“ you see very
few men have souls and very few men
have courage the few who have the
courage to follow their souls are mostly all dead lost in leaves people kill them you know”
—from
“Madwoman”
What characterizes this volume of poetry, published in 2009, for me is the
astonishing variety of poetics on display. Shmailo proves herself adept at wild
internal rhymes, traditional metrics, prose poems, and found poems. The book is divided into three sections: Love Poems,
LitCrit, and In the World. I will discuss one poem from each.
The book begins with a glorious love poem, “Personal.”
I want to know
what makes you
tick.
I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.
…
forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning
The celebration of erotic love is ensconced in the playful
internal and standard rhymes. Love becomes childlike, wonderful, as fun as
hearing an unexpected confluence of sound in two words. So often, romantic love
is obsessive and demanding. This is pitched at the mystery of the beloved, and
she transforms the mystery into linguistic play at the aural level. This poem
is as much music as poetry.
The second section, LitCrit, begins with “In Paran,” which
itself begins by quoting Melville: “Call me Ishmael.” She uses iambs, very long
lines, and a self-consciously archaic diction to, again, celebrate, this time
the speaker’s wildness:
I grew up wild and stubborn: my hand against my father
At war with all my kinfolk; my kin at war with me.
Hear the iambs and alliteration propel this declaration of
independence, of will, of stubbornness, and of the will to see demons and
thrive. I can’t help but think the speaker is female, in spite of her calling
herself Ishmael. Yes, this is a poem in the voice of Ishmael. But it celebrates
being as wild as a man (is allowed).
The most interesting poetic move, for me, occurs in "Chimera." The whole poem is below:
The use of bold and italics creates two poems within a larger poem, and
the way the lines shorten as the poem unfolds feels like the last word: “cut.”
This poem makes me feel the pain of illusion and disillusion, the way we never
know if we know. We could be at the cinema when we are just walking down the
street: Chimera.
In the “In the World” section Shmaillo addresses politics
and pain, from the Holocaust to My Lai to homelessness. The latter is addressed in
a loosely held-together poem, a form that echoes the very state of
homelessness, called “No-Net World.” It is straight-ahead, almost journalistic.
“Now your debts mount up like garbage and a layoff’s coming
soon.”
This line is typical. By the end of the poem, the
accumulated weight of a life on the edge is witnessed and given voice.
I recommend this book to anyone who loves to see a poet take
chances, go with anything and use everything from all of poetics, who writes as
she, apparently, feels she must and not according to any “shoulds.”
________________________
Larissa
Shmailo's work has appeared in Gargoyle, Barrow Street, Drunken
Boat, Fulcrum,The Unbearables Big Book of Sex, and the Penguin anthologyWords
for the Wedding. Her books of
poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press), and Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs
are The No-Net World and Exorcism, available through
iTunes and other digital distributors. Her translation of A. Kruchenych'sVictory
over the Sun is forthcoming
from Cervena Barva Press and is currently featured on the Brooklyn Rail InTranslation Web site.
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