Savage Machinery

Review of Savage Machinery by Karen Rigby, Finishing Line Press (2008), 18 pp., $14, ISBN 978-1-59924-287-3, ISBN 1- 59924-287-7. Reviewed by David Chorlton.

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In “The Story of Adam and Eve,” Karen Rigby works in a style not unlike that of fifteenth century artists in that she uses words with the same delicacy and care the Boucicaut Master and Workshop of c. 1415 would have done. I often wonder what moves us to want to write about art, whether paintings offer us an entry to worlds otherwise denied us in our mechanical age or whether they are just convenient points of departure for those days when the muse is on strike. In this book, the interest in what is seen is always a first step in going beneath surfaces and exploring what is hidden there. Amid much beautiful language, this poem is where the title is tucked away:

Before the savage machinery.
A woman sprung from bone facing her husband,
his body inside her, his body a wing,
in thickened amber—

Rigby’s interest in visual art also leads her to Leonardo da Vinci and Edward Hopper. Just as the painting process can elevate its subject matter, writing can inject a soul into inanimate objects. We find a sequence of poems based on the earthly and everyday in studying first onions, then borscht, bread and plums. “The Song for the Onion” is one that dramatizes it, while in “Borscht” a series of historical and cultural associations are spooned up for our consumption. “Bread,” at least in this baking, has a romantic flavor, and the “Plums” likewise live highly enhanced lives.

Another feature that stands out in Savage Machinery is a sense of mystery. The first poem, “Bathing in the Burned House,” opens with a picture drawn with Rigby’s distinctly visual language:

The house shimmers
behind ribbons of heat. Like a child’s
shoe-box diorama, three brick walls embrace
the clawfoot tub. Its beveled rim

is painted black. The brass rod
stands upright as heron.

From here the poem takes a series of turns, testing the readers’ faith perhaps, and closes with:

Mid-August, any miracle could surface—
Mary’s image graven in the road’s peeled tar.

Savage Machinery is a pensive and pleasurable little group of poems.