Music and Meaning

Norma Cole accomplishes a great deal with an almost minimalist poetry that opens outward both politically and materially from the personal and close-at-hand to the global and universal. Yet, characteristically, in her latest collection, Natural Light, the dynamics of sound are primary. As with "tap… / talk… / Town" and "Here…heart / …hay (harvest)" in the opening poem, "Water Is Best," alliteration, assonance, and elision both counter and accord with dire political realities. Each successive poem supports the claim made by the editors at Libellum Books that Natural Light can be characterized as a book in which "Music controls the tone…as everyday life takes place under a political specter."

The first of the book's three sections, "Pluto's Disgrace," is composed of a series of short poems best described as elemental, in that they concern elements such as iron, "Fe / Atomic number 26 / Atomic weight 55.845 (2)," and are themselves vital and necessary. This sequence begins with "Water Is Best," not the pristine nor primordial water of spring, ocean, lake, or river, but water that flows from a tap through metal or plastic, polluted water from the pipes of "Poison Town." Poison Town stands in for all the makeshift homes and holding areas filled with those displaced by war or other disaster. The dominant element in the poems of "Pluto's Disgrace," however, is not so much water as iron and its derivatives. The second poem in this section, "In Fishville," begins with a series of verbal extractions that mirrors the extraction of metal from the Earth:

the dice are loaded witheggs over easy on butteredwhole wheat toast or withoutthe eggs, no butter, no toast, notable, no water, no glass.

This mining through negation ends with "barbed wire, mesh, bricks" and by implication, pit, camp, prison. On the other hand, we are reminded in "And Many Types of Stars" that

    puremetal is veryreactive, rapidlycorrodes, has

magnetic properties,

a trio of more ambiguous attributes that could just as easily describe the poems in this collection.

Norma Cole's poetry creases a seam, teeters on the edge of that no-place where, in the poem "Concrete," something as benign as a fence is seen first as "security fence, separation / fence" (not quite threatening, still recalling Robert Frost's dictum that "Good fences make good neighbors") then as "security barrier, separation / barrier," and finally as "annexation wall." The words "separation" and "security" carry so much baggage—from notions of co-existence to the hurtful consequences of a notorious American idiom "separate but equal," as well as the fear and discord often disguised as "security." Here a "wall // for instance, down the middle / of the main street" brings to mind all the formally and informally named Division Streets, some of which actually divide one neighborhood from another. These walls, however damaging, are largely imagined, whereas the wall Cole specifically names is "Sharon's Wall," not at all a figurative one. The word concrete here refers both to the material from which this physical wall has been built and to the transformation of an abstract idea of separation into the fact of such separation.

Films, both as source and as the ghost of form, unwind through Cole's poems. For example, the scene in the movie Five Easy Pieces (1970) in which Jack Nicolson orders breakfast in a café flickers as an afterimage in the poem "In Fishville," quoted above; while "Murnau's 'Sunrise,'" one of the last films of the silent era, is specifically mentioned in "Moving Time." In these poems, movies seem halted in flagrante delicto; they are not so much moving pictures as arrested ones, stilled for our inspection, frame by frame, and at close range. At the center of the poem "Missing Person," Cole includes a prose description of what could well be a scene from a movie: "a man with a black and white umbrella in one hand, a full-length translucent skeleton in the other. across the street the second floor is empty, no window shades...