Underground Rivers (review)

In Georgia O'Keefe's 1943 painting, "Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu, Dry Waterfall," the artist depicts golden rock formations whose contours and crevices evoke the female figure. In the spirit of O'Keefe, Peggy Shumaker's most recent collection, Underground Rivers, is an extended meditation on the body as landscape and the landscape as body. Moving from the heat and dryness of the Sonoran desert, to the half-submerged, half-emerging Alaskan territories, to the alien topography of the ocean floor, and finally to the frozen grounds of the Dakotas and Norway, Shumaker reveals a lyrical connection between the characteristics of each landscape and the psychological condition of her speakers.

Opening with "Too Soon After Rain," the poet establishes her formal concerns as well as one of the central tensions of the text, the sexual collision of men and women. This lovely villanelle, which relies upon the pared-down diction of a Native American voice, represents a woman's body as earth and a man's as rain: "a sweaty man, welcome, / pours his skyful of sorrow inside her / too soon." Although the poet will redefine and deepen the images of earth and water as the book progresses, the dichotomy between masculine and feminine sexuality will remain constant. Just as water mixes uncomfortably with the desert soil, so does the commerce of men and women often prove awkward.

The book's title poem, a triptych, presents studies of three different characters as a way of examining the sexual history embodied by a part of the Sonoran landscape, the arroyo. In the first section, a female violinist – that is, an artist – chooses to walk around the arroyo, rather than through it, in order to avoid encountering the rough, cat-calling men who lurk in the gulch; the danger of an arroyo is the threat of sudden flood, a rush of water that can carry us away. Next, Shumaker shows the arroyo as a place to which even pre-pubescent children are drawn, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the area's dryness and infertility: "they breathe the most death- / less air of their lives." In the final section, a man dreams of the arroyo once filled with a living river, the Santa Cruz, but wakes to a very different reality.

               Parched, the man wakes up stiff, jerky, his own salt making the desert thirstier. He has no idea how he will get this grit out of his eyes, how he will scrounge up words to make one more day, his dry tongue splintered insatiable, dust, dry tongue put to bed with no promises.

These narrow, sexy couplets show that the process of recollection inevitably leaves characters thirsty and aroused, bothered by desire but wanting more.

Traveling from desert to snow, another kind of barrenness and cold, Shumaker continues to draw upon the world of indigenous peoples in the Alaska poems, as with "The Story of Light," or to extend the personal mythos of seduction to include a larger, historical perspective, as with "Orange Peel." In the latter poem, wave-like tercets shape the peeling of an orange into doubled metaphor, simultaneously unfolding the enormous pasts of two people as well as the small-scale concerns of their relationship.

He arranges the broken peel      so it tells for him the story           of his people forced to leave along the road frozen solid.      First the samovar, then the menorah           then the clumsy bundles of their dead      they left           frozen solid beside the rut out of that country, across oceans      into a life where people           tear their clothes on purpose, so others will want to touch      them, and she does, she touches           his downy knee through the grin of denim.

In a characteristic move, shifting as sinuously as water, Shumaker turns from the enormity of the Holocaust to the poem's final line in which the lovers ask prosaically, "In the meantime, what?"

From Alaska, we are transported deep underwater. The underground rivers have become an ocean. In these slim, scuba-diving poems, the speaker studies the survival mechanisms of oceanic life; barnacles, eels, dangerous fish...