52
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“When the corn stands high, she walks barefoot across red soil, / a stranger to that house. A sinewy part of her begins to re-coil.” “Re-coil” is not the same term as “recoil,” meaning to shrink back in repugnance, as she did in the marriage bed. Here it means to draw back and re-gather one’s strength, as a snake does in order to strike, and it indicates a radical change in the marital relationship. Nieman does not fear puns. Sometimes they are casual and obvious: “a slattern’s house (un)keeping” in “Dark Matter.” Sometimes they are sly, as when a couple visiting Paris describes their nights as “loud” and their “mornings rue- / full” in “Second Honeymoon,” another poem about an attempt to regroup and start again. A sequence of five pieces called “A Blessing on the Tongue” is launched by the name of an apple found in a farmer’s market, “King Lust.” Lust changes in form and meaning from fruit to literal royalty, to “King Lush,” to “King Luscious,” to “Lucius, king COURTESY OF VALERIE NIEMAN
of the Britons.” “Blessing” is a lighthearted series, but its theme, the mutations and permutations of our appetites and passions, is serious enough to give the wordplay point and poise. And this continual transformation from theme to theme, with reprises, is the method of the volume. In “Racial Memory” the experience of falling out of a sailboat into a lake transforms to falling asleep – and then to falling awake, “jerking upright in bed,” to escape the lake water “black with the dreams of drowned forests.” “Old Story” remarks the penchant for “finding patterns,” “sacredness / in passionflower and lotus,” and also in “the desiccated head / of a giant catfish,” which reveals “a crucified Christ enshrined.” In “The Guide: Cave Paintings at Font de Gaume,” the tour guide’s spiel about the prehistoric artwork gives rise to a personal memory of his grandfather’s discovery of the place with a group of other children and the atavism that overwhelmed them: “We felt the animals rise inside us / until we did not know ourselves.” The loss of individual personality to the great collective human memory is both alienating and conjoining as an encounter with time. The archeologist in “Stratigraphy” speculates about the lives that once clothed the bones he now examines “with dental pick and bone brush.” There must have been flood and famine in the prehistoric period that framed these bones “in time and meaning”: “how high the icy water rose / that spring, / how the deer fled, / how we starved.” We – the pronoun tells us that the
speaker “with pick and shovel” has become identical to the personage who lived so long ago, just as the tour guide became identical to the curious child his grandfather was. “Lore II: Tap’s Tips” imagines a person lost in a wilderness. A town or settlement can be reached simply by following any stream downhill. But this lone figure decides to abjure society and find refuge and purpose in the wild, eating fiddleheads, fox grapes, turtle eggs, hickory nuts – whatever the landscape offers. Hygienic aids are at hand: “Honey cleanses wounds / but so do maggots.” Why should this loner ever return to society? “Consider that the ones who love you / will not look long enough.” This final rejection of human company, because of its placement, seems to bring to a conclusion the instances of separateness recorded in “Laryngitis,” “Alienation,” “Out of the Ordinary,” “Choice of Words,” “Losing Ground,” and others. “Work in the Morning” seems at first a celebration of clean physical labor, pruning trees, “sawing and stacking.” Then we learn that this morning (the inevitable pun), such work is a means of temporary relief from a dire and painful situation: “The darkened room is everyday more familiar, / the worn-out body on the couch, curled like a wood shaving.” The mother lies there, “her breath pulled in like a burdened rope, / breath by breath drawing us tightly into the same coil.” The speaker has been tending to her dying mother and the weight of this duty is oppressive to an extreme. Her work with the saw has given
LEFT Valerie Nieman and poet/playwright Richard Krawiec at their reading at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, 13 Aug. 2015