Colleen McElroy, Blood Memory

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BLOOD MEMORY, Colleen J. McElroy. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260, 2016, 112 pages, $15.95 paper, www.upress.pitt.edu.

I met Professor Colleen J. McElroy when I was a newly minted MFA student at the University of Washington in 1985. If I had to characterize her in one word, it would be “storyteller.” Yes, she taught us (a lot) about poetry and the making of poems, but part of the glamor of her classes, for me, was when she would lean back in her chair, half-close her eyes, and begin telling a story. She put all of us in a trance.

The stories were about her travels—which were many; about poets she’d met and read with all over the world; about her St. Louis childhood; about her family, particularly the women who taught her how to tell stories. Reading Blood Memory transports me back to her classrooms, and to her office where, as my faculty advisor, she met with me (and regaled me) weekly. I read these poems, and I hear her voice, its cadence, its rich timbre, her laughter. And, sometimes, I can see her, fixing me with a look that she must have learned at the feet of the indomitable women who peopled her childhood.

from “Paint Me Visible”:

in a family of beautiful intelligent and profoundly
crazy women     one danced in the dark
to soothe her nerves      another wove shawls
from her husband’s hair and discarded both
when the work was done      another read palms
tea leaves   cards   anything that left an imprint
on her inner eye    neighbors said she saw
things nobody else could describe

From hopscotch rhymes to blues, through birth, abortion, estrangement, exile, and return no one can describe this world the way McElroy can. Here is the book’s opening poem:

The Family Album

call it blood memory for I am the only
one left to identify by name the ancestors

I am the only one left of the women
who sat around grandmother’s oak table
and wove the stories of who and where
who knows the half of it and when

I am the answer to the questions
my mother’s sisters swallowed:
What will you do with that child?

I know now that I am here to give
voice to tongues never silent
and doors closing too quickly

I am of the age where death comes
easily and visits often in those little
obit notes of passing reminding us

how we’ve neglected dear ones
now lived again through fading pictures
stuck to crumbling pages

I buy tickets to places I may never visit
spend hours trying to remember
if the image stuck in my head has origins

in a dream or some foggy night
slipping past almost unnoticed

I am the last female of a family
of women who wove the fabric
of stories into doilies and slip covers

I am the child with sparrow legs
sock heels stuck halfway in her shoes
drinking the last of the metaphors left
in teacups on the table unattended

—Colleen J. McElroy

From the back cover, these words of description and praise:

“She is the last woman of her line. Her new poems end and begin with A. Phillip Randolph and Pullman Porters, her enjambments are Ma Rainey and Lawdy Miz Cloudy, her leading men are the last Black men on the planet named Isom, her major planets are porches and backroads. She is still the master storyteller to the 60 million of the Passage. When I didn’t know how to be a poet, I first read Colleen McElroy to slowly walk the path to how.” —Nikki Finney

Exactly so.

To read more about Colleen J. McElroy, find her at The Poetry Foundation, Historylink.org, and I recommend this interview with Bill Kenower of author magazine.org. Here she talks about where she learned to tell stories. And (love this) she talks about poetry as not just any relationship, “but an affair.” Maybe that helps explain the clotted love that breaks to the surface in poem after poem in this book.

I first read Blood Memory when it was released in 2016. It was a delight to read it this morning and enter the trance again.

https://artsci.washington.edu/news/2022-05/colleen-mcelroy-honored-through-room-dedication

And, again, the link to her at historylink.org.

Donna Hilbert, Threnody

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THRENODY: POEMS, Donna Hilbert. Moon Tide Press, 6709 Whittier, CA 90608, 2022, 102 pages, $15 paper, www.moontidepress.com.

ESSAYS ONE, Lydia Davis. Picador, 120 Broadway, New York 10271, 2019, 528 pages, $30 paper, picadorusa.com.

While reading poems this month, and blogging each day, I have also been reading Lydia Davis’s Essays One, a gift from a friend. She said, “You must read ‘Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,” so I did, and now I am reading the whole fat book from the beginning. This week, I am stuck at Davis’s essay, “Fragmentary or Unfinished: Barthes, Joubert, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Flaubert.”

Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act. (Davis, p. 204)

It strikes me that all poems are, by definition, fragmented. Too densely written, too explanatory, they tip over into prose. (One of my own dangers, in writing narrative poems.) While reading Donna Hilbert’s poetry, Davis’s words have hung over me and made me wonder where I’m not being equal to the task. Consider this, the shortest poem in the book:

Grief

In the dishwasher,
nothing but spoons.

—Donna Hilbert

And consider Davis’s insight into uses of the fragment, the fragmented:

…when I think of the fragment, old or new—it is a text that works with silence, ellipsis, abbreviation, suggesting that something is missing, but that has the effect of a complete experience. (Davis, p. 208)

Hilbert has a big job, writing about grief. Again, I think of Lydia Davis. In this passage she  quotes Barthes: “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order” (p. 220), then continues to comment on Mallarmé’s book after the death of his son, A Tomb for Anatole:

The notes become the most immediate expression, the closest mirroring, of the writer’s emotion at the inspiring subject, the writer’s stutter, and the reader, witnessing the writer’s stutter, is witness not only to his grief but also to his process, to the workings of his mind, closer to what we might think of as the origins of his writing. (Davis, p.221)

This is what I think Hilbert is doing throughout Threnody, deliberately conveying a fragmenting experience. I first caught sight of this book on the publisher’s website, and both the title and cover leapt out at me, threnody, meaning lament. As I was trying to cobble together a book of poems about my childhood, and the loss of my parents, I felt Hilbert’s book would be of help.

It turns out that Hilbert is lamenting many things (as are we all), and though her husband’s death looms (“looms” is the wrong verb), she is also writing about the pandemic, about a stand of trees that shelter a heronry, about children leaving home, about her (our) own inevitable aging. A few of the poems are longer, and, on a first reading, had more of an impact on me. But when I began rereading the poems this morning, the shorter poems got their due. Here is another example:

Gratitude

For the brown pelican
diving into morning ocean,
I thank you, Rachel Carson.

—Donna Hilbert

If you encounter this poem all on its own, it seems true, of course (don’t we agree?), but … it’s hardly enough. In the context of this particular book, however, where things and people are lost who will never come back, where birds weave in and out of many of the poems, it fits like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and helps create the whole. Or, do I mean “the whole”? Words fail me. It takes a sympathetic reader to fill in the gaps. I think that’s the point. 

I have been trying to write this review all day, and it (certainly) is not enough. Let me leave you with one of Hilbert’s longer poems.

Walking the Palo Alto Marshes in My Red Coat

Say mud flat, salt marsh, bittern, egret.
Say egret without thinking regret
one letter away.

Say morning is a gift.
Say the mud flat is a silver tray.
Say birds sing like an orchestra tuning.

I am looking for a prayer.
I am walking for the saving incantation.
I am working at metaphor.

Say blackbird.
Say red wings like epaulets of blood.
Say heart: red four-chambered room.

Say womb, breast, cradle, boat.
Say desire.
Say desire: dark and fathomless,

the iris of an eye, your eye, the sea.
Say desire,
which is the boat.

I am wearing my red coat against the cold.

—Donna Hilbert

In short, the first time I read Threnody, several months ago, it didn’t have much impact. My re-reading of it, today, felt much different, and I’m grateful I decided to circle back to it.

Donna Hilbert has several books, and is the subject of a documentary about her work and life, Grief Becomes Her: A Love Story. To read about Donna Hilbert, check out her personal website. You can listen to a poem from one of her previous books on The Writer’s Almanac, here.

Sandra Noel, Hawk Land

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HAWK LAND, Sandra Noel. Middle Creek Publishing & Audio, 9167 Pueblo Mountain Park Road, Beulah, CO 81023, 85 pages, $18 paper, www.middlecreekpublishing.com.

Sandra Noel is a Marine Biologist and the current poet laureate of Vashon Island. I read Hawk Land last year and wrote a cover blurb for it. This year I read the book itself and am in awe of Noel’s steady adoration of the natural world. If you look at her design website, you get a sense of why birds and water play such a prominent role in her poems. Her publisher, Middle Creek, is all about “The Literature of Human Ecology.” And in her bio notes, you learn that Noel is a dedicated meditator, with poems in journals such as Buddhist Poetry Review.

The poems in this book, too, are meditations:

Space Cannot be Punctured by an Arrow

After many hours on the cushion
thinking about these words
understanding comes
on the drive home
waiting for the ferry.

—Sandra Noel

Noel’s “reverence for nature illustrates the power of place [and] the power of the sacred in nature” advises a cover blurb from David Anthony Martin. Reading these poems, you, too, are out for your morning run, witnessing, lamenting, grateful.

I Heard a Small Stream

I heard a small stream singing
its culverted and corrupted waters
frothed with phosphate
from a nearby field
still, it carried on
a joyful rhythmic cacophony
rolling over small stones and debris
following the sounds of seabirds.
We feed it our poisons or dam its courses
but if there is the smallest breach
it will break through and run.

Once a great mountain not too far from here
erupted and buried a river
under hundreds of feet of earth
but in less time than you can imagine
its waters carved a meandering path
that wore a way through.

I want to be water
and find my way again
winding and flowing
through and over obstacles
pouring out all I am into a vast sea
letting go at last.

—Sandra Noel

Poster by Sandra Noel

Sati Mookherjee

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WAYS OF BEING, Sati Mookherjee. MoonPath Press, PO Box 445, Tillamook, OR 97141, 73 pages, $16 paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

I am writing a “real” review of this book—Mookerjee’s second, and the winner of the 2023 Sally Albiso Award—to be posted at Escape Into Life (EIL) on May 5, 2023, its release date. So consider this a preview, my quick appreciation and shout-out to a stirring collection.

Washington State Book Award winner Sharon Hashimoto says in her cover blurb:

Rhythms, images and juxtapositions in these poems flow like waves filling and emptying, from past to present to what might be—all while glorying in occlusions. Sati Mookherjee’s lively word play questions our definitions, boundaries around spaces, and leads to fresh and original epiphanies…

“Occlusion,” a fine old word meaning “the blockage or closing of an opening, blood vessel, or hollow organ,” often used in a medical context. In these poems, where Salish Sea, tideflats, “the great lung of bay,” are loved, and desecrated like human bodies, the word is completely appropriate.

I’ll get carried away if I go on (and I want to save that for the review), so I’ll offer this short poem (some are quite long), as a teaser:

Ground

Lay your warm body on the warm earth
and sense how deep the roots go, the roots

we can’t see, think of the acres
of hot black lightless matter under your body.

I think the past is a perfectly fine place to live.
Why not be native to it, visit the present

as necessary, a tourist, in transit, on a brief journey.
I can see you’re dying. This terrarium,

even with its carefully laid nests of leaves and grass
and twigs, can’t keep you, I don’t want to keep you,

go home, back to where you need to be.

—Sati Mookherjee

I’m not sure “Ground” is the right choice—so many of the poems are grounded (deeply) in the present. These are poems of witness. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Mookherjee enjoins us to treasure our time here, on earth, adjacent to water.

Ways of Being is available now for presale. Visit MoonPathPress.com for more information. I’ll update the links when the full-length review is posted.

[Update 4.28.23] Mookherjee’s book launch is this coming Sunday in Bellingham, and you can reserve your seat now: https://www.villagebooks.com/event/litlive-sati-mookherkee-043023 

My review of Ways of Being can be found here: https://www.escapeintolife.com/book-reviews/book-review-ways-of-being-by-sati-mookherjee/