Book Reviews

Vulnerable Bodies

A. Mary Murphy (Author)
Shattered Fanatics. Buschek Books
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Joanne Weber (Author)
The Pear Orchid. Hagios
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Margaret Atwood (Author)
The Door. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Antje M. Rauwerda

In one respect, these collections of poems share a similar interest in reflecting on the female body and its vulnerability to its own limits as well as to the effects of time. Murphy writes:

What a cruel twist it is

that gives me a body

that droops and sags and shrivels

and all too readily harbours fat

just when it yearns the most

to be desirable

Meanwhile Atwood, with similar wryness, asks:

(Could it be that we are the old people

already?

Surely not.

Not with such hats.)

And Weber writes of a couple in which the deaf wife is frustrated: "your anger at your deafness has split our voice." Most simply, these three poets contemplate what it means to live in a body that is not what the mind would have it be. However, in each case, these ruminations on bodily limitations are a backdrop, not a central focus.

Murphy foregrounds the sinister power dynamics inherent in human attraction and its consummation: the menace of "when I write you                        you are mine" in an early poem becomes a fond recollection of the speaker's father's manipulation of her mother after they first had sex in a much later one "there / now you'll have to marry me / or I'll tell your dad." Murphy's use of the first person throughout the collection lends intimacy to the poems, making them rational confessions to the reader of the madness (sometimes humorous, sometimes devastating) to which the speaker is prey in experiences of love and lust. Her speaker experiences pain and danger as well as the self-conscious silliness that comes with knowing one is playing a part-while old enough to know better-in the cliché that sexual relationships too often turn out to be:

he looks me straight

in the breasts

calls me beautiful

you are very beautiful

he tells them

Unlike Murphy, Weber uses extensive allusion in The Pear Orchard (the brief explanatory notes at the back are useful). The collection is impressive in scope (poems referring to the ornamentation of medieval French coffins along with contemporary renderings of a farmer and his deaf wife), and still more impressive in its weaving of shared images through these diverse vignettes: the pear orchard as metaphor for the female body, the deaf or intractable wife and the confounded husband, the amber dresses that make wives (medieval, contemporary) velvety and yet again pear-like. Weber tells specific stories in each poem and yet also calls on each poem to interact with others in the collection. Consider, for instance, the complexity and beauty of two poems in juxtaposition: In "Geertgen Tot Sint Jans: The Holy Kinship," Weber writes:

In this pear orchard, my elongated head

is an egg wrapped in a green turban.

. . .

The mummied egg has a wimple yet,

the white linen falling down my neck,

the hills of my amber gown hide

my spreading buttocks.

 

The poem refers to a fifteenth-century style of portraiture, but also gives the image of pear orchard, of woman as pear (clad in amber gown), and of woman as both fertile and deaf ("mummied egg"). Sixty pages later is "Thomas Aquinas-Last Words," a poem which illustrates how these images are sustained, are added to the collection's "sub-plot" about a farmer and his deaf wife, and are embedded in a reflection on Aquinas' Summa:

My wife has packed her amber dress in the trunk up in the attic,

for she is wearing her jeans again. It must be spring

for she comes toward me stranded in this orchard.

I see light and air, the scent of pears and apples reach me

. . .

She holds out another book,

the Summa, some ancient book

by some fat monk

Intimate like Murphy and, in places, as allusive as Weber, Atwood's collection is distinct from the others in its specific consideration of what it is to be a poet who is no longer at the beginning, or perhaps even in the middle, of a successful career. Her collection quite explicitly, and elegantly, manipulates the reader by providing an opening section of ten decent but pedestrian diary-like poems (poems disappointing to an Atwood fan) before launching into a transitional section which explains that now "The poet has come back to being a poet / after decades of being virtuous instead." In her third section, Atwood tackles a range of painful issues on large and smaller scales, like global warming ("The Weather") and the psychological damage parents inflict on their children ("The hurt child"). All of this leads to section four, which Atwood opens in dialogue with her readers (and what they might think of her work so far):

Enough of these discouragements,

you said. Enough gnawed skulls.

. . .

Why can't you tell about flowers?

 

But I did tell, I answer.

. . .

You didn't want them,

these pastel flavours.

You were bored by them.

 

Section four ends with a poem culminating in lines about what a poet does: "I tell dark stories / before and after they come true." The final section, five, leaves the reader's desires out of things to deal with time and mortality for the individual. It ends with the title poem of the collection, "The Door," which ultimately connotes going through to death. Overall, the collection dramatizes the interplay between poet and reader. Sections one and five open and close with a focus on the poet, but the intervening material shows the conflicts over what it means to be a poet, and how the expectancy of a readership turns the poet into a voice for its desires. It's clever, and, as one would expect from an established poet well into a successful career, extremely good.

---

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #202 (Autumn 2009), Sport and the Athletic Body. (pg. 121 - 123)

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.