David Roderick on Loves You, poems by Sarah Gambito
Sarah Gambito’s Loves You opens with a poem titled “On How to Use This Book.” My inclination is to resist a poem promising to operate like a set of instructions. But Gambito, with her masterly feel for imagery and suspense, is too smart for me. The poem surprises and entrances me in its first few stanzas:
You deserve your beautiful life.
Its expectant icicles, the dread forest
that is not our forest.
And yet, we meet there.
The streams streaming through us.
The leaves leaving through us.
Once I was black haired
and I sat in my country’s lap.
I was so sure she was asking me
what I wanted.
The “you” in this passage disorients the reader: “Which ‘you’ are we dealing with here?” But the nebulous pronoun is a key to Gambito’s poetics and the way she claims her Filipino-American heritage. On the one hand, the “you” could represent someone close to the speaker, such as her child. On the other, it might be asking a much broader, collective “you” how the American experience has failed or fulfilled its promise. “You deserve your beautiful life” has a political tinge to it as well — these days our country seems obsessed with who deserves what: billionaires, baby boomers, kids in cages, political leaders, etc. The poem’s second stanza suggests a confluence of cultures: “The streams streaming through us. / The leaves leaving through us.” It’s the kind of imaginative move that makes Gambito’s poems (and politics) interesting to me, her pouring of the metaphorical into the physical. Timelessness sets afloat all human experience but offers special purchase for people who have remade a life in America.
One more note on Gambito’s sly pronoun usage. For her, those words are portals or scopes through which the personal and communal can be examined. The “she” in that fourth couplet, for example, could be a maternal figure (a mother or grandmother). Or it could refer to the “country’s lap.” But to which country does she refer, the Philippines or the United States? In this way Gambito’s broad vision reaches the reader, no matter who we are or where we come from. We all have family allegiances and customs, a complicated relationship with our childhood, memories, and fears. We all seek the comfort and solace of community.
I land on that word community deliberately, because it is the vital theme in Loves You. What an odd title! It lacks a grammatical subject yet still manages to invite the reader with its warmth. In this book you will find poems about parenting children who are also straddling two cultures. You will find centos apparently stitched from a variety of sources, the form itself a kind of metonym for our culture. You will find poems addressing the desperation of Filipino women who leave their families to work as nurses and maids in America. You will also find a poem about Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao, a symbolic figure upon whom the Filipino diaspora pins its aspirations. The lyric anaphora in “We, Pacquiao” rises to a communal sense of solidarity. It puts me in mind of Muhammad Ali’s famous quotation, once labeled (by George Plimpton) as the shortest poem in the English language: “Me. / We.”
Gambito’s roles as a fighter and organizer emanate from her poetry. She co-founded and co-directs Kundiman, an impressive nonprofit dedicated to the Asian-American writing community. Occasionally poems such as “I Like Chinese Food” feel like they are both generated from and written to that community. Gambito herself is also known as a brilliant cook. The largest thematic portion of poems fueling Loves You consists of Filipino recipes. Food is a community builder and binder for Gambito. The book includes family recipes for Arroz Caldo, Barbecue Scepters, Bibinkang Malakit, and Salmon Sinigang (which I cooked for my family — a comfort food, hearty and delicious). There is also a 5 ½ page recipe titled “My Husband’s Lychee Macarons,” a marathon baking experience in which she (or he, if Gambito is indeed channeling her husband) states, “When I make macarons, I make macarons. Since I only do this once a year, I go all in. It’s an all day affair, like 12-14 hours.”
At other points, recipes open or close out poems, hybridizing ingredients and cooking techniques with family anecdotes and riffs. In fact, the rest of the poem cited earlier, “On How to Use This Book,” leaps forward into a prose paragraph praising a chicken dish served with rice for “at least 15 people. It’s okay if your apartment is small.” Gambito’s appropriation of the recipe form is a fascinating extension of her poetic tendency toward mixing and blending. I’m thinking of her centos especially, poems made with a cup of this and a dash or two of that.
Although she takes pride in her Filipino heritage and provenance, and deeply connects to her Kundiman writing community, Gambito’s book dissolves cultural boundaries. Her poems are gifts, and her recipes, sprinkled throughout Loves You, offer unique knowledge and nourishment.
Since recipes are far more valuable than poetry criticism, especially during this period of self-isolation and quarantine, I’ll spend the rest of this space sharing a Gambito poem-recipe that will refresh you during the warm summer months ahead, when our social distancing hopefully comes to an end:
“Watermelon Agua Fresca (For When You Need Me)”
15 cups chopped seedless watermelon (one 10-pound melon)
1 quart pink grapefruit juice
½ cup chopped mint
¼ cup lime juice
1 quart ginger ale
1 bottle white wine
Ice
Purée watermelon in a blender until smooth. Pour into a large bowl and let stand for 15 minutes. Skim foam from surface and discard. Set a fine-mesh sieve over a large pitcher and strain purée into pitcher. Stir in grapefruit juice, ginger ale, mint, lime juice and white wine. Serve in ice-filled glasses and know how much I love you.
[Published by Persea Books on January 22, 2019, 80 pages, $15.95 paperback]
* * * * *
Sydney Lea on In My Unknowing by Chard deNiord
I start with full disclosure: although my friendship with Chard deNiord is not an old one, my admiration of his poetry is. He and I bonded as we co-edited an anthology of Vermont poets, and in this very venue, he composed a gratifying review of my own latest collection.
Does all that affect my perspective on In My Unknowing, just out in the Pitt Poetry Series? I suspect so … and don’t much care. The book’s the thing.
And the book would seem clearly to recall the mystical 14th-century script, The Cloud of Unknowing, of which I have a Cliffs Notes recall from younger days. Yet I resist researching beyond that now, lest — like Milton’s Satanic debaters — I find “no end, in wandering mazes lost.” What is chiefly relevant here is its via negativa – the belief that God (substitute Unknowable for a deity if you prefer) is best considered after cancellation of names and attributes, which means assertion must wait on our having reduced ourselves to silence.
This leads me to affirm rather than just accepting a degree of redundancy: for example, in three poems, two separated by a single page, we read “A hermit thrush reported the dusk”; “A hermit thrush yodeled / in the lingo of dusk”; “… a hermit thrush yodeled its password for dusk.” What we have in such instances, I’d insist, is not mere iteration but one of the author’s most eye-catching motifs. The bird announces and forecasts, for whatever human effort ensues, the imminence and immanence, of silence– and that a human speaker’s words may not improve upon it.
In My Unknowing everywhere suggests that absolute quiet is right at hand and sufficient, maybe, unto the day. As deNiord asks early on in “Dispatch from Putney”:
What did you think?
That you weren’t the farthest point from yourself?
That silence runs out of ink?
Very well, but a poet wants to be a poet, and it is in fact this one’s acute awareness that any utterance will be tenuous which gives so many of the new poems their plangency.
I counted 22 uses of clouds in 83 pages, too, and they make for an even more conspicuous motif than silence, even if the two have some kinship. In the book’s first poem but one, we read “A cloud spelled out a rune I couldn’t read”; in the very next, “clouds / spelled out the truth in vapors I couldn’t hope / to read …” Poem after poem in this intriguing collection patently illustrates the lust to capture, and the frustration of missing, what is ephemeral — which is pretty much everything.
Throughout In My Unknowing you will find an acknowledgment that daunts the writer – and opens him to his moving witness: “Light’s such a fickle thing but I sing for it”; “What greater thing could I become than a translator of a song that has no words …” And so on.
Song’s inadequacy as a goad to song is, of course, no new thing under the sun. As much could be said, we know, of almost any available motif, and what a notice of this scope can’t begin to address is how brilliantly and inventively deNiord responds to his.
Space being thus limited, and lest I be misprised as saying that this collection is basically a compendium of quasi-mystical meditations, I must point out that, for all its ventures into the Oneiric/otherworldly, In My Unknowing is also rich, to use a simplism, in “realist” poems. If “At the Sleep Clinic,” say, is transportative in a largely visionary way, “Drive-In,” which follows immediately, also transports us, but mostly by means of eloquent physical observation. The same could be said of a series of gripping poems on deNiord’s father in his demented old age, of the fabulous “Swimming Hole,” of the stirring “Then There,” and more. Trust me, the list is far longer than I can afford to make it.
A longer review would also scrutinize the poems on the myth of Dumuzi/Tammuz, Mesopotamian god of the harvest and of the underworld, in which the author displays both his razor-sharp eye for earthly particulars and his mystical inclinations. That longer review would likewise note how, when he chooses (see “Sex Is,” e.g.), deNiord can exhibit mastery of rigorous formalism, or, perhaps even more impressively, how he can compose arrow-to-the-heart political verse (“Children of Aleppo,” “Inquisition in the Kitchen of Dorothy Day,” “Letter to the President from a Citizen, August 19, 2019”).
IN MY UNKNOWING
Oh taste and see. Psalm 34, 8
I was driving through the fields of Heaven when I realized I was still on Earth,
because Earth was all I had ever known of Heaven and no other place would do
for living forever. I had grown beyond belief from seeing that everything I felt
had sprung from lives I’d already lived, so that I could feel the way I did, which
was so much I had no idea where to begin. The crawling? The slithering? The
leaping? The flying? The dying? If you had been there with me in the passenger
seat and asked me about the newt or flea or pachyderm, I would have told you
everything I knew, which was a frightening amount, and not only that, but just
how much I loved them all—those Heavenly beings: the serpent, the lion, the
mosquito, the hawk, the antelope, the worm; and not only beings, but stones as
well. Each particular thing so mysterious in my unknowing, I knew I was living
forever. I knew the fields through which I was driving were the fields of Heaven in
which I was tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting.
Oh, there is all manner of praiseworthy stuff here which, you, dear reader, owe it to yourself to savor. But if you are a type whose curiosity is piqued by long five-star reviews, simply assume that you’ve just read one.
[Published by University of Pittsburgh Press on February 25, 2020, 60 pages, $17.00 paperback]
* * * * *
Ron Slate on Vortex Street by Page Hill Starzinger
If every poet must ask, What do I want to see into? then Page Hill Starzinger seems to reply: My aging body, the lives of my unborn children, the extended moment of my parents’ dying and deaths, the fate of our beliefs and the earth that hosted them and the violence that tested them. These are what we would call her materials — and to name them is just the outset of contemplating these poems. Almost all of her materials appear in the first three sections of “And: Still,” the first poem of Vortex Street, her second collection of poems:
I am a child of
no one alive,
no one who
can remember
my name.
Fathers,
mothers,
grand, and great –
they are gone.
My child, you will remember this:
His name was Aylan, three years old.
Washed up, facedown in a red T-shirt on a Turkish beach.
On the way to a country that had already
denied him asylum.
*
I was thinking about attention. Not being there.
And I didn’t notice what happened.
The last two eggs simply
fell out of myself, tumbling –
*
A hospital CEO, rushing to attend a series of meetings
in Perry, Iowa, accidentally
left her daughter in a minivan in 90-degree heat.
Starzinger creates a presence that longs — and then dares — to see into all these things, explicitly displayed. But each thing is imbedded with an implicit barrier to entry. Furthermore, all of these things, and the thoughts that attend them, occur at once – in a vortex. Allusiveness here is the poet’s sketchy recourse, not a fashion statement. References to art stand in for the memoiristic flights that would only dress up the disorderly with the illusory “arc” of a life. In the book’s first section, poems like “Specula” peer at what-never-happened and what-is-barely-communicable: “To the man pressing the sonogram over my ovary, / who is saying, It’s completely shut down: / it is still part of my body / it is alive / it is mine.” There is rue but also a steadfast encounter with the actual. The formal arrangements suggest a reaching, a groping. The long poem and the first section end:
If body is reparation,
she could skin
all the stories written over her torso
and bind
them
in
a book,
thin muslin psalm of self.
As the book proceeds, the gaze turns away from (or looks out through) the body, having been shaken by illness. There is confusion, disorientation: “Humiliation / is the Buddha’s / first noble truth.” But also, the trials of others, “Especially / as Carmen Tarleton emerges / with a new face stitched to her scalp / after her husband beat her with a baseball bat …” Closer, the dementia of the father and mother. But as diverse as her materials are, it is the process of combining them that comprises the show here. The jump-cuts and asides – but also, the sudden spurt of attitude, as in “XX,” quoted here in full:
Told to be self-aware,
Nice. What comes to mind
is flaw –
700 years old, it first meant flake
of snow, spark
of fire, fragment
gone astray.
On Facebook, mean say it’s ok
to use our father’s name
but not our mother’s – no way,
it brings is ridicule and embarrassment –
and gradually over time her name is forgotten:
only mother of the oldest son.
Flake from some Low German fishing net.
Wattled hurdle. Frame or
rack.
And ethicists want to set up inherent limits
on how much humankind
should alter nature.
So we scramble after
Canada snow geese
during molting to harvest
fallen feathers for
harpsichord quills.
Drifting through Earth’s atmosphere
scattering light
through imperfections:
small crystal facets
supercooled,
complex,
no two (isn’t that nice) the same.
Chromosomally speaking, “XX” indicates a female. The “flaw,” critically accepted, is hers, is humanity’s. The most natural occurrence, let’s say a snowflake, no longer may exist without the burden of all that we would do to it. Is a snowflake, in its idiosyncrasy, perfect or flawed? Starzinger pivots between natural phenomena and personal history to see into the latter and answer her own question, “How do you / disinherit yourself” (she omits the question mark) because, like the tectonic planet, “I am full of faults.” But she does not demand recognition for hurts and disappointments as the overriding impulse of the poetry. Her method, not facile conclusions or ethical pronouncements, is the answer to her own question.
Page Starzinger’s work is both bold and reticent, harsh and tender, worldly and confined. Conflicting impulses make her poems feel necessary – and though these are the attributes of a solitary observer, she also embraces our communal griefs. It all occurs in a swirl, an intermixing of memory, biology, history, and circumstance that both smudges and illuminates experience. In “Edge Effect,” she recalls gathering coquinas as a child, butterfly shell clams, invertebrates – then remarks, “I can’t tell these days if my mother is just / acting, as if she remembers her self. Or me.” The poem concludes:
… Incontinent, a shell of shadows – and shallows: we’re at the
edge itself, where increased erosion from groins and tidal walls is
disrupting flow and sensitive dwellings. Prey: regurgitates grit of
chitinous matter, leaving gobbets of inedible remnants. Rough coffin.
One wishes for grace. Finds sediment.
[Published by Barrow Street Press on April 15, 2020, 81 pages, $16.95. Available here.]