Big-Eyed Afraid (review)

In Erica Dawson's poetry, the themes of love and death are handled with verve and an eager desire to make sense of an American landscape lit by neon and drenched in zinfandel and Dior. Big-Eyed Afraid, Dawson's first book and the winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, investigates a modern world mediated by psychiatric drugs, diagnoses, and unabashed carnal cravings. Dawson tempers her autobiographical intensity with humor, irreverence, and delight in language. Each poem reveals an effortless control of form combined with an exuberant syntactical playfulness. Few poets this young—Dawson is 28—are writing (successfully!) in forms such as the ballade, rondeau, rhyme royale, and sestina.

If the reader's primary relationship with the book is intellectual, then there is real pleasure in moving through the skillfully managed rhyme and meter. However, if you allow yourself to be lulled by Dawson's musicality and nimble negotiation of language, a straight-forward sentence like this will leave you breathless: "I died / My hardest but it never took." When her sentences—often long, complicated, and spilling over hard enjambments—settle into these little moments of emotional clarity, the effect is both pleasing and unsettling. Consider the resonance of: "Is sheen / More relevant, more true, than hue?" dropped into a poem that begins "Right now I much prefer / Darkie in place of African- / American."

Dawson deserves credit for her boldness, and for her willingness to place the bawdy beside the domestic. The final seven lines of her opening poem, "Nappyhead," offer up imagery startling and vivid:

I'm bleached, but call me Nappyhead,And know that one week after I'm deadThe roots still grow, shea cream

And pomade gone, the bareLegs freckled with follicles, the shaved-cleanPussy's five-o'clock shadow, the QueenBee, now not worth a hair.

A nicknamed lover, "Sweet Boy," reappears throughout the book. So does "Mom," a comforting and benevolent figure. Yet Dawson's world is never one of simple archetypes. The child in "Bees in the Attic" plays with "pint-sized figurines / Who had no ears, but eye-shaped mouths . . . Their eye-mouths always open in a gasp / Or scream." These moments of haunting domestic estrangement, reminiscent of Plath, offer a counter-point to the brutality more directly presented in "Face in the Pillow":

Then I can't say a word,Or rather, no, he can't discernThe words I'm saying, only learnThe muscles mute and heard

In mimicry of boyAnd girl. Hips twitch. The calves say Faster.The back cracks, Say my name. Master.Mistress. As cunt turned toy,

I quiet down, and darkMakes off with the pillow. It numbsUntil, like steps in snow, he comesAnd I have left my mark.

At the center of both poems is silence. And silence is what Dawson rails against. Owing as much to Dickinson as to Plath, Dawson re-imagines her own death in poem after poem, each time attempting to nail down what it was exactly that had given her life significance. My only criticism of the book is that sometimes the impulse toward formal pyrotechnics gets in the way of Dawson's more metaphysical contemplations of death, a move that the writer coyly acknowledges in "Exam Room Three," when she asks, "And fear?" then answers, "I hide / From that."

When Dawson is at her best, she's able to provide moments of startling insight into a complex and prismatic self constantly pressed in upon by society's expectations regarding race, gender, and sexuality. Her "paper's looking-glass" is a "distorted" mirror, however. In the final, sweeping poem of the book, "DrugFace," Dawson declares that she was born "big-voiced" but with ears "Made for my lonely din . . . The world's outside. I'm in." Though the book closes with a nod toward the impossibility of its own task, Dawson proves in poem after poem that she is a major new talent consistently capable of constructing vivid moments of meeting between the self and the world, between the carnal and the sublime...