Review by Barbara Blatner

IMPROBABLE MUSIC
by Sandra Kohler

Word Press
P.O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106
ISBN 9781936370368
2011, 114 pp., $20.00
www.word-press.com

A few months ago, poet Sandra Kohler, a friend of a friend, published on your pages a penetrating review of my verse memoir about my mother’s death, The Still Position. When she asked me to consider writing a review for her new poetry book, Improbable Music, I consented. Being as I am fascinated by consciousness, how it lives in me, harmonizes and clashes with my perceptions, how I long as a poet to make sense and use of it, I figured that I would find a kinship of sorts in Kohler’s Improbable Music. In poem after poem, Kohler skillfully binds together nature’s land with territories of self-apprehension. Reading her work, I ask myself, “Where do I exist at this particular moment in space and time; where do my perceptions place me?”

Here are what feel to me like signature lines in Kohler’s poem “Out”:

The clarity of the predawn sky. The moon’s
skinny arc, gold and thin as a ring. At the horizon
greeny-rose, a rich murk. Clarity? Murk? I can’t
have it both ways.

In the poem’s first three lines above, Kohler gives us a canvas: sky, moon’s portentous “ring,” the wonderfully spondaic, contradictory “rich murk.” Upon this canvas she projects mind and heart so that I enter a moment where inner and outer worlds merge.

Is the canvas she makes with images in the above lines one of “clarity” or “murk” in her psyche’s calibration of meaning? “Clarity” and “murk,” emerging together, reveal her intimation of dualities. Letting me into her world of this-or-that, she questions her own knowing, and how it is transcribed into word choices. There is no right word when there are two true designations in her mind. I relate to the tug of her opposites; I too find contradiction in everything. “Clarity? Murk?” She can’t “have it both ways,” but she does have it both ways, by putting “it,”perception’s moment, into these two words.

And a little later in the poem, she affirms that “it’s raining lightly. It’s raining darkly. I have it/both ways”–and invites me into a deep, slant play of language.

Kohler very often balances two seemingly warring apprehensions, holding her tensions gracefully in these poems. It is these tensions that, for me, carry the lines forward, nourish their flow. Her constant return is to the natural world, to water, “the river flowing swift and cold,” to changes, to poised doubleness: “what is foreground,/what background – black on/white, white on black?” She does not resolve these tensions. She presents me with their energies.

If there if a hero in these pages, a recurring steady phenomenon that Kohler cites, a kind of correlative for her revelations, it is the heron she looks for and spies sometimes by water or in woods, the heron she names Heraclitus…

Because he doesn’t step
into the same river twice. Because I am not sure
he is the same heron.

(“Naming Heraclitus”)

All poems save one in “Heraclitus,” the second section of the book,contain the name “Heraclitus” in the title. I enjoyed the poet’s attraction to the heron’s “interrogative curve” as a force that leads her onward in her examinations.

In “Heraclitus and Others,” Kohler reports a sighting of six herons. The biggest, most venerable heron, she decides, is Heraclitus; the others are his family members. She doesn’t understand the clouds “bright auroral signals of some joy” that flare up in the herons’ domain, she simply presents this joy in an image. Then, quickly, like the fire and the river, emblems of the inscrutable forces she is drawn to, she moves, as she does often in this book, to thinking darkly about her family, her sister, brother, son. And although, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is keenly aware that “a Heraclitan fire burns through all/our days,” she cannot, does not look away from the knowledge that her “sister will fly to France/and remain unchanged, [her] brother will refuse to/give up one sip of his cup of bitterness,[her] son/will build a future using love and
anger.”

I too have often had to face that change will not come where it is dearly longed for, in the distant, wounded hearts of those I most closely share time with, but that change comes nonetheless. I understand it but dimly, for it presents itself “in mysterious hieroglyphs that encrypt our own nature.” I am reminded here of Hopkins’ ecstatic, almost manic singing, reminded of his birds, his airborne incantations. I think Kohler and Hopkins share something of a fascination with
sublime elementals, polarites of time and space.

But Kohler’s rhythms, unlike Hopkins, do not leap toward sky or fire, desiring to be consumed, but stay broodingly and organically on the dark ground of her visions and preoccupations. The herons are not avatars like Hopkins’ windhover, but “muses/of absence./Praise absence.” Kohler is a lonesome poet, a wanderer. Many parts of her lonesomeness speak to me and will, I think, speak to many readers. Like all of us, she is uniquely lonesome. She is acutely aware of what
and who is absent, especially when she is writing of others, her family and friends. There is distance there, absence of understanding. What she knows are “narratives of loss, alienation,/emigration, exile, sadness”– these are her core stories. What she knows is that “the loved traveler/who returns cannot be embraced, only held/at arms’ length and gazed into, a mirror, impenetrable, remote, impossibly close.”

She is unflinching in relaying truths of human existence. The silent herons, so much themselves, her “muses of absence,” perhaps move her to hear the silences of the world. In the title poem of the section called “Writing the Wound,” she sings of exile and war and atrocity, and how we shut ourselves out of the suffering of others:

The names.
The voices.
How we have
swallowed
the names
how we have sealed up
the voices
in dark chambers
under our throats
passages between
speech and hearing
cells of our inner ears.

We are bound to each other by biology–“cells of our inner ears”–by history–“passages”–by the puzzle of being human. The enormity of what we conceal in “dark chambers” is in our very throats. “What does it mean to be part of a century,” she asks, a bloody century. She writes of death camps in Europe, “rage still in Bosnia,/Northern Ireland, Palestine,/Iraq. The struggles go on in/our name.” By “our name,” I think she refers to all humans who hurt humans–and that means all of us, no matter how loudly we proclaim innocence. Human savagery is the history of centuries.

While Kohler doesn’t offer easy solutions to our killing nature, she as a poet knows that “the dark work of slaughter we cannot/stay cries out for witness.” In the phrase, “dark work of slaughter,” I read her potent inability to hope away our bloody distress. “Work” implies purpose, industry. Fate, actions taken that cannot not be taken, is an ingredient of meaning here, so that the use of the “work” in this context makes the perpetration and perpetuation of human suffering weigh as tragedy. Kohler is a fatalist and an ancient; she does not know how to put out the ravaging fire, she knows to sing about it.

In the book’s final title section, “Improbable Music,” Kohler returns from the world’s grief- stained stage to her home, finds there “something [is] bound and mute this morning, held/and withheld.” Here again are her dynamic paradoxes, tensions that forever and interestingly seem to examine themselves. “Empty and filling” are the lovers in “A Deux,” their communication mute but palpable: “Your silence. My answering silence.” This is not peace exactly, but perhaps
a moment of repose in a universe pelted by despair. Kohler’s music is improbable because, in “September Song,” she knows that “loving you was the mirage I’d subsist on.” She finds her music, and although she is wise enough to know that music itself is a mirage, it is sufficient to make her live.

Review by Sandra Kohler

THE STILL POSITION:
a verse memoir of my mother’s death
by Barbara Blatner

NYQ Books
The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc
P.O. Box 2015
Old Chelsea Station
New York, New York 10113
ISBN 978-1-935520-23-8
2010, 115 pp, $14.95
www.nyqbooks.org

When a poet friend asked if I’d be interested in reading–and possibly reviewing–her acquaintance Barbara Blatner’s new book of poems, The Still Position, I was drawn to say yes by both this poet’s praise of the work and by its daunting subject: the last week of the life of the author’s mother. Two experiences from my life, and one from my work as poet, pulled me: my mother’s death, of cancer, when I was eleven, and my older brother’s death ten years ago, of liver disease. The earlier loss was one from which I had been partly shielded because of my age, so my understanding of it has been limited in ways; my brother’s death, about which I’ve written a number of poems, left me wondering what another poet would make of similar materials. In connection with both losses, I wanted to see what a poet could do with both the grim details of such a death observed and the complex emotional reactions which seem to me almost inevitable. This curiosity was satisfied by Barbara Blatner’s book; more importantly, The Still Position affords a rich poetic and emotional experience which readers will find well worth their attention whether or not they are drawn to the subject by personal experience.

The subtitle of the book, “a verse memoir of my mother’s death,” defines its substance, but not its structure. A clue to that came, for me, when I noted that Blatner is a playwright as well as poet and musician; her previous publications include a verse play. The Still Position can be seen as a play: “before” stands as prologue to the five acts of Monday through Friday; “after” as epilogue. Drama is not just a matter of form in these poems: the poet also has the task of creating suspense in a narrative whose outcome is known from the start. Despite what is known, the poems are full of tensions of various kinds. First, as observers of this death, we want to know just how it occurs, how the process of going from a living being to a dead body is enacted. This may seem a morbid or perverse desire, but I think it entirely natural: how can we not want to know in detail about such a primal event, one to which we are all subject? Reading the sequence, I admired Blatner’s grim honesty, the willingness to articulate and so doing embrace even what some might view as ugly or humiliating details of the body’s process of dying. (I’m reminded, in saying this, of a favorite line from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene: “entire affection hateth nicety”–that is, that unconditional love is not “turned off” by such details.)

In addition to the drama of the body’s death, the sequence is full of another basic element of drama: conflict. (Of course the process of dying can be seen as a battle between life and death in the body itself.) There are several conflicts in the sequence: from the mostly muted kind implied in the lines about the mother’s caretakers and her children: “we…/kinda like each other/and kinda don’t,” to the actual arguments that take place, like the one between Sadie, the caretaker, and Tom, the narrator’s brother, ended by the dying mother’s forceful return to full consciousness and pithy advice, “Don’t be an ass”; to the fight between the narrator and her sister that turns violent, dangerous as the narrator drives furiously into the night, almost willing her own death. But these external conflicts, important as they are, nevertheless weigh less than the ongoing more inward struggles. The first of these is the dying woman’s own attitude toward her death, involving simultaneously admission and denial. Like the narrator, we keep wondering: will she ever acknowledge that she is indeed dying? The other is the narrator’s conflict between love and fury, tenderness and resentment, delight and disgust with the mother who has inflicted suffering and withheld longed-for love. These struggles, especially that of the narrator, seem the skeleton, the basic bones on which the sequence is fleshed out. And because of their constant push-pull, the difficulty of reaching a fixed place, it seems a tremendous irony that the title poem is “The Still Position.”

Many of the poems of the sequence themselves seem skeletal, not in the sense of lacking flesh and blood, but in their spare unrolling of short lines, linear progression. Another image that comes to mind for them is that of a knife blade, honed and wielded to cut to the quick of the struggles they enact. Doing so, they can be moving, indeed almost astonishing, like the amazing poem “morphine,” the final poem of “Thursday,” in which the mother is seen as shepherd leading her children, imaged here as her sheep, up the terrible climb, the “invisible/stony path” of her death. This extraordinary moment seems resolution, if a momentary one, of both of the conflicts I’ve been discussing: the mother’s own “ownership” of her death and the narrator’s ambivalent relationship with the mother.

One comment on the narrator’s portrait of the mother, a qualification of sorts. After reading and re-reading the poems, it occurred to me that I still did not “see” the mother as a character in her own right. On further reflection, I decided that there is no way that the narrator could have achieved such a portrait, for to do so would have required presenting something to which the daughter/narrator has no real access: the inner life of the mother. That inner life is partially revealed, of course, by what we’re told of the mother’s past actions and what we see and hear of her in the present of the poems. But a more complete view of it would have been false to the reality of the narrator’s position as a character in this sequence, not author of a fiction in which the mother is fully revealed as character.

In the image from “morphine” of the stony path, we see one of the constants of the sequence: the presence of a natural world that is not merely background or setting but a vital counterpart to the human and psychological processes of the narrative. The images Blatner uses to create this world are wonderfully precise, wonderfully realized. Take, for instance, the description in “home,” the first poem of “before,” of the tree whose spring bloom the mother will not live to see: “…your two-hundred-year/ apple tree,/…branches bare/now, scored/twisted/and barren, /and…/to imagine/fresh taffeta/frothing/from its moist boles/in a May/you will not/see, infant/ blossoms/on ancient limbs.” This image could stand as emblem to the entire sequence: the mother’s death bringing forth a kind of birth (for the narrator perhaps) that she will not see but has nevertheless engendered. Like the shepherd/sheep image discussed above, this image, for all its precision and specificity, resonates with the entire sequence’s structure and meaning.

Later natural images–the mother’s garden with its daffodils and lilac, orchards, “green escarpment,” looming black mountain and the creatures like hawks and deer glimpsed in this landscape–complete this process of definition of the world of the sequence, becoming, like the alternate burial of the mother envisaged in the first poem of “after,” “the theatre of death,” a way of placing the action of this “play” in its full context of human meaning.

As a poet, I found myself deeply drawn to these poems in part because of their natural images; that sense of nature providing a kind of counterpart, a vital context for the most intense emotional experience is a central part of my own work. As the woman who was once a child barred from the room in which her mother was dying, I was drawn almost compulsively to the graphic scenes of a similar death, a loss whose meaning I am still plumbing sixty years later. As the adult who knows how tortuously complex the emotions involved in our family bonds and tensions are, I was drawn to this scrupulously honest account of their ambiguity, their rich and dynamic nature. As a reader, Blatner’s craft and skill afforded me delight in beauty as well as moments of breathtaking pain. The Still Position is a fine book, an achievement of both mind and heart.

____________

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, is forthcoming in May, 2011 from Word Press. Her second collection, The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in November, 2003. An earlier volume, The Country of Women, was published in 1995 by Calyx Books. Her poems have appeared over the past thirty years in journals including Prairie Schooner, The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Flyway, The Missouri Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and The Colorado Review. She is a participant in the Handprint Identity Project, a collaboration between artists and poets, which had its opening exhibit at Elizabethtown College in November, 2008. After living in Pennsylvania for most of her adult life, she has recently moved to Boston, Massachusetts.