There’s a particularly heart-rending passage in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s remarkable memoir, Hope Against Hope. It comes amid a relentless recounting of the privations of life under Stalin, and the persecution suffered by the Mandelstams. (Stalin took a perversely personal interest regarding the ways in which he could torment the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife, reportedly saying they should be “isolated,” and not killed.) Readers know all-too-well what that isolation meant: years of internal exile, constant harassment by the NKVD, and finally Osip Mandelstam’s train to the Gulag where in 1938 he was last seen, scavenging for food from a garbage dump. The passage in Hope Against Hope that I have in mind is an aside, a throwaway within Nadezhda’s unstinting lament: “What we wouldn’t have given for a life of ordinary heartbreak.”
Americans — at least that tiny segment of the population that writes and consumes poetry — can’t help but read this sentence with chagrin. Can you think of any more pithy critique of our privilege and entitlement? Yet ordinary heartbreak may carry with it some immense travails. Cleopatra Mathis’s After the Body, a gathering of poems drawn from her 40-year career, reckons with a preponderance of ordinary heartbreaks — the mental illness and hospitalizations of the poet’s daughter, her husband’s struggles with cancer, and the poet’s own griefs with cancer, chronic illnesses, and aging. Some extraordinary heartbreaks are confronted by the poet as well, most notably the murder of her beloved brother.
Upon hearing this catalogue of affliction, potential readers of Mathis’s poems might be apt to suspect that she is a “confessional” poet, a label that for a long while has carried with it an undeservedly pejorative connotation. But Mathis has always written a variety of autobiographical lyric that defies easy categorization. Formally, her poems have always favored a spare but burnished free verse line that at times recalls Louise Glück — a quality that emphasizes a poem’s musicality rather than simple self-disclosure. Thematically, the poems derive much of their tension (sometimes subliminally, sometimes more overtly) from the contrast between her Southern upbringing — she was born in Louisiana to a family of Greek immigrants — and her 40 years of residence in New England. Like several other figures of her approximate generation who migrated to the Northeast from the South — I think of Ellen Bryant Voigt and C.D. Wright — the Southern narrative tradition, with its emphasis on memory and troubled recollection, is very much in evidence in her work, though Mathis’s writing generally eschews strict linearity. Yet she also has been influenced by that uniquely eccentric New Englander approach to nature poetry that derives from the more ironical side of Robert Frost. (I’m reminded of poems such as “Directive” and “Design.”). This confluence of influences has served Mathis well.
Mathis arrived at something like a mature voice early on, in her first collection, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, not long after her graduation from Columbia where she studied under Stanley Kunitz. You can see the older poet’s stamp on these poems, most notably his admixture of rhapsodic yearning and hard-bitten realism. The book’s title poem, with its alternations between minutiae and grand perspectives, also echoes Elizabeth Bishop. It’s worth quoting in full.
AERIAL VIEW OF LOUISIANA
The delta lies unchanged, flat
as childhood. A woman gathering pecans
from a yard black with water, purple martins
after mosquitos, all winter mock lilac.
In the dream of wrought iron
you find them — the grandmother is fierce,
both arms waving you away. Your mother
takes your hand to speak
of fishing from low pine flats,
how she loves the nests of water.
She says your pride will be her death.
You wear your grandmother’s wild name,
her fan of hair.
You wake to mountains, reflections
off coastal islands, hills of prairie marsh.
Memory is the first claim,
you’ll spend your life coming back
to this flatness. By dusk you have forgotten
everything but the bleeding outline
of the river. You watch for New Orleans,
the white cluster of tombs.
It’s the sly recasting of quotidian details that does much of the work here — “You wear your grandmother’s wild name / her fan of hairs,” New Orleans and its “white cluster of tombs” — but Mathis also knows how to wield statement engagingly: “Memory is the first claim, / you’ll spend your life coming back/to this flatness.” This seamless oscillation between image and abstraction is very much in evidence in Mathis’s first four collections. Aerial View of Louisiana was followed by The Bottom Land (1983), The Center for Cold Weather (1989), and Guardian (1995). These books are all of a piece; in each of them shorter lyrics orbit around a central long poem or sequence. The most haunting example of the latter is The Bottom Land’s “Elegy for the Other,” an emotionally turbulent threnody for the poet’s drug dealer brother. It’s a stark and unsparing effort, wary of settling for easy consolations. Near the end of the poem, Mathis writes:
If I stay up long enough, then you will come as well,
wearing the preoccupied mask of the dead,
that cast of light. I know you are dead
because your eyes reflect water,
because all water is the sound of crying.
Though I can’t hold you, I lean into the white
wall of your body and you lull me,
somnabulant. You are the secret of sleep,
your face with its fine grasses and moss.
What I find most striking about Mathis’s work is the phase it enters with her fifth volume, 2001’s What to Pay the Boatman? — a phase that has continued through White Sea (2005), Book of Dog (2012) and in a small gathering of new poems that includes some of the best work she has done. There’s a new looseness in Mathis’s method, a greater range of diction, and a tone of quiet ferocity. Mathis grows impatient with the blandishments of her generation’s period style, with its hushed refinements and scrupulously crafted metaphors, and seeks an edgier sort of utterance. At the risk of sounding reductive, I would venture say there is one main reason for Mathis’s transformation. In her early books, as “Elegy for the Other” suggests, Mathis worked hard, and with noteworthy success, to define herself as an elegiac poet. Mathis in her later work finds elegy anathema. She now writes poems about survival, poems which rail against our transience and the indignities of illness; poems which struggle with the problem of belief. And Mathis offers these testaments without solipsism or self-pity. The poems of What to Pay the Boatman? focus on the poet’s adolescent daughter and her struggles with mental illness. They feature some harrowing descriptions of self-injury and cutting, and a style that is minimalist and austere. Here’s the opening of “Cutlery”:
You must earn the fork
but only after you’ve earned
the spoon. All you’ll know
of the knife
is the blade you remember,
cousin to the forks five prongs
those scissored lines
you dragged along your arm.
Points for the healing,
points to earn anything
hell bent for damage.
Nothing’s innocent, not
in this world. You’ll eat
like the civilized only before
dismissal from the double
metal door. Ignore that bell
from the other side: the visitor
you’ll have to earn as well.
The poet’s use of metaphor is quite impressive here: even more so is the poem’s unremitting viscerality, something that Mathis accomplishes not so much by the figurative language as by her command of the line — the two- and three-beat accentuals and the canny enjambments create a relentless percussive effect. Although Mathis inhabits the point of view of her daughter, the poem’s prosody enacts the obsessive worry and anxiety of how a parent reacts to a child’s mysterious malady. The poem may nominally be set in a psych ward, but it also seems to be the byproduct of all-too-many guilt-wracked and bewildered sleepless nights.
There are epiphanies to be found in Mathis’s later work, but they are guarded and hard-won, and come amid poems which bear titles such as “After Chemo,” “Dyskinesia,” “Essential Tremor” and an apostrophe to “Mother Pain.” They acknowledge the speaker’s endurance rather than celebrate it, and do so with a rueful eloquence. There’s no better example of this quality than “Survival: A Guide,” the poem which closes Book of Dog. It finds the speaker observing again the heron that has lived on her property for years. It’s Mathis’s version of “The Wild Swans at Coole,” though it scrupulously avoids Yeats’ romantic grandiosity. Here’s the poem’s concluding stanza:
If I do catch her move, the heron appears
to have no particular fear or hunger, her gaunt body
hinged haphazardly, a few gears unlocking
one wing, then another. More than a generation here,
and every year more drab.
Once I called her blue heron, as in Great Blue,
true to a book—part myth, part childhood’s color.
Older now, I see her plain, a mere surviving
against a weedy bank with fox dens
and the ruthless, overhead patrol.
Some blind clockwork keeps her going.
In reading this superb collection, I was often reminded of the closing of Randall Jarrell’s “90 North,” a poem of doubt and regret that somehow manages to quietly triumph over its bitterness. “Pain comes from the darkness. / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” Mathis’s poems, like so many of Jarrell’s, insist that pain and wisdom are often bafflingly symbiotic: they have learned to live with this injustice, and do so with a bravery and emotional depth that is sadly rare among contemporary poets.
[Published by Sarabande Books on July 4, 2020, 216 pages, $17.95 paperback]