, as well as finding hope and boldness in nature and remembered music, suggesting both of these gave her relief, and perhaps relief to Lee, in the knowledge of how his mother may have observed, reflected, and opened, as she moved toward healing.

This is new terrain for Lee in some ways, but it is still him at his best. The swells of it, its risks, spot-on vernacular, humor, tenderness, and depth that calls forth Chaucer, Milton, Dante, and Greek tragedy will be familiar to readers of his previous work. It is both earthy and erudite. He is a magician, a weaver of poetry-tales unlike anything anyone else has written. It is a delight to once again share in his fine mind and heart.

The Worrier by Nancy Takacs
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Katie Kingston

Worry is not a new concept, but Nancy Takacs’ treatment of the issue in her new collection, The Worrier, is both refreshing and unnerving. She cares about the plight of the natural world, and these poems address these concerns as well as their impact on our personal relationships. Each poem is an arena where vanishing bees “[p]lay practical jokes”; where algae is “[a] cross between turquoise fleece and lime velour”; where light comes from “[a] lightbox and nine double A batteries.” She immerses the reader in an endless pool of imagery rooted in sparse language as she addresses climate change and human encroachment. She allows the reader to ruminate under a rural Utah sky, get in touch with wilderness, relearn what it is to be “[b]lue mustard / igniting the desert field.”

Takacs’ “Worrier” enters into a dialogue with the self. The questions are honest, basic queries that arise from an everyday voice, as if formulated by a friend or parent, teacher or therapist: 

    What is the point of it? 

    What is that scar on your thumb?
    What are you looking for? 
    How will you remember to paint him? 
    What is the poet doing? 
    Where is your plastic?

These questions are a dynamic springboard for the answers that follow, which are unexpected, loaded with tension, and wildly juxtaposed. Each of the brief responses is weighted with wisdom. It’s as if a placid lake has been sliced open by a diver and the ripples surge in their wake. The twists, turns, and leaps in midair are breath-taking as in this poem subtitled “failure.” 

    Where does failure come from?

    Trilobites, corals,
    dinosaur footprints,
    ice-aged mammoths.

    How do you get rid of it?

    I’m learning not to trust the map.

These seemingly disparate jumps continue throughout the course of the book. No matter what the subtitled theme of each poem suggests, the answers are always unorthodox, always thought provoking, as evidenced again in the opening lines of “skin.” 

    What lives on the skin?

    A mirror and a cloud of tumbleweed.

In addition to her emphasis on dialogue, Takacs leaves the reader plenty of white space to absorb the ricochet of her words. Her pauses allow the reader to savor the stream of natural imagery and find a place for it, not as a conclusion, but as an opening that floods a void. Her silences are key to a resonance that internalizes these images for the reader as in the poem “volunteer.”  

    What have you given up? 

   
    Words,
    but they seep into my mouth
    anyway.

    What do you feel?

    I feel embroidered tonight,
    like an intricate
    tablecloth of blossoms
    whose eyes stay open.

Each poem is a scaffolding of concern honed from direct questions and followed by answers juxtaposed on a stepladder where each rung is separated by white space. Just as the rung allows the foot to enter and raise the body to new heights, so too, Takacs’ use of white space allows the mind to enter the poem’s sensibilities and elevate. These Worrier voices resonate with the wisdom and turmoil of mid-life as they traverse remote, wilderness landscapes—Lake Superior, Devil’s Backbone, Swasey’s Leap, Flaming Gorge—exploring not only terrain, but a field of stunning images from a poet who knows firsthand “[w]hen the sandhill cranes / begin their chortle. / [w]hen the wind chime / stops its winks of glass.”