Larry Laurence
I'm Hearing Myself Grow Louder
Elizabeth MyhrLife Of The Bones To Come, by Larry Laurence, 1999, Black Heron Press, Seattle, Washington, $11.95 paper. Available from _______(bookstore, online. distr.)
The forty-six poems in this first book are separated into three sections, each section more intense than the last. The poems represent a descent from an uneasy Eden into a particularly nasty brand of hell-a languid state of violent, personal crisis, where the aftermath of sexual intimacy is the soul "cut in strips, salted, and hung/on a branch." It's a long trip.
Almost every poem in the book contains images or references to sex. It starts off interesting (as sexually charged material usually does) and gets tiring, especially when the images compulsively intrude, as one does in Contrary: "Hard to know the sun on so cold a day./The sun pale as sperm and all that's/in shadow." But you can't say you weren't warned from the very beginning.
The first poem of the book, Invocation To A Field OF Wild Grass, presents, in moderately veiled language, the strength and overwhelming needs of a male sexuality that come to dominate, and eventually overwhelm, the poems:
The poems in Section I are the best in the book. They display a thorough knowledge of their subject matter-the natural world, especially the world of birds-and several of the descriptive phrases are outstanding: young fish "shine like bright spindles" (Fingerlings), lovers are "still wet with fresh discoveries" (Three Months At Taylor's Cabin) and relief from pain is "morphine drip cooling/the embers of my lungs." (This Morning). Diction in this first section, like the rest of the book, is plain, and the voice is usually narrating a story or explaining a situation or place. And here Laurence uses a marvelous technique. Just as a reader gets comfortable with the story, along comes a spare, lyrical line that lifts poem and reader off the ground and opens a door to larger places. For example:
Because I am able to speak,
I ask for a few things. Let me share
the one idea in the weight and number
of these seedheads.
Let me cling
like the bearded husks
to all that moves through,
sometimes only a wind.
Let me enter like deerflies,
enter at dusk,
urgent,
perfect in hunger.The tall grass gave no answer.
No secret life visited me.
Only a knock in one ankle
Or maybe old insistences begin
heart, mind, stomach, cock.
Aren't they just like little birds?
Aren't they?(italics added)
No one owns the old road.
Only what's left of one gatepost-
it's falling too slowly to see-
and brown leaves drifted against it.
And waist-high grasses in the road's center
and its wild flanks
of salmonberry and young willow.
Kinglets appear from nowhere
working the brush on both sides.
Their singing is a stone
through many windows.(from On The Way To The River)
As the poems shift into more personal and finally confessional modes in Sections II and III, Laurence's lyrical gifts and ability to surprise and delight (hallmarks of great poetry) are mercilessly turned inside out, though perhaps not purposely. The poems in Section II move away from the land into the city and the childhood home, and closer to the self. However, in so doing, though they remain well-wrought (the entire book is well written) they also become disturbingly insensitive and senseless in their descriptions of parental loss, criminal fantasies and dysfunctional family life. Evil appears. By the time we arrive in Section III to the landscape of the heart, the poems unforgivingly grind out a subtext of anger, lust, devouring hunger, intense loss, sadism, and unabated misery.
One of the mechanisms employed in Section II and III--using poems about political torture as backdrops and props for explorations of the sexually tortured soul and sex as an alternative to political actionare questionable. The trick begins with Amadeo's Interrogation: El Salvador, 1983, a poem ostensibly about surviving torture, which appears to be a poem of political witness. However, when Amadeo, the tortured friend, speaks up later in the book in Bus Ride To The Coast: San Blas, Mexico and remarks that a woman has had the narrator's "soul cut in strips, salted and hung/on a branch" the motive for descriptions of torture becomes suspect, especially when this same poem turns into a love poem, "her breasts lively beneath the yellow/silk robe, lemon-tip nipples." Then again, in the next poem, "The wet push of a finger in a cunt ought to be a good,/one of the few absolutes" is the first line of a poem titled "In Protest Of The Chilean Tall Ship, Esmerelda, Pinochet's Floating Torture Chamber, On Her Visit To Elliot Bay, 1989. One wonders. The juxtaposition of idle musings about sex with torture, though perhaps intended to make a statement about pleasure, morality and pain, seems to point in the direction of sadism and misogyny. But perhaps I'm missing something.
The poems' relationship between location and level of intimacy with the self is a particularly interesting one, and the editors have done an excellent job of organizing the poems to reflect this underlying construction. As the poems' landscapes change from exterior to interior, the poems move from mutual understanding toward the personally painful and the subjectively vicious. The descent portrayed in these poems is well-written and finely constructed.
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