Blood Flower: New Poems by Pamela Uschuk (review)

The blood flower, a kind of milkweed, is not without its dangers: gashed stem-wise, it oozes toxin; but cultivated with care, it becomes food for butterflies. Pamela Uschuk's new book of poems evokes both the sting and the feast in a three-part collection, each with its quotient of life-sap and nourishment, memory and care. The psychic terrain of her Russian forebears is as familiar and haunting as an old volume of daguerreotypes one might have come across, bewhiskered ancestors coolly appraising an unknown progeny. Uschuk's book is a chaplet of blood flower blooms wreathed around the brows of the grand-folk she conjures and interrogates. Stepping forward to summarize and memorialize their unruly lives (and sometimes unfortunate deaths), Uschuk takes a glisteningly aware sensibility to the memory of a grandfather, engineer of an obscure murder, who finished himself inside a gas oven; a beloved grandmother brewing borscht ("Oh, to palm the red cabbage head / the way my grandmother must have cupped / my infant skull…."); a spicy, if imaginary, pairing of violin and cello in a small collectanea of Shostakovich. Throughout her lines are mostly regular and conventionally sonorous, though there is a regular supply of felicities ("What we inhale is strangled / as the breathing of horses in a winter pasture"; "The slush of clouds"; "Emerald common as bread"), and her rhythms are mostly those of respiration: common, even, predictable. Reading Uschuk is to be lulled, not goaded; led, not thrust. Her most vivid lines, compact and blood-bright, seem to involve either the curette or the blade; but for the most part, Uschuk offers the music of the prayer-book and the natural revelations of a kind of poeticized National Geographic. She aims to startle, and sometimes does, but her craft emerges from glowing memory, gore bespattered though it sometimes is:

My brother, in those rainbright dayswhen blood showered like pennies around you, andsense leaked from the world            like helium from a foil balloon,I couldn't see your hands at war in Vietnam.

("The Trick")

Not infrequently there are metaphorical pile-ups in the poet's pursuit of vivid sense:

Here, a cricket sings to desertfar from the sulfur racket grinding the city.Was there a piano, at least,a stray balalaika to buffer silence            that tasted like rusted tinand roared like a wolverine so starvedit could not gnaw through grief's walls.

("Blood Flower")

Uschuk is poorly served by her printer: there are misspellings throughout the text. Some of them are glaring, as in the poem entitled "Eucarist," while others challenge the reader's credulity. Is "umbrelled" (as in "Up ramps umbrelled by new oak leaves") the poet's attempt at coinage? And what about "Barn swallows swallows blue as Czech streams raise"? And there is some confusion about the difference between "lie" and "lay," a bugbear among grammarians. These mistakes and malapropisms (there are several more) frustrate the careful reader and interrupt the expression of a competent poet. Uschuk's work is otherwise cleanly assembled, but the collection, presented in three groupings ("Blood Flower," family memories; "The Trick," poems from the battlefield; and "Talk About Your Bad Girls," a miscellany without a common theme) are workmanlike and worthy, but the collection is too large. A book a third as long would have produced fewer look-alike poems. For all that, Uschuk enthusiasts who can appreciate her poems in bulk will not be disappointed.