Philadelphia Flowers (review)

"Philadelphia Flowers". by Roberta Hill Whiteman. Holy Cow! Press, 1996

The impulse for my writing was my need to find a way to deal with my anger" (81). So Roberta Hill ¹ writes in her essay, "Immersed in Words," which appeared in Simon J. Ortiz's Speaking for the Generations (1998). Although there is some evidence of what one reviewer has identified as writing that is "among the best political poetry today" in her first collection, Star Quilt (1984, reprinted in 2000), readers will more likely be conscious of what they might describe as nature poems marked by vivid visual imagery. In poems like "In the Longhouse, Oneida Museum," she speaks of awakening "amazed at winter, / my breath in the draft a chain of violets." Later in the poem, however, she describes herself as "a fragment, / less than my name, / shaking in a solitary landscape, / like the last burnt leaf of an oak" (16). In her essay Hill appears to be thinking of a broader application for that passage when she observes, "The dominant culture is fragmenting into bits, driven by the force of individual greed. My anger is distilled in the writing, and the anger no longer harms my life but instead becomes awareness and social action" (82).

The opening poems of her second book, Philadelphia Flowers (1996), also published by the small press Holy Cow! in Duluth, Minnesota, are intimate and personal, and they would not likely be labeled political. That is to say, while several of those poems reflect her own anguish, only a few, like "Against Annihilation" and "Unbinding Anger," anticipate the social commentary in the second part. The long title poem, in particular, which is based in part on actual events, demonstrates Roberta Hill's compassionate social views.

On March 2, 1972, Philadelphia police shot and killed a Mohawk steelworker, a skywalker named Leroy Shenandoah, who was a former Green Beret and who had marched behind the casket of John F. Kennedy in 1963. This occurred at the old Colonial Hotel on Quince and Spruce Streets. That much is certain. Everything else is history, perhaps in the sense that Neville Chamberlain described it in 1940 as a "flickering lamp" that "stumbles along the trail of the past." And perhaps what is not history might be described as the clarifying and transforming lamp of literature. In the four parts of "Philadelphia Flowers," Hill draws from the shooting of Leroy Shenandoah, blending the raw materials of flickering history, personal experience, and transforming imagination.

Hill reports that she wrote the poem rapidly, "at one shot, one section after another," around the time of the 1992 presidential elections. It is the lead poem in the second section of the book, which is comprised of poems she describes as concerned with "social justice and peace." (The first section of the book, Hill notes, is concerned with the theme of grief.) A careful (she describes herself as "obsessive") craftsman who was schooled by Richard Hugo (she received her M.F.A. from the University of Montana in 1973), Hill says she may go through as many as twenty-five drafts of a poem before she is satisfied with the results.

In the eight sestets of the opening section, the first-person speaker comes across a homeless woman wearing a turquoise sweater, asleep in "the cubbyhole entrance to Cornell and Son." This is the first of three women who appear in succeeding parts of the poem: "a woman in a turquoise sweater" (I), "A woman in blue / sashayed up the street" (II), and "A woman in mauve silk and pearls stepped into the street" (III). The women appear to correspond to socioeconomic classes: lower, middle, and upper. The speaker wants to invite the homeless woman in for coffee and to "tell her to go sleep in the extra bed upstairs," but feeling herself a "guest" in Philadelphia and "unaccustomed to this place," she moves on. Ironically, it is the person native to the city, by way...