2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
metaphor for a transsexual half-life: on Mondays, the “nail polish off, carhart jacket on, he’s left behind / the clothes that fit her secret self”; for “[f]ive days a week he moves toward home under ground.” The poem ends on a celebratory note, however, when, at the end of the week, he emerges against a floral backdrop, where “the yellow bouffant skirts of forsythia” echo the broader dimensions of the obscured “secret self.” That same possibility of emerging from the underground into the desired and “secret self” and the joy of that potential is also evoked in “Sparks Fly Upward.” In the poem’s autumnal setting, the persona is stopped in her tracks by “the trees blazing up in their dying,” and she realizes that Dying and coming back is what trees promise us – coming back as ourselves, arms spread, the sun pulling life up through our veins, so we play a new song on our xylem xylophone.
Moments like these – of being arrested by and attentive to natural beauty – punctuate many of Pratt’s poems: in “Teaching a Child to Talk,” for example, a mother introduces her small son to more-than-human communication by having him listen to the “common sparrows talking in the hedge”; a lost job is mourned in “A Temporary Job” because the persona had “learned the way the sun laid its palm / over the side window in the morning, heavy / light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.” Such moments of attentiveness illuminate a final element in the underground motif: they point to the realization that all we do to live, whether it takes the form of subsistence or more transcendent kinds of labor, depends entirely on the earth: a dark underground that nourishes the seed and the hidden alchemy of minerals that swim toward us through the roots and leaves we taste and savor. Pratt pointedly evokes this beauty and this mystery in “The Great Leafing-Out.” The poem poses a heated moment of protest against “corporate greed” alongside the persona’s recent memory in which
number 21
into a systematic or romantic philosophy here. Rather, this and other organic images and metaphors represent the simple desire to bring us back to our senses: they affirm sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste – the concretes of experience – against an empire of economic abstraction. They challenge models of “reality” based on mathematical obscurity and sleight of hand jargon with the things we actually touch and feel: the embodied knowledge of life and labor. Finally, in “Fighting Fire,” as in many of the poems in the final “If We Jump Up Now” section, Pratt’s persona speaks directly to us. She urges us to obey the evidence of our senses in order to inspire us out of silence, out of apathy: “Jump up, jump up. Let the words leap out of our mouths, / let us follow ourselves out of the burning now, out of / the dying house, out from under the blood slowly dropping / onto our foreheads, onto our closed eyelids. Let’s get up now.” It may be that this lovely and extremely accessible volume of poems will, as time passes, simply have borne witness to the dispossessions of our time. That is, Pratt’s poems may live on as a document of our collective and tragic failure to “jump up.” Or they may become something more. What is certain is that Pratt has done her part here, politically and poetically. The rest of the words, the rest of the labor, must be our own. n
2011 NC AAUW AWARD COURTESY OF HarperCOllins Publishers
48
the maple tree dropped its own reality at my feet, a twig waving red-green paws, curled with little finger muscles of seed. Over my head and further than I can see, the tree tops brighten in a green sunrise. The beautiful moment between when something has begun and is not finished yet.
As a poem and as an image, “The Great LeafingOut” suggests itself as a metaphor for waking up, for waking into collective action against an unbridled profit ethos; however, Pratt does not elaborate this organic motif of earthly beauty and natural mystery
Gloria Houston received the 2011 North Carolina Association of American University Women Award for Juvenile Literature for Miss Dorothy and Her Bookmobile (HarperCollins), illustrated by Susan Condie Lamb. n