Lamb (review)

Frannie Lindsay’s Lamb, winner of the 2006 Perugia Press Prize, vibrates with emotional intensity. These poems, with their straightforward diction and graceful lineation, convey exchanges in which the power of touch destroys or comforts. The opening poem, “The Ewe Lamb,” introduces such a moment and reveals the complex love and violence Lindsay explores in the collection. Its Biblical epigraph, “But the poor man had nothing except for a little lamb he had acquired. He raised it, and it grew up alongside him and his children. It used to eat his food, drink from his cup, and sleep in his arms. It was just like a daughter to him” (2 Samuel 12:3), parallels the speaker’s story; she has raised her one ewe lamb “as a daughter, fed her / red clover, the last hearts / of my cabbage, offered / her inky lips my cup” yet hands her over to slaughter. Lindsay fills Lamb with such poems, pieces whose compressed language yet expansive themes linger in readers’ imaginations. Moreover, what makes Lamb superb is its artfulness as a book. The pain revealed in one poem echoes, building a symphony of energy surrounding each one in succession.

As readers may expect when opening a memoir, Lindsay introduces us to an innocent girl, abusive father, and ineffectual mother in the first section, Good, Good Daughter—another type of the nurturing/slaughter dynamic. These poems witness personal injustice yet resist sensationalizing private crimes. Only “Father in Darkness” actually depicts a man molesting his daughter; the rest show versions of this violence. “Clean” depicts mother instructing a young daughter how to clean herself in the tub; the mother’s care to use the “paw of her washcloth” and to dry the shivering girl off juxtaposes the father’s transgressions. In “Doll,” readers see the speaker cutting her doll’s hair, stepping on her and spanking her, yet another manifestation of the violence and its effects. Lindsay also accomplishes this symbolically, a technique that resists spectacle yet conveys emotional impact. For instance, in “Something He Did,” Lindsay describes the father striking “what would have been // the pear tree’s waist if it were a girl.”

Two of the strongest poems in Good, Good Daughter, “The Chores” and “Saying Amen to My Father,” end this section. In “The Chores,” father and adolescent daughter shoot a litter of kittens. By skillfully placing the sentence “He pats my bottom” in a description of the scene that focuses on the speaker’s preparation to kill the kittens, Lindsay reminds readers of the father’s control, how he has shaped this good daughter. In “Saying Amen to My Father,” however, Lindsay conveys a point of the daughter’s empowerment and agency—foreshadowing poems in the third section—where the daughter contemplates nurturing touch. She begins: “Finally one spring I was less afraid / to climb the crabapple tree, / its elbows knotted and able to take / the unfolding hand of my body” and she decides, should she want to, that she could reach into his study window using only

a stick of blossoms, close the book in his lap, flick the afghan over his rising and falling shoulders, and blow out the lamp with a kiss that touched nothing.

Not only does this poem exemplify how Lindsay exploits arrangement for thematic development, it also shows her skillful deployment of music. Because of the poem’s lean architecture, the subtle repetition of “s” and “z” sounds (stick, blossoms, kiss; close, rising, shoulders) balances the heavy emotional resonances. In these stark and powerful moments, music binds experience and art.

Love grounds this collection, protecting it from charges of selfish exploitation that some critics apply to personal narratives of abuse. Even though one type of love witnessed is perverted by violence, Lindsay explores it, noting that the father calls his actions “love” (“Father in Darkness”). Perhaps this is a corrupted love, the anti-nurturing the cat in “Salvage” gives her kitten when she feeds it poisoned milk. Lindsay does not dwell in this realm, however; she shifts away in the second section, Beatitude, toward a love based on mutual need...