All Odd and Splendid (review)

It is a challenging exercise to write a review of a book written by a friend, mentor, and former teacher, which is precisely what Hilda Raz is to me. What a pleasure, then, to read All Odd and Splendid and discover that the poet treats her subjects with the same warmth and compassion that she shows her students. All Odd and Splendid extends the work Raz began with her previous poetry collection, Trans, and with a book of essays, What Becomes You, which she co-wrote with her transgendered son, Aaron Raz Link. But while Trans and What Becomes You are fiercely intimate, often wrenching accounts of the ways in which gender impacts the relationship between parent and child—particularly in a Jewish family—this latest collection is a more meditative, philosophical exploration of the mind-body problem. Although the poems remain rooted in personal experience, they find emotional containment through Raz's careful handling of line margin, syntax, and even fixed forms such as terza rima and the villanelle.

Broken into six sections, All Odd and Splendid derives both its structure and its aesthetic from the epigraph, a quote attributed to Diane Arbus: "Everyone today looks remarkable…so absolute and immutable down to the last button feather tassel or stripe. All odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in." Each part of the collection uses a phrase from Arbus's statement to warn the reader of the "especial shapes" that the will be addressed. The book opens with a section entitled "History: Everyone today looks remarkable," in which Raz reexamines the sharp differences between raising daughters and sons.

Duende, the looming presence of death, shadows many of these poems, reminding us that danger is an inevitable component of childhood, no matter how much we might wish to romanticize infancy and youth. In "Diaspora," the poet uses the cyclical form of the pantoum to gesture toward Jewish displacement and grief within a rather prosaic, domestic setting: "then there was smoke, and damp, and sky / our suitcases packed, our coats tossed off / we shut the windows, began to move / The gates were closing and the time was late" (17-20). In "Childhood," the poet provides us with the reassuring details of a girl's upbringing—braids, starched pinafores—while transforming the scene into a more ominous narrative: "We filled white cardboard boxes / the size of small dolls' coffins / with brushes, paste, and cloths. / The red crosses on the lid / meant something we don't know (25-29). Little girls may be sugar and spice and everything nice, but Raz wants the reader to acknowledge the vulnerability of children. In "Son" she tells us that "The problem is birth" (9). The problem is that transformation doesn't stop with the end of labor; instead, the child remains soft and mutable long after his delivery. "I can see his pads in the backfield, "the poet writes, "still skin on the cow's back. Io, / I think and he laughs" (22-24). The little boy's shape-shifting is mythical, yet terrible and real to the mother. Like a character in Greek mythology, she can only watch as the gods determine her child's fate.

As the children grow, the mother becomes more powerless over their destinies. By the time we reach the center of the collection, Raz has established that hers is a world governed by uncertainty, blurred pronouns and point of view, and wars not only internal but also external. In "Paper Strip," a slim poem that follows elegiac pieces such as "Flight" and "September 11," a speaker attempts to contain the uncontainable through verse: "Oh / page be my friend. I need you / to guide my thoughts on loss / exactly the opposite of absence / which I think may be death / this page filled up completely edge to" (21-26). This is an ars poetica, a poem about the writing of poetry, which uses the formal tensions of enjambment...