Review of Brenda Graham's "How Sound Carries Over Water"

Review of Brenda Graham’s How Sound Carries Over Water (Main Street Rag, $14, 59 pages)

I think Brenda Graham and I grew up in the same place, a place with a Red Dot Store, a mill village (or trailer park), disappointing fathers, and an empty swing singing “its unoiled song” (“Any Other Man’s Daughter Would Be Crying”), a place where everyone else’s Daddy seemed kinder than the one who “makes me pick my own / switches from the hedge, stings my legs, [warning] You’d better not whine.”
The poems in Graham’s first collection, How Sound Carries Over Water, are very familiar to me, and not just because this is the third book of poems I’ve read this year about growing up in an alcoholic and impoverished home in the South, nor just because that setting is similar to the one I was born into, but because Graham does the hard work of the poet. She goes back into memory to find the images that reveal the deeper truths about the places we live, and then she tries on word after word and phrase after phrase until she finds the one way those images can be recorded such that the reader is transported to the time, place, and reality she writes of.
The poems of How Sound Carries Over Water are mostly confessional and accessible. They are divided into three sections. The first section, “The Bones of Home,” creates a sort of childhood family portrait, albeit a family portrait from hell. These poems show us a home characterized by “temper-cracked walls” (“Mitsy”) where even the family dog, named Good-for-Nothin’ Bitch, keeps returning to “colorless crosses / as if they were something worth coming back to.” It’s a home of disappointment, molestation, and ultimately, violence, as the reader sees in one of the collection’s strongest poems, “Shame”:

I want to be blind to the rocky yards
I pick my way through on the way
to our house, my sister’s hand a bud in mine.
Blind to the shattered glass

that haloes my mother’s head, the way
she lies, crumpled, at the bottom of the porch steps,
my father at the top, hurling goddamns
and empty whiskey bottles,

the neighbors in robes and slippers,
pulled from sleep to see our family on display.

The second section of the book, “Dream within a Dream,” tells the story of the speaker’s inevitably doomed marriage, a marriage that begins with laughter in “Beds” as the couple fall through the middle of single beds they’ve “shackled” together with belts only to have their “thrashing” “loosen the knots.” The poems in this section are remarkable for the subtly suggestive language. Even the apparently happiest poems are marked with words whose double-entendre suggest an inexorable falling apart, an inescapable silence. The speaker says in “The Vase”

Once upon a time, I tried
to mend our conversations
that heated up

like a glass blower’s furnace.
Soon enough, I learned to treat
the melted, twisted stuff
with a cold blast of silence.

The third section of the book, “A Backwards Sort of Rising,” is aptly named as the poems in this section make clear the speaker’s understanding of how the past haunts the present, and of the need to go back and deal with that past before “rising” will be possible. The section begins with the speaker in a dangerous place, contemplating self-harm in “Cardinal:” “I’ve had the urge myself, / wondering if I had what it took / to shatter my rippling image.” But then she moves through “Recurring Dream”s of her father drunk and goes “Back to Avondale Drive” where “Thunder clouds of anger / / didn’t gather in the corners, roll / from room to shadowed room” and even revisits her “grandfather’s / fingers like gum erasers against your nipples” (“Fat”) and finally begins to “see a bit of green worth saving” (“After the Hail Storm”) and the possibility that “The Light in This House Is Changing.”
In sum, while the poems in How Sound Carries Over Water tell the story of a fragile, uncertain success, their own success as poems is neither fragile nor uncertain. They are strong and worthy of being read.

To Feel What Might Otherwise Be Lost

To Feel What Might Otherwise Be Lost
Musings for February 5

Linda Annas Ferguson and I share a lot in common. We’re both poets; we’ve both lived in North and South Carolina; we both grew up in a mill village; and we were both scarred by the rites of passage such a childhood seems to entail. In fact, we have both written poems extensively from that experience of a mill village childhood, and we even occasionally discuss the pipe dream of a much larger collection of poems from that perspective by ourselves and other poets ranging from Molly Rice to Ron Rash. After all, if you grew up in the Carolinas prior to the 1970s, chances are your life was touched by the cotton mill industry. Now, the lifestyle created by those mill villages is disappearing, and perhaps some record of it ought to be saved.

One place that record is preserved is in the four books of poems by Ferguson: Bird Missing from One Shoulder (WordTech Editions, 2007); Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk (Finishing Line Press, 2006); Last Chance to Be Lost (Kentucky Writers’ Coalition, 2004); and It’s Hard to Hate a Broken Thing (Palanquin Press, University of S.C. Aiken, 2002). This is the important sort of work that Ferguson has done as one of our area’s most active poets, but mill village life is not the only subject she bends her pen to. Equally impressive among her work are the poems that deal with growing up as a girl in the South, with being a woman in the South, with suffering and loss and persistence, with, ultimately, being alive in the world today.

I wrote in a recent review of Ferguson’s latest book, that “Bird Missing from One Shoulder does what most poetry aspires to do, to save what might otherwise be lost, the world not simply as it happens but as it is felt.” Ferguson’s poetry is not just history, not just autobiography, not just perception, but all of that infused with the permanence of emotional impact, with the timeless revelations of how it feels to love, to struggle, to persist, to lose, to grieve, and to ultimately keep going.
On February 10, Ferguson will bring her work to Hickory, back to the county in which she was born. She will read as part of Poetry Hickory at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse, starting at 6:30. It will, undoubtedly, be a cathartic evening for all those who attend, an evening which helps us all better feel what might otherwise be lost.
The poem below is not part of Ferguson’s mill village work, but rather explores another vital subject, dealing with Alzheimer’s. It is taken from Bird Missing from One Shoulder and will soon be reprinted in the anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease

My Mother Doesn’t Know Me

To her, I’m the mild-mannered woman
who cooks her meals.
She is going to leave me a tip
when she finds her purse.

She sits for hours, eyebrow
cocked in a wrinkled study,
as if she can fathom
the distance between us,

saves pieces of thread
in a coffee can,
picked from her afghan all day
while both our lives unravel.

Thanksgiving, she put a hammer
in the oven at 400 degrees,
spent the rest of the day
on the back porch step,

wanting only to leave
this strange house,
silently wringing her hands
as if her body could not contain her.

Review of Linda Ferguson's "Bird Missing from One Shoulder" (Wild Goose, Summer 2008)

Bird Missing from One Shoulder, by Linda Annas Ferguson, WordTech Editions 2007
A photo of the author’s mother adorns the front cover of Linda Annas Ferguson’s wonderful collection of poetry Bird Missing from One Shoulder. In a sort of poetic full circle, that image is clearly repeated on the back cover in the photo of Ferguson herself. Given the continuity of these two images, it should come as little surprise that the poems are, in part, dedicated to Virgie Nelson Annas, and that it is the spirit of an often underappreciated but strong woman, a self-sacrificing and persisting force of family that runs throughout the body of the work.
Through these poems the reader comes to appreciate the personal sacrifices made by the speaker’s mother as she “rises at five” (“Making Biscuits”), “hides money for a child’s needs” (Mama’s Closet”), hangs “wash outside on the line” (“Choices”) and “kneads with such ease it barely touches the heart of the palm” (“Making Biscuits”), all the while staying “at home / waiting for her own life” (“Lying in State”), listening “with her eyes shut,” (“Mama’s Apron”) and believing “she wasn’t anyone” (“Anonymous”). Even in the poems that focus on the speaker’s father it is the mother who leaves burning “a seashell lamp from a beach / we’ve never seen” (“Living Room”).
Do not think, however, that the poems can be reduced to a mere elegy for the speaker’s mother, for they are also the story of a girl growing up in a place that will be familiar to most readers from the small town South of the 20th century (and deserves to be familiar to those from elsewhere), a place of “fragments . . . parasites . . . bones thrown about” (“Cotton Mill Hill”), a place where “all streets lead to the cotton mill” (“Living Room”), “funerals cost too much to die” (“Graveyard Shift”) and “life comes in pieces” (“Almost Fourteen”). The greatest part of that growing up in this volume is the process of learning to accept grief maturely and of coming to understand the “austere and lonely offices,” as Robert Hayden calls them, of parenting and forgive the shortcomings accepting those offices often result in.
Ultimately, Bird Missing from One Shoulder does what most poetry aspires to do, to save what might otherwise be lost, the world not simply as it happens but as it is felt. The poems literally enact the final lines of “Mama’s Closet” where the speaker’s mother is seen “saving the girl she wants/ to remember, every small portion of paper / a folded page of herself.”