JA S P E R r e A D s review: A Book of Exquisite Disasters by Charlene Spearen (University of South Carolina Press, 2012)
By Carol Peters
you would have crowed: Get out of here; find your own piece of roadkill. Six soldiers, like a team of rowers, guards of grief wearing khaki and brass, moved in unison. They stood faceless as a pack of penguins.
Charlene Spearen prefaces her new poetry collection with an epigraph from Israeli poet Agi Mishol: “you, with
Spearen is unwaveringly honest. In “Last Confession,”
a womb in your brain.” Spearen’s work counters Mishol’s
one of the book’s two poems written from a male point
sarcasm with powerful, often devastating narrative poems
of view, the brother brusquely mocks the Catholic faith
that expose the devaluation of women and honor women’s
that the poet, trained by family and church, takes more
defiance of alleged constraints. The poet’s respect for
seriously. “Mother of God” relates a vision experienced
women and their right to live lives of their own choosing
after her own mother’s death:
illuminate this compelling first book. The poems, as poet Kwame Dawes writes in the preface, are “wonderful studies
Never had I seen such
in how language, arresting experience, can produce these
radiance fill alcove, aisle, pew. . . .
artifacts of great and lasting beauty.”
I began to feel heaven’s omniscient
The first section of the book is a moving sequence of poems about a brother’s dying and death. Spearen
voice . . .
dedicates the first poem, “Magic inside a Hell-Box,” to
all that was His will
C.J.M., an “M” we take for Monahan, maiden name of the poet and last name of her brother. As throughout, lyricism complements narrative:
The book’s final poem, “Judgment Day,” confesses the author’s ongoing respect for her Catholic training, “I am still so fearful of the heaven or hell / moment,” but counters that impediment with her desire “for another
Morning. The early light centers
chance,” which arrives as the opportunity to do good, care
and fills the air like the smell
for another:
of new clothes on Easter Sunday. follow the assigned path, it is veiled The simile invokes a child’s sensory immediacy before the
in a holy state and ceases to wonder about
poem rushes on the morbid present:
words like blame and direction.
pallid veins that pulse against your
This obedience to religious authority, male authority,
yellow skin. You shield your eyes
is what most of the women in Spearen’s book defy,
from the shame of a shrinking body . . .
sometimes in what most people would regard as bizarre and disastrous ways, e.g., a mother who drowns her three
The sister admits, “Now you are dying,” the fact she and
small children in the bath, a pregnant wife who commits
her brother attempt to deny, unlike the dog:
harakiri, a woman who survives decades of marriage to the husband she was sold to by chanting, “I will outlive
this animal seems to know the cold, blue landscape will empty, become a place where you will never go again
him! I will. I will.” The narrative strength of Spearen’s book lies in the recurring theme of women who take back their lives after being devalued by parenting, by sexual abuse, by religion,
The poet reveals a searing and unsentimental story that
by lovers and husbands, by the self-disparagement that
is not the family story – “Your wife, hidden / in a vapor
blooms from such ubiquitous treatment. One recovery
cloud” – to its comic funeral end:
poem,
“Eruptions
from
Natural
Causes”
begins
in
dormancy and ends in eruption:
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