Domestic Work, and: Bellocq's Ophelia, and: The Paintings of Our Lives, and: Days of Wonder (review)

In her recent book Wonder and Science, a brilliant reading of European early Renaissance texts describing encounters with the many worlds (both real and imagined) that humankind has tried to occupy, the literary historian Mary Baine Campbell writes, "What is human, and how various? ... A question once central to the task of poetry became the property of a science opposed to the indeterminate and the inspired." She is referring to a tension she astutely identifies between the ancient art of poetry, and the nascent 16th- and 17th-century "science" of anthropology: the recording of details of human cultures, full of astonishment and terror and joy, and long the province of the poem, was being encroached on by a novel literature that sought to comprehend humanness by examining New World peoples much as a botanist might coolly dissect exotic orchids. In the trajectory formed by these stunning new volumes of poetry under review - from Natasha Trethewey's post-Reconstruction Deep South to Grace Schulman's modern New York - one has a sense of how contemporary American poetry continues to be shaped by these forces of natural beauty versus conquest, of intuition against definition. Ultimately, through powers of insight that transcend mere observation, each of these books supports Campbell's conclusion (she herself is a poet) that poetry yet retains its unique capacity for expressing wonder - which perhaps is only heightened by science's attempts to supercede it.

Selected by Rita Dove for the Cave Canem Poetry Award, Natasha Trethewey's first book Domestic Work is profoundly concerned with this fundamental question of what it means to be human; she teaches us her appropriately elusive definition, by example after patient example. This precocious book is full of quiet portraits of dignity and duty, brimming with the unobvious yet gleaming details of daily life. If she yields perhaps a bit more to the anthropological approach of such concern to Campbell, she does so like a young Zora Neale Hurston, with such great empathy for her subjects that she can't help but sing her soulful lyrics. She begins with a series of poems that examine antique photographs, breathing life effortlessly back into their subjects; elsewhere, she chillingly documents Jim Crow disenfranchisement with an almost reverent accuracy.

Restraint perhaps, but not detachment, is what most characterizes her art; in her poem "Hot Combs," for example, she unearths not just a significant artifact, but catalogues an emotional find of utterly heartbreaking import:

At the junk shop, I find an old pair,
black with grease, the teeth still pungent
as burning hair. One is small,
fine-toothed as if for a child. Holding it,
I think of my mother's slender wrist,
the curve of her neck as she leaned

over the stove, her eyes shut as she pulled
the wooden handle and laid flat the wisps
at her temples. The heat in our kitchen
made her glow that morning I watched her
wincing, the hot comb singeing her brow,
sweat glistening above her lips,
her face made strangely beautiful
as only suffering can do.

Trethewey, true to the gifted poet within herself, does not merely describe with precision the terrible comb; her word choice is laden with connotations that insist she is a participant, an implicated witness, and not just an observer. She shows us what is in fact a kind of instrument of torture, a device fashioned by human hands made to serve a racist ideal of beauty, its blackness and grease seemingly emblematic of what it was employed so painfully to "correct." So Trethewey not only depicts the damage a cultural construct can inflict (as the reader must ask, does the little girl see herself as ugly, as deserving of this kind of punishment?); what makes the poem even more remarkable is how the figure of her mother, even as she toils under...