Increase (review)

Book Reviews273 They'U read about her short-lived goal of being a shiksa and a long piece about the airlines and airUne attendants, "Inside the Tube," which ends with a description ofthe smeUs ofair travel. Read this today and remember a time before the image of the airUner crashing into the second tower became indelibly seared into your memory. One hundred ninety-four passengers are curled up asleep in what little space they have, their coats tucked under their heads, their knees tucked under their chins. Laptop computer screens are glowing. The air smeUs of coffee and peanuts and bodies. It's such a specific aroma, bottled in its giant container, sponged off the skins of 194 people who think it must be coming from the person sitting next to them. But this is what an airplane always smells like. It is the scent of the house where the entire world lives. After the horrors ofSeptember 11th, Meghan Daum has aU she needs to write an important book. She's a good writer. I hope she does it. Reviewed by Priscilla Hodgkins Increase by Lia Purpura University of Georgia Press, 2000 141 pages, cloth, $24.95 The big subjects—birth, death, love—are as old as time and as perennial as the written word. Thejob ofthe artist is to capture and recapture the intensity of these elemental experiences as they are lived by the individual going through them, never mind that these events have happened and wfll happen to miUions yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In Increase, a lyrical and contemplative record of pregnancy and new motherhood, Lia Purpura sticks faithfuUy to authentic experience, sidestepping conventional wisdom and soaring over the common snares of clichéd sentimentaUty She uses language carefuUy , sometimes self-consciously, to perforate the veil between the expected, familiar idealization of motherhood and the startling reality underneath— what it is like, for her, to grow and birth a child. The book requires the kind ofattention usuaUy reserved for poetry. Purpura invites the reader to slow down and share in her meditative observation of the world, a world made newly vivid by the inescapable realities of reproduction. Whether she is commenting on her own changing body or describing a cat's 274Fourth Genre skeleton discovered in a field, her imagery is fresh and powerful. In the early stages of pregnancy, she reports, "I was growing heavier, but my center was seafoam, home to a thing smaUer and Ughter than a clot ofwet sand." Like Thoreau, Purpura handles the natural world with a seamless combination of scientific clarity and metaphorical lyricism. Here she describes bees preparing for winter in a large oak tree: "Already the bees were driving down to the hoUow parts, getting ready to sleep long months. They were deep inside, but I could see where they'd enter and leave again, being the live pulse ofblood they were, the yeUow rivulets ofspeech and hum guided by instinct into sweetness, into a rage as long as a black silk scarfin wind." Sometimes her diction is downright ecstatic—a butterfly glows with "cornflower urgency" and a rabbit "pours itselfUke raw silk" down an incUne behind her house; a sunflower is "jackknifed in heavy rain."The book's tide is carried Uke a meditative motifthroughout the stages ofpreparation, birth, and Ufe with baby Joseph. As Purpura and her husband prepare their Uving space for the increase ofthe new Ufe, she contemplates the baby's empty room: " Ught through the window gathers precisely, and with less to fall on, pours, blossoms, and streams. It kicks itselfwide. The bare room, slowly fiUing with Ught, with baby things, resembles the odd loneliness of a new friendship, softening." One of the more subtle treasures of the book is Purpura's ongoing discovery that the joyful abundance of her properly thematic tide must be counterbalanced by the opposite principle: loss. Even during pregnancy, she describes occasional vague feefings ofwishing the baby not to leave her body a foreshadowing ofaU the moments ahead when a mother must let go. With an authentic stab of surprise and discomfort, she beautifuUy articulates the difficulty in moments of necessary separation. She had never expected, for example, to be...