By Anne Whitehouse. Reviewed by David Chorlton.
Blessings and Curses, by Anne Whitehouse, 2009, Poetic Matrix Press, 113 pp., perfect bound, ISBN 978-0-924276-3-7, $15.00 (www.poeticmatrix.com). Reviewed by David Chorlton.
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University, Anne Whitehouse now lives in New York City and has published an earlier collection of poems, The Surveyor's Hand, as well as a novel, Fall Love. Her Blessings and Curses volume contains forty blessings and twenty-four curses, set between one introductory and one closing poem. As far as the vision in the book is concerned, I feel heartened by the breadth of sympathy she has and especially by that for animal life. In CURSE IV she describes the senseless act of someone overturning a pigeon's nest and destroying the eggs. Then she continues to tell about her own observations of the pair that occupied the nest. Finally, she laments the lack of eggs and fledglings this year and rounds out with "Those who despise/pigeons/will despise me/for writing this:/their life/is as worthy/as any other.” This is a simple enough sentiment, but a welcome and all too rare one.
Elsewhere, nature brings out the best in Whitehouse, with lines that build an impressive atmosphere, such as those beginning BLESSING IX:
The magical rocks of Hamilton Falls
shine silvery even when dry
because of the mica.
Also mineral-laden schists,
they are not like New York City rocks
cropping up in big slabs,
but small pebbles tumbled
smooth and flat as coins
in the cold rushing waters
of Cobb Brook.
The use of visual detail distinguishes CURSE IX, which tells about the decline of a poet "who was not good or kind,/but he was memorable.” Early in the poem the ash hangs from the poet's cigarette before dropping off, while at the end, his condition is summed up with the echo of the ash image as he is left "clutching his dead cigarette,/the ash scattered on the table,/staring into nothing.” Likeable character or not, the poet's fate was not a matter of indifference for Whitehouse, who has a sharp interest in the circumstances that surround those cursed with misfortune. CURSE XXII is written as an account quoted from a person who lived in Warsaw at the outbreak of World War II and sees the city destroyed, lives broken and ended, and finally is left to reflect on why she survived. The speaker's voice is effectively elemental for all the horror contained in what she has to say.
Shifting from vast historical drama to family relationships in CURSE XIII, we find abstractions moving into the text: "With a legacy of struggle and distrust,/so much jealousy and so little love,/we practiced stealth tactics,/intent on undermining each other.” Accurate as this may be, it doesn't make for the kind of lyrical poetry that grows out of the rocks at Hamilton Falls. Even the nicely stated ending ("I'm left in an empty field/gleaning regret, while birds fly over,/finding nothing, crying,/too late, too late?”) doesn't quite lift the poem as a whole to the lyricism in some of the others. When family affairs are blessings, as in BLESSING XXIII, they appear by way of language that can't escape becoming mundane at times:
Meanwhile, Steve was calling me to the table,
where he and Claire sat waiting to eat.
The food was ready, and so was Aunt Mildred,
her response rising uncontrollably, like sap,
or like my own characters who didn't hold back
when in love, though they might be deluded.
Too often, the poems sound flat. The lines progress without giving us much to enthuse about by way of a surprising word, lyrical phrase or the intuitive flair that brings free verse to life. Sometimes a phrase that feels natural enough to use in speech or prose but which doesn't add to poetry is retained to the detriment of the whole. In BLESSING II for example, the opening stanza includes this:
She accepted his gifts
with grace and pleasure,
not plagued as I might be
by the fear that she
didn't deserve them
and so must reject them.
Without arguing either for a minimalist approach or too much zeal in cutting the unnecessary from a poem, I could still see a case here for less is more with something like:
She accepted his gifts with grace
not plagued
by the fear that she didn't
deserve them.
I would have been happier in many places by having more suggestion and less outright explanation. CURSE III begins by signaling, at least with the mood, of what is to come rather than making the events speak for themselves. "Sometimes tragedy can strike/out of nowhere./Everyday obligations pale/to insignificance/in the great shock;/ordinary life is put on pause,/and another life takes over.” Had the poem started with the next stanza and "When Patty's twenty-year-old son/was arrested at his college/and accused of selling a drug,/he was instantly expelled/and sent off to county jail” it would have generated immediacy with a simple but well stated passage that stimulates the reader's appetite.
I like the observation Anne Whitehouse makes at the end of BLESSING XXV with "Go, Reader, to your ease!/May you give minutes where I spent years!” In this case the effort involved much reflection on big issues made accessible as anecdotes and observations. As much as I like the concept and structure of this book, I feel frustrated by extraneous thoughts such as this one that follows the lines just quoted: "The effort means nothing to the work,/but it is everything.” To close, I offer some lines from BLESSING VII which show the poet in a more convincing tone, as she refers to the cicadas that emerge in a seventeen-year cycle:
In the ecstasy of union her wings grew still
as he burst into the culminating solo.
In the Ohio River Valley
at the height of the year,
they were as numerous
as drops of rain.