Frances McCue reviews Sati Mookherjee's EYE

SOMETIMES IT TAKES A LINE TO MAKE A CIRCLE

A review by FRANCES McCUE

Some poetry books lay out poems as if they were little fossils slotted into display drawers where a reader can marvel at them—opening and shutting pages—viewing poems in or out of order. Lyrics shape their own encounters. But I’m a reader who loves momentum. I relish connections that riff and shimmer, and encourage readers to piece together stories. Sati Mookherjee’s new poetry book, EYE, offers that sweet shimmer of beautiful lyrics and the riff and pacing of a poetic narrative. I am smitten by how readable the book is, how compelling the story is, and how beautifully crafted the individual poems are. To construct poems within a narrative arc, without overloading the freight of exposition onto individual lyrics, is really challenging. Mookherjee works magic here.

EYE is a migration story created with poems that trace the poet’s grandfather as he is sent from India into exile in 1932; that story is framed by the poet’s storytelling present as she looks back to her own childhood and then, later, when she becomes a new mother.

The book opens in a one-poem section, “KAL (Bellingham)” (Bengali for “Yesterday,” “Tomorrow”), as the poet describes a globe of the moon in her childhood home: The “muddied celadon, with the ancient magma oceans” resembles “an orange . . . / newly peeled, spoked with strings of pith.” It’s a beautiful turn from the globes of earthly continents that the rest of us encountered in schoolrooms!

The poet takes her tutelage of the far off, bringing it near:

. . . I learned to read
what that polished globe spinning under my hand

(tomorrow / yesterday / tomorrow) told:
a story of travelers and immigrants.

The poet’s quest to understand her grandfather rather than to flatten him by memorializing—that’s a choice you can feel throughout, and one I cherish as a reader.

From this launching place, the journey follows the poet’s grandfather as he “took a last meal in [his] my sister’s home” before he was banished to England after being convicted of “sedition, conspiracy against the Crown” in India. These quotes, given in italics, are from the grandfather’s memoir and the poet uses them to mark essential places and events. Then, the poems fill in around them. Lesser poets try this kind of thing all the time. They take artifacts from the lives of grandparents and build little shrine poems from them. But not this poet. Mookherjee’s grandfather feels alive in these poems and the memoir references are anchor bolts, not sacred talismans or false notes of reverence, just clear, strong writing: “with three steep steps” into a train leaving India, for example, her “grandfather climbed into exile.” On the train, he dreams of “ancient paths” and “cart-flanks ornamented with rice paste” and “Home / an always-young and always-dying thing,” found in “the ebbing shade of a date tree in sub, or a low mud wall / snaking over the ground, taking its tail in its mouth/to make place—left, then, erased . . .”

Before I get lost in this story, and a beautiful one it is, I want to note how intricate and musical the poems are. To describe their artistry, I was tempted to conjure up the shiny intricacy of pocket watches but I came to my senses, knowing that polishing and refurbishing the past are not what these poems are up to. They are more contemporary, more organic and they certainly don’t polish out humanity or mechanize it. Still, they aren’t tossed out from the heart’s back door either.

The poet’s quest to understand her grandfather rather than to flatten him by memorializing—that’s a choice you can feel throughout, and one I cherish as a reader. How can we truly imagine a past we weren’t in? How can a poet conjure that imagining for the rest of us?

 The grandfather becomes a scientist and his granddaughter creates one of the most beautiful depictions of a laboratory process that I’ve ever read:

In the laboratory he folded circles
of filter paper into cones, decanted,
sucked acids into the glass stems of pipettes.
He created the clotted orange

precipitate of chinoidine,
and herapathite, amber as resin.

See how the orange of the moon-sphere from the first poem returns here? Then, as this poem, Number 15, goes on, the grandfather documents his findings:

And he sketched these events—as all the C’s and H’s
and SO4’s clasped electrons
and bonded and double-bonded—

he filled pages with hexagons and dashes, stylized lidless eyes
that observed the constant conversion of matter,
the perpetual transformation of substances.

 The “eye” metaphor opens in this poem, yet the image is settled within a sphere of action. Instead of hanging a trope and letting it rest on its own, the poet pushes beyond mere metaphor and follows the collapse of the scientist’s world into the small, the synecdoche of enterprise and sorrow:

One evening, in midst of some frothing experiment

he became aware of a low buzzing, a hornet dying
on the workbench, its deathspin
centrifuge-rapid. He could almost see

the clear pellet of soul spit out. This death overwhelmed him.
He put his head to the table and wept. In the window

a blue wagon, painted with scallops and scrolls—Travelers—
crossed the pasture. The dray horse stepped carefully
along the old ruts left by other caravans,
the sunken, delible scars of movement.

As the grandfather looks out from his new home and workplace, he sees migration caught in “old ruts.” Concurrently, as I read lines of verse, circles form in my imaging mind. In poem 18, for example, the poem uses repetition to form a circle, beginning “on a clear Saturday in Manchester, / in the lap of a park bench” where her grandfather naps, and the poem ends “on the lap of the bench” on that same “clear Saturday in Manchester.” You can read the poem from both ends, back into the middle where the “prayer beads tumble through his fingers,” a line that dissolves into the circle of “the great soundless Bengal sky.”

We leave the grandfather in “the glad renunciation of world, of body, only the eye left / to lurch about in the socket, conjuring.”

The third section, set as the first, in “KAL (Seattle—Kolkata—Bellingham),” translated from the Bengali as “Yesterday,” “Tomorrow,” returns to our poet / narrator / speaker who conjures her moon, the “shadow-sleeved” presence as she cooks and reflects on the chain of births in her lineage. Her infant son is sleeping and her daughter, at this point “is yet unborn, unconceived” and she “hovers someplace / beyond the opaque atmosphere around me.” In poem 2 of this last section, the speaker imagines gulls returning to Bengal’s Bay

What forces have colluded to pull them there

or to pull this child to me.
What histories of loss and migration, leave-taking,

the overlapping orbits of the exiled, the immigrant, the refugee.

She is tethered to moon and eye, the pupils of her son looking back at her the reflections refracted through language. And from poem 11:

 We stage the story again and again:
how once we stood, two travelers, each unseen to the other,
waiting—

until the circle of shadow fell away
to give me to him, and him to me.

The book, in structure and lyric, folds backwards and forwards, into a generational palindrome that becomes both line and circle—and a wondrous one at that.

————————————————————————————

Frances McCue is an American poet, writer, and teacher. She has published four books of poetry and two books of prose. Her poetry collection The Bled (2010) received the 2011 Washington State Book Award and the 2011 Grub Street National Book prize. Three of her other books, Mary Randlett Portraits (2014), Timber Curtain (2017), and The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs (2014) were all finalists for the Washington State Book Award. In 1996, McCue cofounded Richard Hugo House, a literary organization in Seattle, where she served as the founding director for the organization’s first decade. During that time, she researched Richard Hugo and the Pacific Northwest towns that inspired his poems. She is the Founder of Pulley Press, a new poetry imprint that celebrates rural poets and poetry. McCue is a professor at the University of Washington.

EYE
by Sati Mookherjee

 ISBN 978-1-7369169-3-3

ISBN 978-1-7369169-3-3

Ravenna Press, Seattle, Washington

http://ravennapress.com/?s=Eye+

Distributed by https://itascabooks.com/collections/literature-fiction-poetry/products/eye

2022, paperback, 78 pages, $16.00