An Introduction to Shara McCallum's Madwoman

    Madwoman by Shara McCallum

     Alice James Books, 2017

    ISBN: 978-1-938584-28-2

Shara McCallum

Let me confess: I had never heard of Shara McCallum. At AWP Conference 2017, mid Friday morning, I listened, rapt, in a session called, “Written on a Woman’s Body: A cross-genre reading of bold writings about women and their bodies.” The presenters were prepared and impressive. The last presenter on the panel was Shara McCallum. A tough spot to be in, last. She opened, not with her own work, as the other four presenters had, but by reading Lucille Clifton’s “leda 1,” “leda 2,” and “leda 3.” McCallum’s commanding voice pulled off this reading and, in the process, put her own work in a vulnerable position. Then the strength of her own words followed—outstanding. She read from her newest publication, Madwoman, the following poems: “Madwoman a Rasta Medusa,” “Oh Abuse,” “Insomnia,” “Grief,” “To Red,” and “The Parable of Shit and Flowers,” in that order. Wow. The book was available at the Alice James booth in the book fair; I read it as I flew home from D.C. And this served as my introduction to Shara McCallum.  —Melva Sue Priddy

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother and moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She earned a BA from the University of Miami, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a PhD from Binghamton University. McCallum is the author of four previously published poetry books: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

 Recognition for her poetry includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and other awards. Her poems and personal essays have been published in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, and Romanian.

McCallum’s dramatic reading drew me in. But the strength of her own words are admirable, at times lapsing into her Jamaican patois. As if this weren’t magical enough, her poems slip in and out of time, yet remain timeless. She includes the mystical and commonplace. She writes of all life’s maddening contradictions matter-of-factly, without explanations, reflecting real life. Madwoman does not step neatly from one age or stage to the next; her contradictions and paradoxes are often stirred in with rewritten myths, life challenges demanding one’s need to adapt and push through living, doing what has to be done, especially for a woman of color.  

One can, of course, make a search of all the wonderful reviews and interviews available on the internet (Consider reviews listed at the bottom of http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/madwoman .) and so I intend only to introduce McCallum to readers unfamiliar with her work.  

The persona, Madwoman, marginalized, sane, insane, and, more likely, multiple beings at once, reoccurs, scattered throughout the book, and remains an engaging thread that confounds with her many anomalies. At one point, she is “the madwoman now being all women” (27). She is addressed by various voices from multiple intersections: “Madwoman as Salome”(8), “Madwoman in Middle Age” (24), “Why Madwomen Shouldn’t Read the News” (41), “Lot’s Wife to Madwoman” (51). 

One theme that binds this book concerns the various stages of womanhood. In response to a question about those stages and whether madness was an inevitable trait, McCallum states: 

I suspect some forms of ‘madness’ are an inevitable byproduct of aging. As we go along in life, if we are fortunate to live long enough, we will all accumulate losses—of people we love to death or to the changing nature of relationships over time, or of parts of ourselves as we are forced to confront the fact that versions of who we thought we might be or a life we imagined we would live will simply not [be] coming into being. The poems in the collection address various feelings of ‘madness’ roiling below the surface—among others, rage and sadness and dislocation of the self but also defiance, a wanting to say or actually saying ‘fuck you’ to societal norms and expectations. The vantage points through which I look closely at or dwell in these poems in anger, despair, fear, moments of coming unhinged, etc. are those of womanhood and girlhood and the stages in-between, as you note. But I am sure the gamut of emotions the Madwoman confronts exists in men and women alike, in anyone who has eyes to see and does not close them. (“Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum”, interview by Alice James Books)

A recurring motif is memory; what gets remembered, by whom, and why. In fact, McCallum’s prologue poem, “Little Soul” after Hadrian, opens the possibilities of memory’s role in, or lack of, influence. 

Little soul—kind, wandering—
body’s host and guest,

look how you’ve lowered yourself,
moving in a word of ice,

washed of color.  My girl, 
what compelled you once

is no more. 

Such a small, unassuming poem, and yet there it is: How are our lives shaped by memory, “what compelled you once”? Which begs of Madwoman, what role has memory played in your development? These questions will not be answered in this book. No neat little strings. McCallum doesn’t try to tell us what the meaning of her life is, what the meaning of our lives are, woman or man, madwoman or sane. And she reinforces this in the book’s second poem,“Memory” (quoted in full): 

I bruise the way the most secreted,most tender part of a thigh exposedpurples then blues.  No spit-shine shoes,I’m dirt you can’t wash from your feet.Wherever you go, know I’m the windaccosting the trees, the howling nightof your sea.  Try to leave me, I’ll pin you between a rock and a hard place; will hunt you,even as you erase your trackswith the tail ends of your skirt.  You thinkI’m gristle, begging to be chewed?No, my love: I’m bone.  Rather: the sound
bone makes when it snaps.  That ditty
lingering in you, like ruin. (5)

Nothing sentimental here, no, rather bruises, dirt, howling, bone and ruin that linger. At best, the truth will confront: “Friends,/do you remember when we were young?/Life plump with promise and dreams?/Me neither” (41). Memories can “become unbearable” (12). But answer our life’s questions?  One voice asks midway through “Madwoman Apocrypha,” “Shouldn’t the death of ten thousand matter/more to you than that of just one person?” and another answers, “Yes. But I’m afraid grief isn’t math” (75). “Insomnia” speaks: “Dear one, why do you assume/there are lessons?” (64).

Yet even in the grittiness of life, McCallum gives us some beauty and innocence, but not much. “How else chart/a course than the way a child//plucks flowers from a field—/the eye compelling the hand to reach” (11). Even “Death” waxes poetic, if absolute: “…for I am in you/as the river is inside the stone”(56). 

In McCallum’s last poem, and the longest covering nine pages, “Madwoman Apocrypha,” several voices are speaking at once. Interlaced are those who will question and those who will tell Madwoman something, each with his/her own agenda. “Apocrypha” is a biblical term referring to texts of largely unknown authorship. When asked how this word defines the poem, McCallum responds: 

It speaks to it very well. But there’s another part of the definition of the word that is important to me to add to the mix. Apocryphal texts are those omitted from the ‘canon’ and are therefore not accepted as doctrine. Aspersions are often cast upon apocryphal narratives—due to their supposed lack of authenticity or truthfulness or sufficient evidence to back them up—in order to qualify and rationalize their exclusion. (“Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum”, interview by Alice James Books)

An excerpt from this poem is difficult to layout, the page is broader than the regular page, but let me try, in order to show these voices intertwining.   

          Q: Why do you make the past a fiction?
          A: Everything is a wager.

                                                                                              Duppy know who to frighten. 
                                                               I heard this as admonishment 
                                                                           when a child.  But now
I think she is, I will be,
                                                                                        we have always been
                                                                                                             the duppy we fear.

          Q: What do you mean “a wager”?
          A: I needed to enact a search, but something happened
          I didn’t mean to have happen. I’ve become
          a sifter and a counter of grains.  


                                                                                     When as a child I couldn't sleep,
                                                                                                  stroking my arm,
                                                            she would sit with me, repeating,  …

                                                            nursery rhymes, song, nothing making sense
                                                            …

  but her voice and the dark.

          A: I don’t know where she ends and I begin. (77)

This last answer, above, has no question before it. The poem attempts to imitate the many voices each of us may have to confront within ourselves, even when there are no easy reassurances. 

Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world. Find her work and read. And so I give McCallum the last word.

Q: Why do you keep referring to this woman

in third person? She is you after all, isn’t she

A: I’ve come to believe all stories

are self referential. Or else none of them are. 

When comes the night of your unmaking? (78)

Melva Sue Priddy lives near Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys gardening, sewing, and grandmaw-ing. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and has published work recently with Still: the Journal, Friends Journal, Poet Lore, and LexPoMo.. 

Pricking by Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello 
Pricking 

Tiger Bark Press
http://www.tigerbarkpress.com/


By the numbers 

ISBN: 978-0-997-63051-0 
Publication: 2016 
Total pages: 74
Number of poems: 69

__________

Pricking is Jessica Cuello's first full-length manuscript. Her second collection, Hunt, was the winner of The 2016 Washington Prize from The Word Works and will appear in March 2017. She is also the author of the chapbooks My Father’s Bargain (Finishing Line Press 2015), By Fire (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and Curie (Kattywompus Press 2011). She was the winner of The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize and the recipient of the 2014 Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. Jessica was selected as a Juried Fellow by the Saltonstall Foundation.

I interviewed Jessica on my personal blog last year about her chapbook My Father's Bargain. You can read that interview here.

—Nancy Chen Long

__________

Jessica Cuello's first book Pricking is titled after the act of pricking, a method of witch-hunting in the Middle Ages. Suspects, usually women, were forced to strip naked, while witch-hunters, usually men, pricked the marks on their body—birthmarks, moles, pimples. If the hunter found a spot that didn't bleed, the suspect was declared a witch. Using special needles, these often-times paid hunters would prick and prick until they found a spot that didn’t bleed and would identify that mark as the devil’s mark. The title of the book is indicative of what I sense to be the primary impulse of the book: Woman’s struggle for autonomy over her body, the connection between bodily integrity and empowerment.

The book as a whole is comprised of compressed and spare persona poems that place us smack in the Middle Ages. We find ourselves caught up in the lives of three French women thought to be heretical: Esclarmonde de Foix, Joan of Arc, and a midwife. Through the use of imagination and historical fact, Cuello fleshes out a captivating narrative that brings each woman to life.

There are three sections to the book, one for each woman. The first is in the voice of Esclarmonde de Foix, a prominent leader in Cathar Church in the thirteenth century who was accused of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. The origins of the Inquisition are in Rome’s effort to quash the heretical Cathers, a religious group in the south of France whose practices were believed to contain elements of witchcraft. Esclarmonde had six children and is thought to have turned to Catharism after the death of her husband.

This first section opens with three poems that set the stage for Esclarmonde's rise as a leader of the Cathars. The first poem "The Births: 1186" is about Esclarmonde giving birth to her children and introduces birth as one of the themes of the book. This first poem also signals Esclarmonde's turn towards religion after her sixth child: "After my sixth I locked the door. / ... / The natural world is hard and dirt. / I want to scrape it off my skin." The second and third poems center around her mystical conversion experiences. In "Conversion: May 1204," Esclarmonde begins to hear voices, a whisper that has "no decision it," faint voices that she discovers can't leave, because "they were in the body." While there was indecision in the first conversion poem, the second conversion poem, "Conversion: June 1204," is resolute: "God reversed me. See my legs / jaunt up the hill. / The hot wind is His mouth / around me."

In the remainder of this first section, Cuello's poems propel us forward with Esclarmonde through a Cathar-Catholic debate, the atrocities of the Cathar Wars (aka the Albigensian Crusade), and her life as a fugitive, a time during which she was rarely seen. Throughout this first section, the tone remains even and matter-of-fact in the face of violence, for example "The Foot of Montségur," which depicts the remaining remnant of the Cathars corralled and then burned alive, "All night, sun sets on the town. / Easily they fit us in the circle. / We are the last of us." This section closes with a funeral lament voiced by Esclarmonde for her brother Raymond Roger, a non-Cathar who fought to oppose the crusades:

Planh For My Brother, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix

While I was finding room
to hide refugees and heal the sick
you were present.
We never lacked
for things to do and moved
in the self-importance of our birth.
Once, pinning up my reddish hair
I paused and thought of your boyish head.
We were two foxes
from the last litter of our kind.
Our tongues were South.
When you were before the church
half-dressed and shackled,
I couldn’t look.
The world did not seem
long enough in history.
No, it was done.
Our land. Our tongue.
At the end you said your only wish was
that you’d killed more of them.

The second section of Pricking is set in 15th-century France. Most the poems are in the voice of Joan of Arc, another woman who heard voices and had visions. It's a shorter section comprised of ten poems. Around the time that Joan of Arc lived, there were prophecies that France would be saved by a virgin from Lorraine. The first poem, "Jeanne D’Arc Thinks of Her Virginity" hints at the importance of virginity to her ("a virgin / can prophesy for God"), possibly in light of the prophecies. The poem also suggests that once she becomes a mother, she would (or could) no longer be an instrument of God ("but once / a mother, / nothing else.")

I read the first poem of this section to be at a time when Joan of Arc is still with her mother and father. Earlier in Joan's life, her father had a dream that Joan would go off to war. It was a dream that made him frightened for her. This first poem seems to take place soon after Joan hears her mother say that her father told her brothers he would want Joan drowned if she were to leave for war ("I pretend not to know / that he told my brothers // to drown me.") With respect to timing, the remaining poems in this second section seem to take place during the last two years of her life, that is, the year she spent in prison after her capture in 1430 and the subsequent year when she was on trial for heresy. For example, the second poem "70 Feet Down" is likely about one of her attempted escapes from a tower at Beaurevoir Castle where she was first imprisoned. ("Can you be dropped from the lips of the Lord? / I leapt. The ledge / less certain than the bracing cold.")

The poem "In My Cell" appears to be set during a time when the interrogations for Joan of Arc's trial of witchcraft and heresy were moved to her prison cell. In this poem, we see the return to the of idea of mother in which Joan of Arc is mother to herself:

.... shackled to the wall at night
I dream in silence of Lorraine.

The fields are wide. I hold
my left hand in

my right and kiss
my fingers like a mother.

This reference to being a mother bridges back to the opening poem of this section and suggests that Joan is realizing the end of her prophesy, of her usefulness to God. The idea of mother continues in this section's final poem "Isabelle D’Arc Thinks of Jeanne," which is in the voice of Joan of Arc's mother. Coming as it does after a poem titled "Executioner," we know that Joan of Arc is now dead. It strengthens the poignancy of the poem, a mother bearing the grief of a lost child, as we listen to Isabelle talk to her daughter: "I hear your humming while I work / as if you left it in the timbers of our home." The idea of the child being heard and held within the timbers (walls) of a home presages a metaphor of womb-as-a-room, a metaphor that is introduced in the next section.

The third and final section of the book is set in 1580 during the Reformation and associated witch trials. The poems are told in the voice of a midwife. Unlike the second section, which begins with the speaker not wanting to be a mother, this section opens up stressing the importance of motherhood and birth. In the opening poem, "Midwife," the speaker, who is assisting in a birth, uses room as a metaphor for the womb: "All of us began in a room." Speaking of the woman giving birth, the midwife asks "What room is she?" and answers her own question, an answer which highlights the importance of bearing children during this time period: "Walls that go / when they hold no one."

Even though the first handful of poems in this section are about birth and midwifery, the reader will find herself immersed in death. In this arc of the narrative, the speaker recalls one of her own children, a son who died after nine days ("Nine days. The court / remembers. Even my goat / has babies longer", from the poem "Baby Boy.") In addition, one, possible two of the babies whose birth she attends die ("Sick Infant," "Baptism.") In addition, the speaker becomes a widow ("Widowed Young.")

The story turns once the speaker is widowed: She stands accused of witchcraft, likely due to the death of the babies. At the time of the Reformation, some people drew a connection between midwifery and witchcraft. Midwives were not infrequently prosecuted in church courts for providing charms either to assist the mother in childbirth/ pregnancy or to encourage conception. In the poem "Evidence Before the Court" (see the third poem in the link), the midwife denies that she crafted an aigullette "to take a man away." An aigullette is, among other things, a knotted loop of thread used by midwives and/or witches to cast a spell, either for bareness in the case of women, or impotence in the case of men. Through the skillful use of anaphora ("I never / never" repeated twice), the reader is left wondering if perhaps the speaker has indeed used the aiguillette. In the poem, the allusion to Eve, Original Sin, and the biblical garden ("an apple in my / bucket smelling / of the devil") foregrounds the belief at the time of the inherent evilness of women and the blame of women by the Judeo-Christian church for all ills that beset humanity.

After the accusation of witchcraft, the midwife is subjected to a number of tests: "Lack of Tears (see the fourth poem at the link)," "Pricking Test," "Water Test," and "Fire Test." The tests were nothing less than legalized abuse, sexual violence, and murder. Unfortunately, the midwife meets the fate of many who stood likewise accused—she is found guilty of being a witch ("They found the marks," from the poem "Limbo.") The midwife speaks from beyond the grave in this final poem in an understated tone, with what I read as relief: "How familiar: I won’t belong / to the face that made me. / I won’t belong by living." One leaves this last section feeling the full potency of being accused of, and/or prosecuted for, witchcraft, how potent it was as a tool of intimidation, how effective—almost foolproof—it surely must have been in controlling women and their bodies.

Pricking is a successful first book. Its themes carry the reader through each woman's life and time in history, beginning and ending with birth, mother, and midwifery. The themes of body and agency integrate the poems to form a satisfying whole, from the first section, in which Esclarmonde, in "Material," tells us:

My God had no argument,
he panted through my body
until the body was inward
like the caves: cool, silent.
Until it was as the cliffs...

...until the final poem, "Limbo," in which the midwife "waits with the unsaved babies," her soul in limbo, body-less like the others there, until they are reunited with their bodies at the Resurrection. Cuello's consistent use of an understated tone and her finely-chiseled, spare language serve the poems well by standing in contrast to the violence witnessed in the poems. Cuello's poems bring history to life.

__________

Apprentice
- by Jessica Cuello

Soon she would have learned
to strip the membrane
near the womb.
One finger to set
the labor on.

Then she would have learned
to turn the baby
in the mother’s water.
A sailing planet in her hands.

"Apprentice" and "Planh For My Brother, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix" © Jessica Cuello Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016)

---

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light Into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013.) You’ll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, The Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Superstition Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. nancychenlong.com

Mendeleev’s Mandala by Jessica Goodfellow

Jessica Goodfello 
Mendeleev's Mandala 

Mayapple Press 
http://mayapplepress.com/




By the numbers 

ISBN 978-1-936419-49-4 
Publication: 2015 
Total pages: 100 
Number of poems: 49

__________

Despite my occasional whining about the evils of Facebook, I love how it connects us with others that we might not otherwise meet. Poet Jessica Goodfellow is one such person: She and I are part of an online group of poets. Several months ago, in hopes of giving poets and poetry a bit more visibility, I started an interview series on my personal blog and extended an invitation to poets in that group. As a result, I was lucky enough to secure an interview with her.  (You can read the interview here.) 

In preparation for the interview, I immersed myself in her online work and was blown away. Folks, her poetry resonates with me at a physical level. When I read one of her poems, I feel like that second tuning fork in that physics experiment on sympathetic tuning forks, vibrating at some resonant frequency with the poem. Anyway, suffice it to say I ordered her book and read through it several times. Other poetry books are important to me for various reasons, but on a purely personal, aesthetic, and emotional level, Mendeleev’s Mandala is one of my favorite books of poetry that I’ve read, not just this year, but ever.

As is the case with my other reviews here on Poetry Matters, my hope is to give you an overall description of the book by touching on each of its sections and to give you a peek into the book by looking a bit more deeply at one or two of the individual poems. But I’ll say this now: People, read this book.

—Nancy Chen Long

__________

Much about poet Jessica Goodfellow could be viewed as the beautiful blending of seeming opposites. An American poet now living in Japan with her husband and sons, Goodfellow grew up in Pennsylvania in a family where religion played a prominent role. Her educational background is heavy in math and science, with an MS degree from the California Institute of Technology (she’d been pursuing a PhD in Economics but stopped short in order to pursue creative writing) and an MA in linguistics from the University of New England. 

That beautiful blending—the integration of dissimilar, even antithetical, things—is one of the features of Mendeleev’s Mandala, which is filled with poems that mix religion and science, myth and math, fact and fable, speaking and silence, dark and light, chaos/randomness and order. In addition to such fusion, other themes in the book include an obsession with sight and the process of seeing, repetition and the need to repeat, time, and relationships, especially family. Most of the poems are free-verse and innovative. Some might even call a few of the poems experimental. And language in all of its glory—connotation, denotation, sound and rhythm, some of it playful—is the one of the driving forces in every poem.

Let's begin at the beginning. If we consider the title (the book is titled after one of its poems), we can see this blending or inclination towards integration that runs throughout the book: Mendeleev is of science and mandala is of religion. Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist who, among other things, devised the periodic table of elements that predicted undiscovered elements. Mendeleev’s predictive model was based on patterns and repetitions of those circles of atoms and electrons that make up the universe. And a mandala is a spiritual symbol representing the universe that includes circles as a predominant geometric shape. In addition, Goodfellow is a master of layering meaning. In the title, not only are science and religion combined by juxtaposing a science name next to a religious one, they are unified in a variety of ways, two of which I’ll mention. First, the two names are unified sonically. That is, both are pleasingly similar in sound. Secondly, the two names are unified through similarity in function: Both bring some level of order to the chaotic universe. Through the periodicity of elements, Mendeleev brought structure—a bit more order—to our understanding of what makes up our universe. And the mandala, as a religious icon, supplies a symbolic structure, an organized wholeness, to our universe. The title is an excellent indicator of the weaving of different subjects and the layered meaning that permeate the book.

The poems in Mendeleev’s Mandala are divided into five sections. The first section is about many things, but for me, the unifying theme is relationships—father, self, brother, friend—with a number of motifs including beginnings/births/starts. A number of the poems feature famous people and characters from science, the bible, myth, American history, for example Medeleev, Sarai, Iphigenia, Wilbur Wright, a fortune teller, a soul guru, to name a few. 

There are a few genre-blending pieces in the book, and this first section opens with one such work, "The Problem with Pilgrims," which spans two and half pages. It could be a prose (or mostly prose) poem, could be flash fiction, could be essay, could be a riff on zuihitsu. The opening line to the poem, and therefore the book, is "The problem with pilgrims is they think words are souvenirs." Pilgrim: a person on a sacred journey as an act of religious devotion. Pilgrim: a newcomer. Pilgrim: any wayfarer. Souvenir: a memento, a memory, a keepsake, curio. The line is indicative of the journey through the book, one in which the speaker seems displaced, out of place, a newcomer, wayfarer, one always in transition or transit, a speaker that collects and uses words as mementos and keepsakes, sometimes even as a curiosity. 

I'd like to linger a bit on a poem in this first section as an example of the layered meaning found in the book and Goodfellow's exquisite work in imagery, language, and metaphor. It's a poem in which the speaker is traveling with her father to visit the copper-mine town where he was born. During their visit, they list past and current uses of copper:

How to Find a Missing Father in a Town that Isn’t There

The town where my father was born
was long ago swallowed up
by the copper mine it was birthed to serve:
my first first-hand experience of a parent
eating his child. Since we could not visit
the town, we stood instead at the edge
of a nearly-mile-deep pit, watching trucks
corkscrew the walls until they disappeared,
like my father’s father who’d worked one season here.
Mine, my father joked, pointing into the gaping hole.
Not mine, he waved his arms in large gestures
in no particular direction. To distract him
I read aloud, Used anciently to make mirrors.
He nodded, The sheathing on the hulls
of the Pinta, the Nina, the Santa Maria.
The Statue, we said in unison, of Liberty.

Before we left I bought myself
at the mine gift shop a ring, a copper band
of hearts that turned my finger green
and soon snapped in two. I handed one half to my father,
tossed the other into the pit, losing sight of it
before it hit its lineage. When he pocketed his piece,
I frowned, but my father shrugged, and said,
Semiconductor chips and tea carts.
I nodded, Coat trees and undersea cables.
Saxophones, stained glass, and pacemakers.
I did not mean to mean the mine was a mirror
or vice versa. What I should have said was
Lightning rod, something needed, in theory, only once.
Like a father. Which may be of scant comfort,
or untrue, as any gauge that measures the depths of the pit
is likely made itself of copper. (18)

There's so much in this poem. For brevity's sake, I'll focus on the treatment of copper (or the copper mine) that is woven throughout poem. In line 3, we encounter "copper mine." 'Copper' here is a metal deposit, one that had sustained a town, had been the town's livelihood. Then in lines 9-10, ("Mine, my father joked ... Not mine"), 'mine' here could mean the copper mine. Or it could be the pronoun meaning something that belongs to me. In the last four lines of the first stanza, we encounter a short list of historic uses of copper ("used anciently to make mirrors," etc.), as if to affirm that copper was important in the past. In the second stanza, we have the copper band that the speaker buys in the mine store (or alternatively, the "mine" store, as in the store where everything belongs to the father). Here, copper is a metal that makes for a cheap ring, one that turns the skin green and breaks a heart in half; it is a metal of little significance to the speaker because she throws her half of the broken-heart ring back from whence it came, that is, back into the pit, the father’s "mine." Later in the second stanza, there is the list of more modern applications of copper ("semiconductor chips...," etc.), as if to say that copper is still important. Then that final rumination on copper in making lightning rods, a thing that protects by attracting the danger: “Lightning rod, something needed, in theory, only once. / Like a father…” By the time we get to the end of the poem, copper could be read as a metaphor for the father.

[A quick comment before moving on to the second section: Folks, stop right now and go over to the motionpoem of "Crows, Reckoning," which is one of the poems in the first section. Seriously. Check it out.]

The second section of the book coheres around the theme of time. You can see that theme in the titles alone, for example "In Praise of the Candle Clock," "A Sundail Explains the Uncertainty Principle," and "Metronome is the Opposite of Wind." Also in this section, we learn that the speaker’s husband is going blind ("The Blind Man's Wife Makes a List of Words She Must No Longer Use") due to an inherited disease retinitis pigmentosa and that she fears her son might go blind as well ("Three Views of Mars.") The last poem in this section, "Night View from the Back of a Taxi," as the speaker tells us she chooses not to go home, she prepares the reader for an upcoming switch that transitions us away from the motif of beginnings and starts found in the first section, to a later motif of moving away:

     The taxi slows for a yellow—no, red light.
     Color is the Babel of the eyes. For example, in Ojibwe
     there’s a verb tense for what was going to happen
     but didn’t. As in, I was going to ask the driver to start homeward,
     but then the light turned green. ... 

Section 3 is one long poem titled "The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau." It's a poetic sequence comprised of twelve prose poems that center around a character who is identified only as “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau.” It serves as both a disruption in the flow, as well as a centering point, of the book:

• Disruption, because its poems are tightly coupled with respect to 1) character focus—they’re all about one character, in contrast with the other poems that are about the speaker, members of her family, historic figures such as Mendeleev, biblical characters, famous artists and scientists, etc., and 2) form—they’re all prose poems, in contrast with the other poems, which are free verse or received form.

• Centering, because its tightness functions as a pivoting point around which the other poems turn. The information, themes, and motifs woven into these poems deepen as well as augment the other poems in the book.

The sequence opens with three epigraphs. The first epigraph, a snippet from the Wikipedia explanation of eigengrau, begins 

Eigengrau (German: "intrinsic gray" / literally: "own gray"), also called Eigenlicht ("intrinsic light"), dark light, or brain gray, is the uniform dark gray background that many people report seeing in the absence of light.

Below the Wikipedia snippet is a quote by Swiss-born painter Paul Klee, "Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet." The last epigraph is by French artist Pierre Bonnard, "Color is an act of reason." 

Each prose poem in the sequence has its own title that includes the poem title in it, e. g. “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau Thinks About Thinking” and “Pity Not the Blind Man Who Has Married the Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau.” The poems in this section delve into the philosophical, advancing subjects such as thinking/thought, death, language, logic. Taken as a whole, the tone (the attitude of the speaker) of the poems is matter-of-fact, although the mood (the emotion evoked in the reader) is one of loneliness, at least for this reader. The cool, detached tone serves the mood because it leaves an emotional void that the reader can then fill with his/her own feelings of loneliness. The matter-of-fact tone is evident in the first poem in the sequence: “Pity the girl whose favorite color is eigengrau. She cannot say so without seeming to be pretentious. She is a lungfish, able to exist anywhere and thus at home nowhere, except in the dark."

Running through the book are the motifs of color and the eye, both of which support the theme of seeing (sight). This third section is no exception. The main character is identified by the color (or lack of color) she prefers. In poem titled “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau is Mocked by Those She had Thought to be Friends,” we read "The girl whose favorite color is eigengrau says nothing, recalling to herself how Wittgenstein had written: "Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying ‘the walls in my room should be painted this color.'"" Then, in a subsequent poem we again encounter the eye and iris. However, this time the word 'iris' might not part of the eye, but possibly a flower: "The girl whose favorite color is eigengrau marries a blind man who eyes are the color of a Rembrandt iris" (61). Both of these passages set up a dissonance and a sense of loss. In the first passage, it's in the detailing of the eyes of a blind man—talking about the organ of sight in a man who cannot see. In the second passage, it's in the mention of color—something we see only because of light—with respect to a woman whose favorite 'color' is something we see when there is no light.

In addition, there’s a disconnect when imagining ‘iris’ to be a flower in a Rembrandt painting. Rembrandt is known for his portraits and historical paintings. He tended towards faces and people, not flowers and fruit. While I am no expert in art or Rembrandt, I know of only one Rembrandt still-life, Little Girl with Dead Peacocks. (In case you'd like to search for yourself, a catalog of Rembrandt's work can be found here.) So, when thinking of 'Rembrandt iris' as a flower, there isn't one. This means that the color of the eyes of her husband is no color or unknown or doesn’t exist, the way color doesn’t exist to a blind person, the way her favorite color is no color. 

The poems in this section are wonderful. While each individual poem stands on its own, taken as a whole, I find the sequence remarkable. If you'd like to read them in their entirety, you'll have to read the book :) That said, you’ll find one of them printed in its entirety at the end of this post.

In Section 4, the unifying theme continues to be relationships, but with a turn here, away from beginnings/births/starts that characterized the first section, to endings and moving away. The first poem of this fourth section, "The Book of the Edge," is a poem about the illusory hard-edge of fact, especially in the context human relationships. When the speaker tells us that "there is so much chaos even order / is made of it," she could be referring to the chaotic universe, but (I suspect) she means relationships as well. When she says "There's so much history / even night is made of it. And walls. It’s why, / numb as numbers, we still burnish the urgent stained glass / of forgiveness, letting through light but not fact," I feel certain she means relationships, history that begs to be forgiven, situations that become walls that cordon us off from one another, histories we cannot allow to be fact, at least for a while. 

Also in this first poem of the fourth section, the speaker offers redshift, what happens when an object in space moves away from us, as "proof all things move away from their center" and the next two poems "November Nocturne" and "Self Improvement Project #4" continue, among other things, the idea of moving away. 

This section also confronts marriage in the poem "Possessed," which opens with "To have and to hold—the expression of possession… ." Marriage threads through the remaining poems in this section and the condition of the marriage is powerfully modeled in the poem "The Puppet," through the coupling—the marriage—of a hand and a puppet: “What a hand really wants but cannot have is a mouth. A puppet has a mouth …. // A mouth on the other hand doesn’t want a hand. … it knows the hand would cover it up." By the end of this section, we know the speaker and the marriage are in distress: "And the hurly-burly / of regret is two folded pieces of any bed I lie in." ("Self-Improvement Project #5")

In Section 5 the theme of marriage and moving away—vanishing—merge into that of a marriage in decline. In the first poem of this section "The Function of the Comma is to Separate," the speaker, in a fit of insomnia, writes while her husband sleeps next to her. She writes a poem about the various uses of the comma and illustrates such uses in telling, personal sentences, for example the open stanza: 

One function of the comma is to separate items in a series. For example: In this room are a bed comma you comma me comma and a clock ticking loudly period 

In this poem, the speaker replaces the commas, which would have separated the items, with the word ‘comma’ and in the doing, has removed the grammatical separation. Nothing separates the words; all words flow without hesitation or stop. The speaker offers ten such examples of the comma’s ability-purpose to separate, all ten using as example sentences her thoughts as she observes her sleeping husband. By the end of the poem, one suspects the comma is a stand-in for other things that function to separate people in a marriage. 

With each poem that follows, the separation gets fleshed out more and more until the penultimate poem of the book, "If E Is Not for Eternal Love, What’s It For?," when it is clear he wants to leave; she does not: "You say Go away. I say / I can't ..."  "You say you'll call the cops. I say they can't arrest a shadow."

The last poem of the book, "A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland," is another poetic sequence. (You can read it at BPJ, http://www.bpj.org/PDF/V54N4.pdf, page 28.) This sequence is comprised of six poems about a road trip through the Midwest that the speaker takes with her son. Also in this section, random numbers increasingly make their appearance in the poems as the section progresses. (Goodfellow used random number tables to both choose which numbers to insert and specify where in the poem the numbers should appear.) And the feeling of what I experience to be emptiness or vastness grows as the section progresses, beginning in the first poem, "Road Trip":

And this I did not expect,
that the lon7eliness would be countable.
My son wants a tumbleweed for a pet,
now one is buckled in the back seat.
What a clever boy, choosing to love
a thing already dead and rootless.
At the motel, he watches me
lower the blinds against
the white noise, the presence

of all possibilit5ies in the night.
"It's such a lovely dark, Mama," he says.

The final poem of the book and of the poetic sequence, "6. 015Random N6umber Tab8le," is a page filled with random numbers. The epigraph to the poem is a quote by mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski, "We know what randomness isn’t, not what it is." In the middle of that rectangle filled with numbers are five small islands, the words: "It" "is"  "a" "lovely" "dark". And on the right hand side, below the number-rectangle with its island-words, this: "Br12eathe."

Mendeleev's Mandala opens with pilgrims ("The Problem with Pilgrims") and closes with pilgrims ("A Pilgram’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland"). It opens with words repeatedly rubbed like lucky stones—echo. bittern. egret. Echoing bitter regret. And it closes with numbers that cradle a lovely dark, sea of random order. For me, the genius of this collection is the unified whole that's created, the beauty and intelligence of Goodfellow's language as she marries one siloed domain with another—the slip of science into religion, dark into light, number into word—that I find compelling. It fills me with hope. The next statement likely says as much about me as it does the book: I find the poetry in Mendeleev's Mandala to border on the sublime. It’s one book I will still be reading years from now. 

In closing, I’ll leave you with the poem below from Section 3"The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau." It’s representative of Goodfellow’s emotionally-moving logical leaps and weavings that I find exhilarating.

__________

The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau Compares Words to Stones in a Japanese Garden

by Jessica Goodfello

When she was young, the girl whose favorite color is eigengrau liked paint-by-numbers, though she never cared for connect-the-dots. This she recalls as she walks along a stepping-stone path through a Japanese garden. She has read that in certain parts of the garden the stones have been placed at awkward intervals for a slow and contemplative passage, while elsewhere stones have been laid evenly to encourage a natural gait. Still elsewhere the stones’ placement suggests a hurried pace through where the garden is not yet finished, where it may never be finished. Darkness too, thinks the girl whose favorite color is eigengrau, changes the way we lope through it. Darkness, too, in some places may never be finished. And words, like stones in the darkness, are laid over here, haltingly, unevenly, and over there, as flowing and slick as gray paint.

"How to Find a Missing Father in a Town that Isn’t There" and “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau Compares Words to Stones in a Japanese Garden,” © Jessica Goodfellow Mendeleev's Mandala (Mayapple Press, 2015)

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Nancy Chen Long received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates the Lemonstone Reading Series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. Her chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (2013) was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Pleiades, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.