The Common Fire (review)

Shelley Savren's first book of poetry opens by weaving family stories with collective Jewish history. The Common Fire covers themes such as generational family narratives, death, motherhood, and the body. The first section, "mama's kitchen," recounts family ceremony and ritual in poems such as "Passover" and "Chanukah." These poems focus on the matriarchs of the family, Mama, Bubbie Annie, and Aunties, while using the specific details of the matzos and latkas on the table to create a sense of family, of ritual, and of place.

The prose poem "Aunt Reghie" is especially effective in combining the family history in context of the collective history. The poem is told from the perspective of a child, who asks about the blue numbers stamped on the aunt's arm:

Aunt Reghie sipped her coffee and told me when she was a little girl in Hungary, her mother was afraid she'd get lost. So she wrote her address on her arm.

Later, the reader learns that "Aunt Reghie lost her sons. They went to a camp and never came home." The child-speaker muses, "Too bad Aunt Reghie didn't write her address on their arms." The child-speaker, satisfied with the story she has been told, then goes out to play "captured prisoners" creating an ironic disjunction in which the reader knows more than the speaker, and though the childish game seems cruel in light of the aunt's history, the child, for the time being, is happily ignorant. The balance between family life and history and the juxtaposition between personal and historical tragedy and child's play creates compelling and complicated narratives.

One of the strengths of The Common Fire is the narrative voice, which is most effective when employed with surrealistic leaps, as in the dream-like narrative of the opening poem "The Smell of Stones." This poem effectively uses the sense of smell as a way to evoke memory. The poem begins:

The house shines a dim Shabbasglow and I smell stonesin my mother's black iron ovenas they whiten to dust.

My mother calls me.as I walk through her house,a salty odor of smoking meat sticksto the air, kitchen counters clean and wet.

This realistic rendering is complicated by the surreal but necessary ending of the poem:

When I reachthrough the barbed wire fenceto touch her hands, they melt.she disappears.

As I chase her voice, it fadesinto the smoke. The dream vanishesand there is only the smellof stones.

Many of these poems strike a delicate equilibrium between the lyric and the narrative, creating a compelling tension within each "story."

The poems of the second section "leaving this world," are elegies, and the long poem in this section, "Snapshots of a Superman Girl" unflinchingly tells the story of a dying girl, presumably a niece. The speaker says, "You wait,/ but there are no miracles," reminding herself and the reader that this is the truth, and the truth is often brutal.

The poems flow from death to life, and the third section of the book, "just a child" focuses on the next generation, chronicling the relationship between the speaker-mother and the daughter. While the poems provide an uplifting antidote to the elegiac poems that precede them, some tend to cross the line between nostalgia and sentimentality; however, the poems in this section are likely to resonate with parents who have recognized the eventuality of letting go of a grown child.

The last section, "searching for that light," ends with a speaker turning back to herself, back to her life. The poems refocus on the speaker and the body, as in the poems "Meeks Bay," "Hands," and "Turning Fifty," as well as the relationship between the speaker and the lover or spouse. The language in these poems is both speculative and imagistic, leaving the poems, and the close of the collection, open ended. A standout poem in this section is "Inevitable Love," which ponders whether or not love is tied to fate. The poem...