Memory in the Blood

Although Fauna is the first collection of poems by Jacqueline Bishop, she is not a new -comer to either poetry or the publishing world. As one of the founders of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters that is based out of New York University, Bishop has been the editor of the journal since its inception ten years ago. In addition, her poems have been published widely, including in Wasafir , Bearing Witness: The Best of the Observe Arts Literary Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, and other notable journals. Bishop is also a novelist and a painter, whose work has been exhibited in New York and Jamaica.

Jacqueline Bishop is also a storyteller, and in this collection of forty-four poems, divided into four sections, Bishop expands the meaning of fauna in these very personal poems that explore dark places, contradictions, family, love, but mostly memory—what the poet chooses to remember and that which she wishes she could forget. Even though she declares in the first poem, “I cannot remember any more. I cannot remember,” (13), the collection is about memory, the acute and painful memories that the poet shares, that she invites others to join her in remembering, in the fourth to last poem, “Pa”:

Do you remember: we sat quietly, waiting

(70)

And, frustrated at the lack of response, the poem ends in a sorrowful plea:

Don’t you remember, remember, remember me, Pa?

(71)

In the opening poem, “An End, Or Maybe a Beginning,” the poet makes a subtle disclaimer, intimating that perhaps her memory might be impaired, while in the same breath she asks “Father, forgive me for the stories I tell—s” (13). The poet’s reference to father is not a plea to a biological father, but rather a higher being—Father, the creator—which is perhaps why in the two last stanzas, the poet continues: “Your admonition to me:/Tell it and tell it again, your story” (13).

Repeatedly in these poems the poet insists on her story, masterfully shifting the point of view from first to third person, evidenced in the poem, “Prelude.” Here, the poet reveals candidly the man that was her father and moves towards acceptance of who and what she is as a result of being her father’s daughter. Consequently, the poem dances between the flame of blame and the fan of understanding, and Bishop utilizes couplet lines and stanza break to allow the poems to breathe. This poetic device allows readers to know the specific, but can, with the poet, swim through the memories and leave them behind.

The most imaginative of the poems are found in section II, (29–40). The plants and trees are personified and given gender and character. The poet’s language shimmers in these poems, illuminating the descriptive qualities. So for example, anyone familiar with the “Flame Tree,” can easily identify with the opening lines: “I am tired of this, arms outstretched/providing shade” (29).Or in the poem, “Love Bush,” when the persona of the poem declares, “Those nights I would creep over the walls, /shameless in my desire for you,” (31), the insider reader sees the vein-like yellow-orange vines creeping down the other side of the wall. But whether insider or not, the poems invite the reader to examine the plant life more closely. The poems are so suffused with specific imagery that undoubtedly the reader’s desire will be piqued and after reading the poem, the reader will want to learn more. This is most evident in “Petrea”:

Mexican woman With bushy blue hair,

oftentimes I watch you by the river? —washing.

You are always slightly apart from the others.

When the spirit takes you you hum, sometimes sing

a long forgotten song. They do not like it, how do you not

concern yourself with being showy. Your wise dull

dark-green eyes – how you cherish solitude!

Their constant, insistent, murmuring.

(38)

Bishop maintains and achieves a delicate balance in this poem, in which she incorporates a description as well as the location where such a tree...