Earthquake Weather
Earthquake Weather,
Poems by Janice Gould.
University of Arizona Press, 1996.
$10.95 paperback; $24.95 cloth bound.
88 pages.
The title of Earthquake Weather, Janice Gould's second collection of poetry, warns of danger--something is coming that no one can control or exactly predict, although you can feel it in the air against your skin. The quakes in these poems arrive in different ways: some through direct language that bares a startling event, others through swirling detail and metaphor that ripples out like shockwaves. The first section, "This Energy in Which We Exist," collects details of the everyday forces of life, sex, death, and soul. "A Berkeley Life" contains poems of childhood and about mother, father, and sisters. "Burdening of the Heart" unwinds deeper hurts and joys, especially the simultaneous pain and sweetness of accepting life as a lesbian.In the last line of the preface, Gould compares her poems in this book to "those fields of wildflowers that bloom in what are left of open places all over a state that is never far from my state of heart or mind." Many poems are filled with northern California vegetation -- yucca and eucalyptus and star jasmine, a delightful and scenic trip. Although Gould's life view is rooted firmly as a California native, as a woman, as a mixedblood Koyangk'auwi Maidu (a Native American tribe of the Sierra Nevadas), and as a lesbian, her poetry is not subject to simple categorization as "feminist" or "ethnic" or "gay" (though anyone with a particular interest in any of these genres would not be disappointed). These huge social forces are shattered into human and detailed scenes: learning of a lover's epilepsy combatted with heroin; a conversation with a "blood sister" over coffee ("I did not know how lonely I was/ till we began to talk"); a mother's angry accusations toward a daughter who supports the 1960's civil rights movement, wanting justice instead of to just fit in.
Some of Gould's most striking pieces are her prose poems. Several are titled after days of the week ("Sunday Mornings"; "Friday Evening"; "Thursdays"). The ordinariness of the day draws you in as you remember all of your own Saturdays or Thursdays and then suddenly find yourself doing laundry in a house in Berkeley with your two sisters, or in junior high school, caught wearing green on the wrong day of the week. Without line breaks, the poems rush at you and with you at once, carrying you away with words:
Chatting over latte, she might guilelessly reveal to you the
things that shaped her strangeness: an ability to leave her body
and fly around the earth; an ability to cause the rain to fall or
cease; an ability to always know which direction is north. You
smile and listen, but you are aware, as she talks, that the
workweek comes quickly, that tomorrow you must face the office,
the printshop, or school. You wish Sunday could extend
infinitely--like wings moving across the distant watery horizon,
well on past the meridians and datelines of the world.
("Sunday Mornings")
Each poem has reflections of others, different faces of the same stone catching the light. The poems feed into each other: In one of the "Berkeley Life" poems, her mother advises not to tell anyone that her father can sew, for fear of him being misunderstood as queer.
In a later poem, the father, then in his seventies, becomes a woman, telling his daughter about this through letters she almost cannot bear to read. Questions are asked in "Mornings Are Like This" ("I want to know/ the secrets of this life/ break them/ in a thousand pieces./ I will seize the cold fragments,/ and hold them fiercely/ to the morning light") and in "Questions about the Soul" ("I have questions about the soul/ who resides like history/ in my heart's dark chamber." The last poem answers with
We're rich and foreign as the dinner we just ate off hot
solid plates: edged with the piquancy of sauce and hard
tears of garlic, graced with basil and thyme to a perfect
measure, fresh as the pale butter, crusty loaf, and earthy
wine.
("Days Without You")
Through descriptive, often lyrical language, Earthquake Weather successfully captures the manic, invisible energy of storms and the strength of raging emotion, positive and negative. The title poem is one of the best, ending with this verse:
Janice Gould has broken open her world for us straight down her own fault line, and the results are fascinating to read or hear aloud.
When September comes with its hot,
electric winds,
I will think of you and know
somewhere in the world
the earth is breaking open.
("Earthquake Weather")
Review by Fiona D. Russell
