What Small Soundby Francesca Bell
(Red Hen Press, 2023) Reviewed by Dion O’Reilly
What Small Sound: Francesca Bell’s Radical Acceptance
Francesca Bell, who has been writing luminous poems for decades, published her sophomore poetry collection, What Small Sound. As in her debut, Bright Stain—also from Red Hen Press—Bell studies the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, violence, loss, sex, and beauty. Bell’s speaker grapples with varieties of loss as her hearing fails and her children struggle. At every step, she plumbs depths of grief, often framing it with excruciating beauty, bringing her losses into sharp relief. Finally, the speaker appears to sit quietly, to breathe into her mix of pain and pleasure, to accept what she cannot change.
The text opens with a tough poem with a lovely name, “Jubilations.” The first line tells us, “Every two minutes, an American woman is raped.” Sexual assault happens in the time it takes to “tear / this organic tomato to its pulpy center and bite in, / letting juice run down my chin, stinging.” For five more stanzas, acts of violence are braced against moments of joy and appetite, but the final image, with a nod to Whitman, settles the argument: “OMG. OMG.” says the speaker, “Thank You for this world of green grass and suffering.”
“Jubilations” sets the book's tone, a kind of radical acceptance, an existential openness that is acutely aware of both trauma and ecstasy. Often, the final lines of her poems enact this acceptance, as in “Proofs,” where another mother contemplates her helplessness to save her son:
No woman who had lain after fullness and felt love tickle out of her
could have said, Let it be done to me according to your word.
Had she felt life unfurl inside her, or a child tear its way out, and then waited,
a wide wound, as her body closed, she would never have said,
Give me the child already nailed in place, destined to run with the scissors of His life
pointed up. Let Him breach like a great whale beneath the dome of my stretched- taut
skin and force His way out of this slit husk. Behold.
I am the handmaid of the Lord. His strange carapace.
The useless shell that cannot save him.
In this poem, awareness of parental helplessness is brought into the archetypal, the mythic, zooming out to wider history and culture, which is not only poetry’s great work, but also a way to grapple with unthinkable loss. As always, the speaker acknowledges physical pleasure—if not god-like awe—that may precede or exist alongside hardship. Despite the mother’s archetypal suffering and ambivalence, she has “lain after fullness and felt love tickle out of her.”
Other poems in the collection are more focused in the first-person voice of the speaker. As in “Right to Life,” which appears shortly before the poem above and is in conversation with it:
It’s like hiring a hitman
—Pope Francis on abortion
I know what you are,
little hitman, little cherub,
snuck up into me,
swum past my barriers,
implanting like a movie mobster who
takes a person hostage from the inside.
You merely tap your unformed foot,
and my body bursts into symphony,
blood volume cranked dizzingly up
breasts swelling in fiery crescendo.
Nausea slams me forward,
just like your father liked me:
a body bent double to take him.
I’m on my knees, little one, surrendered,
vomit heaving out of me like prayers.
I know, O, I know the life you’ve come for.
Of course, the central idea is philosophical. The pope sees abortion as murder, but becoming a mother—as we have seen with Mary’s “carapace”—is also a kind of death, a kind of possession, a taking, even from the moment of conception. Many women acknowledge the joy of sex and the glorious aspects of pregnancy, how the body “bursts into symphony,” yet still sense a parasitic possession, similar to the “implanting like a movie mobster who / takes a person hostage from the inside.” Seen that way, abortion is a form of self-defense. Here, still, there is a brand of acceptance, perhaps a lack of agency in the face of deific fate, as the speaker is on her “knees … surrendered, // vomit heaving out of [her] like prayers.”
This speaker relents to harsh realities, finding ways to express the difficulty (and sometimes joy) of being shoved against the immutable. Whether it is facing hearing loss in the titular poem “What Small Sound,” where Bell exquisitely compares approaching deafness to the spectral moons of Jupiter, and “bears witness to this deafness / that expands imperceptibly, the way the universe, they say / is expanding.” Or when discussing her daughter’s return from the mental hospital in “Taking Your Place,” the speaker admits she is irrevocably altered—perhaps possessed—by her daughter’s illness and suicidal ideation, saying, “But though you’ve returned, / I’m not coming back.” This helplessness and openness in the face of what is works well when contemplating the realities of motherhood, aging, illness, and death. As devastating as it might be, we understand we often cannot change our children’s suffering, cannot stop them from doing their worst. Indeed, constructing incisive metaphors and narratives from such experiences is a way to wield some control through deeper understanding.
At one point, Bell’s narrator wields this acceptance, this lack of agency, while contemplating stereotypes of social-justice culture. In “Containment,” a syntactically masterful one-sentence prose poem, the speaker enacts a fragile inner narrative in the face of imagined, tweet-like accusations of her white culpability.
When the man sat down next to me at Starbucks, need coming off of him like a pheromone, I was quiet, having read, more than once, God save me from the well-meaning white woman, for he was a person of color—I wasn’t sure which color, but not a fucking white person like me—and maybe I was profiling him, maybe I was an asshole and had already offended the black woman who said I could share the table but packed up her things when I sat down, leaving me to chew my dry, multigrain bagel thoroughly like the stereotype it was … until the man asked quietly, from his place to my side, if I could buy him a cup of coffee, his face open the way a wound is open … I worried he was hungry, my son is always hungry … I had an appointment to get to and handed him twenty dollars from the stack in my purse and heard him order coffee and his bagel with cream cheese, and the black woman came back and sat down just as I walked out, my tears overflowing like clichés.
Perhaps this could be an opportunity to challenge or explore social containment, the speaker’s feelings of helplessness in the face of it. It can feel like people are defined by their mistakes, ostracized, more than ever, and that is terrifying. After all, all of us— caught in a racist system—are more than clichés, but the speaker’s fears combined with the current divisive milieu have transformed a seemingly benign situation into something nefarious.
It is easy to see how the poems in What Small Sound speak to each other as the speaker grapples with accepting what happens to her and the ones she loves. The speaker comes to terms with different modes of nurturing, the marks that giving leaves on the giver, and how we are shattered by life and reformed. Perhaps my favorite moment of radical acceptance occurs in one of the final poems, “Perimenopause,” where the aging female speaker shaves her chin—as many older women do—while contemplating her changing mind and body, both of which are increasingly prone to break open, her “tears / unchanneled and at the slightest provocation.”
Last week, in the produce aisle, a man
I’ve never been drawn to hugged me,
his hands warm the way a pilot light
is warm, its staid flicker merely dependable
in the dusty window of a hot water heater,
but I danced to life like a kerosene
slick touched by the sweet carelessness
of a match and stood there, helplessly burning.
Francesca Bell’s speaker is often ‘helplessly burning’ in the fires of life; in the heat of pleasure; and in the unthinkable pain of death, aging, sexual violence, or a child’s mental illness. These poems are a lesson in crafting the “sweet carelessness of the world” to remain, despite everything, completely alive to it.
