CLICK HERE FOR BLOGGER TEMPLATES AND MYSPACE LAYOUTS »

Sunday, September 19, 2010

chapbook review: Heather Cadenhead's Inventory of Sleeping Things

Heather Cadenhead’s chapbook Inventory of Sleeping Things (Maverick Duck Press 2010) collects what is probably a “best of…so far” for the young poet rather than poems unified by a major theme. That’s not to say the eighteen poems are void of recurring motifs; the palette of diction, image, and emotion seem to have been limited by design in this miniature, this small, rather abstract portrait of intimacy and ambivalence regarding it. For Cadenhead, love is the tie that binds, but is more “SOLD sign/ taped to layaway items” than invisible, slack, silken cord. Poem after poem she buries any optimism for relationships in dread (dread of loss of identity, dread of the finite including mortality), but even in this bleak repetitiveness a child’s handful of delightful, lyrical lines and phrases shine. As Horace tells us, the great work of the great poets, if we care to look past the varnish of their names, is merely a few bright, shining strings of words.

The poem that opens the collection “The Cracking of Bones Makes the Same Sound as Falling in Love” contains this: “You’ve gotten used/ to a heaven filled with telephone poles, but I want/ a sky that swallows ideas…” This sentence is musical. In fact, it could make two lines of nearly perfect trochaic hexameter, but broken up over the pattern of regular speech (as Frost might say), we get a different kind of music, one charged not by drumbeat but by accusation. The following line masquerades as the poem’s best one, “I want to know/why falling in love feels like listening to bones crack…,” but this is a game poets play with the trust of their audience. It sounds true…if one isn’t really listening. Maybe poets should play this game so we become better questioners of such declarations, better seekers of truth—so that we ask, what does falling in love feel like if not like listening to bones crack? Whatever the answer is, the combination of pleasure and revulsion continues in the chapbook with “So I Picked Up the Pieces and Threw Them Away” and more subtly in other poems.

“So I Picked Up the Pieces” is just as fleshy and ready to be peeled as its protagonist. “You asked if you could peel my layer,/ and I nodded, handing you a spearing knife…You slid your instrument over me,/ and I felt my skin fall off…I could see my fruit,/ Fleshed across a hidden core./ And you saw, too”. Maybe it’s ars poetica, maybe a poem about surrender or violation of the body, or is this a religious poem? I must admit I looked for religion or at least spirituality from the editor of Basilica Review, an online journal that “seek[s] to broaden the label of Christian poetry and art.” As I use a paring knife to peel my fruit rather than a “spearing” one, I had to hope that, in combination with the ecstasy of the scene and the penultimate piece of the chapbook “Autumn Claims My Bones,” Cadenhead was trying to guide her reader to something else, something beyond a simple metaphor for the male sex organ. From a translation of Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiography Book of My Life: “Then the angel plunged the flaming spear through my heart again and again until it penetrated my innermost core.” Poetry should bring us to more poetry, to art, to music, to science, to history…This isn’t the only poem in Cadenhead’s brief collection that was the answer of another poem (see Harold Bloom). Read “Autumn Claims My Bones” and Sappho’s “One Girl” and Carl Phillips’s “Aubade: Some Peaches…” Read “Moonblock for Moony Days” and Mark Strand’s “Moontan.” Paste William Meredith’s “The Illiterate” over Cadenhead’s “Illiterate.” Read the entire chapbook and then Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife.” I ask you to read these poems as companions to one another not competitors (with the exception of the “Illiterate” poems).

I am disappointed with the revision of “A Coat on a Love Seat, Translated.” Should I even be mentioning a version of a poem not printed in the work at hand? I’m not sure, but I believe that the internet’s influence on the way poetry is written, disseminated, and read should cause us to rethink the limits of publishing and critique. The original “Coat” can still be accessed on the website of the online journal Up the Staircase. The cutting of two strophes has resulted in each remaining strophe becoming a possible “translation” of the coat or what that coat reminds the speaker of; for instance, the speaker on a bed and pine cones on the limp grass which in turn are like women on chaise lounges. However, as readers, we lose the more tangible and relatable image of the woman who must work both inside and outside the home. We lose the message that keeping house—not just keeping it tidy but keeping it whole—is work. And, we lose the perfect, concise way Cadenhead had conveyed the tedium of the balancing act required of the “working woman” and wife in the simple refrain of “I work, I work.” Also, I am afraid that the poem as printed in the book may have been a casualty of the micro press. The last lines on the page look to be a mistake being identical in capitalization and punctuation to the lines from two pages prior. Despite the fact that it might be an error, I delight in the way these lines suddenly convolute the “rain” and the “you.”

Finally I arrive at my “last things.” In Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” Rich identifies the problem of male-dominated culture misnaming woman’s needs and being. Inventory of Sleeping Things looks at that misnaming in the most claustrophobic, if not the most intimate, of environments, the co-inhabited home. A poem like “A Man Names Things” reassures me that I’m not entirely wrong about my interpretation. The themes of ownership and identity which I briefly touched above are gender-neutral; both the “you” and the “I” mistake his or her own desires and fears for the other’s needs. In “Raven,” for instance, the speaker provides us with two stanzas of hope and then these lines:

If I am alone, I am not whole.
What I want is this: Bare
fingers pulling bread from
the same loaf, a glass of wine
from a shared skin, a deep burial.
There, the ground will swallow us, together.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed a couple of poems like “The Astronaut’s Lost and Found,” (I believe it’s telling that the ones I liked the most had more than a good dose of magic realism in them. A review is just an opinion after all) and followed the reasoning of the arrangement of poems (the side-by-side house poems were a nice touch, like decorative support columns), but wish that the chapbook had been treated more as a form and that it had freakin’ page numbers.

I invite Heather Cadenhead to respond to this review. After all, this isn’t workshop wherein one must remain silent while her peers praise and criticize her (and how much of our practice of ignoring the poet has to do with previous generation’s lack of all the communication tools we now have? Not saying I want the poet to interfere in my reading of his poems; I don’t like to be managed that way, but as an experiment…) I would be more than happy to post her response here believing dialogue can be beneficial to the appreciation of poetry especially to those not so arrogant to have already formed one immutable opinion of it.

No comments:

Post a Comment