Keeping Watch

A striking tension can be drawn between the cover art and the title in Estha Weiner's collection of poems Transfiguration Begins at Home. The cover image is the well-recognized Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892) by Paul Gauguin. A young, Tahitian woman lies naked on her stomach across a bed covered in brightly colored, yellow linen. Her face turned straight ahead; her eyes make contact. Behind her, at the foot of the bed, sits a spirit of the dead watching over the girl—a figure rendered androgynous. The book's title suggests metamorphosis, one that is exalting and glorifying. Together, the symbolic front cover image and provocative title set the tenor for what follows in Estha Weiner's evocative, poignant work.

Transfiguration Begins at Home is a memoir, comprised of four sections with an introductory poem: a classic dramatic structure. Although the poems document expressions of love and the quest for acceptance, the final product is not a tragedy, but rather an honest evaluation of a life lived. The poet's voice is fueled by an evolving self-awareness of alienation, segregation, uncertainty, missed opportunities, misunderstandings, and loss. All lead gradually to personal transformation and maturity. Weiner's narrator assumes many roles: the wise seven-year-old, the heartbroken adolescent, the young woman seeking to know her father's origins, the other woman, the rejected lover, and the final role of the mature and accepting daughter. The prologue, "Roots" draws out the full arc, tying Weiner's early childhood recollections in Maine with the harder reality of her current life in New York City. At the end of the poem, she is ready to "invite my dead father and mother to see how I live":

My mother coaxed her gardens,as New Englanders do,out of ledge and rocks.………………………Come spring, I wake uplooking at my garden coaxedfrom a city terrace, and every nightthe sign that glows "New Yorker"atop the hotel, whose splendid days are gone.

Part 1 contains only two poems: "tragedies" and the title poem, "Transfiguration Begins at Home." Both lay out the pathos that will permeate Weiner's poetic drama. They are two of the stronger poems in the book. In "tragedies," the father instigates an emotional break with his daughter:

                  "I knowyou love me,but you really mustfind someone else."

Weiner, an actress earlier in life, attempts to understand this traumatic event by way of Electra, but doesn't know which version to play: "Sophocles'? Euripedes'? /O'Neill's? Giraudoux's?" Her query here highlights her propensity to be uncertain in years to come.

In "Transfiguration Begins at Home," the daughter sees the trajectory of life as moving along a "Cinderella" staircase. Her early dependence on her father's support is turned upside down when he dies. With pauses between phrases, the visual arrangement of words produces a cadence that emulates ascending and descending a flight of stairs:

The person who started at the top wasnever the person who reached the bottomThe one who climbed it from the bottomwasalways different at the top…………………………….Before a father coulddescend it with a daughter on his armto give her away in marriage a daughterwould ascend it with a father on her armto give him away to silence Anythingis possible.

Part 2 elaborates on Weiner's childhood in Maine, her flight to escape it, and her failed attempts to forget it. In some of these poems, she relies on references: literature, culture, privilege. These seem to weaken rather than embellish them. However, three poems in part 2 plainly, but eloquently, state the case. "At Seven" delineates the age of reason by way of a simple question asked by a third grade teacher:

Every Monday she asked if we'd been to church Sunday.Most of the kids said yes.I never knew what to saybecause my answer was always no;so that's what I said. Every Monday.And finally she asked no more.

"In the Office of Population...