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Trapeze
By Deborah Digges
KNOPF; 46 PAGES; $23
The Woman I Kept to Myself
By Julia Alvarez
ALGONQUIN; 158 PAGES; $14.95 PAPERBACK
Coincidence gives rise to conjecture. Because Deborah Digges' "Trapeze"
and Julia Alvarez's "The Woman I Kept to Myself" arrived within a fortnight of
each other, the timing invites comparisons. Perhaps in a bland attempt to draw
in the Baby Boomers, the publishers' blurbs for both gently remind us that
these are midlife books -- both poets are in their 50s. The generational
billing invites big questions: What do they have to tell us as women, as
poets? What do they have to tell the great unwashed, the universal "us," about
the road ahead?
Both publish in America's most eminent publications, such as the New
Yorker and the Atlantic. Digges, the daughter of an oncologist, was reared on
a Missouri apple orchard. Her poems abound in country images, but roam from
Damascus to the Sung Dynasty to her own backyard garden. Her husband, Franklin
Loew, president of Becker College, died of a rare form of cancer last year.
That provides an important Rosetta stone for this collection, but it is easy
to miss in even the most moving poems. (It's alluded to euphemistically on the
dust jacket as the "loss" of a husband -- in a divorce?) Alvarez spent her
first decade in the Dominican Republic; she now divides her time between
Vermont and her Dominican Republic coffee farm and literacy center.
Both women are self-consciously writerly. (For example, Digges, who
intersperses short prose pieces in her book, titles one of them "Becoming a
Poet.") Both poets have written acclaimed prose. Alvarez's gripping "In the
Time of the Butterflies," a finalist for the National Book Award, is almost
impossible to put down. "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," too, has
been praised for its loose, jazzy, compelling style. Digges' controversial
"Stardust Lounge" chronicled her brave and unconventional reaction to a 13-
year-old son who was running away, stealing his mother's car, carrying guns
and doing drugs.
Alvarez's poetry is by far the more accessible. In a world adrift with
pretension and obscurity, Alvarez's approachability and amiability come as a
relief. One knows, at least, what she is trying to say. She breezes over
cliches, name-drops (Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost and others
are trotted out) and shamelessly borrows lines from greater poets to give her
poems weight. She seems to write quickly, tearing pages from her diary and
commonplace book, despite the dozen drafts she promises us fill her
wastebaskets in one of her poems.
Usually, poetry has the tension that prose lacks -- to paraphrase the
late Joseph Brodsky, prose is spilling some beans, which poetry keeps in a
tight pod. For Alvarez, the reverse holds: a narrative line, a plot keep her
prose in check. Her poems tend to sprawl, and the loose, jazzy style reads an
awful lot like, well, prose. Alvarez's Latina brio appeals, but the self-
aggrandizing "yo-yo-yo" wears thin. Interestingly, her poetry gains momentum
when she lapses into iambic pentameter and even rhyme -- in short, when her
self-regard drops before ageless patterns.
Digges is the harder nut to crack. Her canvas is large, her poems keenly
observed, her imagery often lush and beautiful (a pomegranate is "a sack of
stars"). Breathtaking passages show Digges at her best: "Sparrows sailed the
barn's doomed girth, forsaken,/ Therefore free. They lit on rafters crossing
the west windows/ That flared at sunset like a furnace fed on stars." Or here:
"See how the first dark takes the city in its arms/ And carries it into what
yesterday we called the future./ O, the dying are such acrobats." But often
she rambles in her own rapturous trance. A small instance: How is "a house of
stone discovered in wandering" an example of something one "inherits," as she
suggests?
A lapse of taste can be telling. In "Two of the Lost Five Foolish Virgins,
" Digges pairs herself with the unmatchable Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who
hanged herself in 1941 after the arrest of her family, war dislocations and
years of KGB hounding. Digges fantasizes cutting the rope from Tsvetaeva's
lifeless body ("My tears would not prevent/ me from the task at hand") and
imagines how "delighted" they would be in each other's company (they "embrace
as women do inside/ the aftermath of youth,/ its strange, enduring dust").
Curiously, Alvarez has a similar fantasy: In a dream, she parties with Allen
Ginsberg after his death ("I embrace him, patting his heaving back/ as if I
were burping a big baby"). It's one thing to write a tribute or homage to a
dead poet, another to chum up to the defenseless dead, and, in Tsvetaeva's
case, appropriate an awful, grueling suffering that approaches the
incomprehensible.
And why borrow gravitas from others? Both poets have rich ore in their
own lives. Alvarez's emerges in her prose, but too often staggers under the
weight of the superficial "I" she presents in her poetry; in Digges, real
suffering is often buried under a soft snow of classical and literary
allusions -- Cerberus, Catullus, Lachesis. Why don't they burst into their
own flames?
One longs to dog-ear a page corner, marking a place to revisit -- or
scribble down a few lines for one's pocket, to memorize. One searches for a
mantra to cherish as we head into the night. One of these laudable ladies
might yet point the way -- but not yet, not in these two collections.
Cynthia Haven has written for the Times Literary Supplement and Commonweal.
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©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |
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