The Making of a Desirable Set of Three
Coming Up for Light and Air, by Barbara Crow, 72 pages, paper $7.95;
Everything's a Verb, by Debra Marquart, 86 pages, paper $7.95;
What They Always Were, by Norita Dittberner-Jax, 78 pages, paper $7.95;
all New Rivers Press, 1995.
The purposes of the Minnesota Voices Project provide an annual competition for the Upper Midwest's new and emerging writers. The 1994 winners, for example, were poetry books of outstanding merit. Those chosen for 1995 are no less so, and if there existed some temptation to select three works that would, by style, slightest leaning or content, bind them together in the cause of sameness or unity, the selectors gave not a millimeter of ground. Each book is singular of tongue, texture and flavor, enabling each to stand on its own. It should be said, also, that the publisher's production values rate highly, each cover having a handsome full-color painting that compliments and resonates the sensibilities of the poem within. What most serves, however, to make these three books a desirable "set" lies in their literary excellence and that they are, again this year, all written by women.In Coming Up for Light and Air, former New Zealander Barbara Crow writes with subdued passion. Her life blood is in her poems: "I took the ring from my finger/ this morning. I'm thriving./ I'm reading love poems. Last month,/ last year, all I could swallow/ was death."
If her poem, "Son," does not, in its bony anguish, shatter old concepts of human love, little will. For at least the time required to read and reread her poems, Crow lends us the universality of her burning loss: ("...because if I stop/ talking about you, will you be/ truly gone"); harrowing confusion: ("...a sudden/ tip in the cerebral axis, events/ collapsing into each other / like box-cars on the railway line"); raw pain: ("Every now and again/ I'd go to the window, hungry/ for the sounds of morning--/ tuis and bellbirds and trains") ; and that miraculous comprehension: ("...we saw/ your drawing of this/ circle with two small/ moons inside, one black,/ one white, for all the dark/ and all the light/ in the light and dark/ of all of us"), and epiphany which come of being brutally tested.
And if we yearn for a contemporary poem that will become a classic, we need only read, on page 55, Barbara Crow's splendid poem, "Hands." It is too sacred to quote even the smallest piece of it here.
Former rock and roll musician Debra Marquart's Everything's a Verb, reels with realism and candor. It brings to us the intimacy of photo albums, jars of jelly beans, bedrooms, deathbeds. It brims with tears, her need to get at the marrow of life laid out in the unyielding despair of her titled poem. In it, a counselor argues for "boundaries" and "clear-cut definitions" as solutions to problems and troubles, against which Marquart explains:
how everything's a verb to me
the world is an endless array of fibers
weaving and connecting
unraveled as time passes.
Much deeper into her book, in a unifying and canny stroke, Marquart recapitulates her "fibers" theory through a poem entitled, " The Weaver."
Streetwise and world wise, some of Marquart's precise language is gritty and cynical ("Shit & the Dream of It," "The Miracle Baby") but because its use sustains the thrust of given pieces and harbors no hypocrisy, we should commend her courage. Like counterweights, Marquart's poems about emergence ( "Getting Ready," wherein the thousand-change girl dresses for school, "Doing the Twist") are suitably jittery and nervous, alive with images that light up dark corners and conclude in quirky true-to-life closures. In her quatrained, "Between Wives," there is an unflinching exchange between second and prospective third wives across a Village Inn table. "Knitting" works simultaneously on so many planes of consciousness, it is breathless, unforgettable. Yet, I tell you this: do not go through life without reading Marquart's powerful, wrenching poem, "Gatherings." It is Marquart, pure Marquart at her devastating, imagist best.
Then, there is the steady, gentler hand of Norita Dittberner-Jax. What They Always Were assembles fine, lovely poems ("the willow's green rain") written by a poet whose view of life finds calm even in pain, beauty even in frustration, and acceptance, even in the face of final loss:
Dittberner-Jax takes us from childbirth to childhood, first days at school; from the wilderness of sexual awareness to marriage; to childbirth again and the whole business of living, wound on the wide spool of her experience. Of love she says, "Most nights we don't leap into bed/ but come to it grateful/ for a body that keeps on warming,/ for the imprint of flesh." The insightful poem, "Across the Driveway," relates the interdependent relationship between two women of common lot: " Rituals of necessity connect you--/ sooner or later/ one of you will need eggs." She enchants us with delightful images ("The mirror was polished till the peonies/ could see themselves"). And she thumps us with reminders of our own isolation when she writes, "...and me, empty as a farmhouse, / its door flapping in the wind." In uncluttered speech, these poems lay unabashedly bare every human emotion, every human situation, good and ill. They are, in fact, love poems-- to life, to the world, to the balm of memory, to triumph over disaster. In "Theresa's Bar," the poet tells us that "we are the fire/ around which terrible stories are told." Still, Dittberner-Jax is never more economic or eloquent than in her closing poem. While washing dishes, she speaks to her long-dead mother:
Why is the earth so indifferent?
A man dies early by thirty years
and the sky is placid as Buddha.
The streets don't buckle
in grief, water runs downhill
as always.
it only matters to humans
with the gift of memory.
There is no help for this.
How is it where you are?
You, folded so long
into your death --
there's been no word
for years. Here
water runs off plates,
the furnace kicks in
like a great heart.
Review by June Owens
