Hummingbird House (review)

Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness ofPoetry by Alice Fulton Graywolf Press, 1999, 176 pp., $15 In the sixth of Fulton's ten essays collected here, "To Organize a Waterfall ," the seasoned poet reports her misgivings about trying to explain her writing practice. "Why write about your own work? Who would be interested ? Why not leave commentary to the critics rather than expose yourself through explication?" she asks. The answers are contained in the nine other richly varied essays. In this, her first prose collection, Fulton writes with scientific curiosity about her own work and withjudiciousness and generosity about the work of others. My favorite essays are the first and last in the book: "Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook" and "A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge." Tm taken by the careful artlessness of the former , with its vast emotional and geographic ranges. In "Screens" Fulton asserts, "The veil is a prosthetic face," and indeed, the many-layered veils of sound, language, narrative and autobiography she employs justify her use of a term derived from the Greek prostithenai, "to add to." In "A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge " Fulton's penultimate plea is for a poetry that "treats the tongue as a muscle." The trenchant insights that build up to this request include a great deal ofcommentary on the lack of political engagement in American poetry and the need to "edge," in form and substance, "into realms more conscientious and more spacious than poetry has lately allowed." The book's lasting contribution, however, lies in the theory of "fractal verse" that Fulton explicates in the two essays of the "Poetics" section. Fulton explains, "To put it simply, each part of a fractal form replicates the form of the entire structure. Increasing detail is revealed with increasing magnification, and each smaller part looks like the entire structure, turned around or tilted a bit." That's from "Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic," a 1986 essay that proposes Fulton's fractal theory as one of many excellent solutions to the critical problem of how to discuss formal elements in what might otherwise be considered formless free verse. The second essay, "Fractal Amplifications : Writing in Three Dimensions" struck me as more problematic. Here Fulton is not so much seeking a means of understanding an existing tradition of poetry as she is creating a new poetics of "fractal verse." While her goal is laudable, I'm disturbed by the implication that the fractal occurrences Fulton previously prized as accidental can and should be made, through "radical artifice," into conscious poetic choices. This feels to me like an orthodoxy of the unorthodox —which is not the same thing as "the good strangeness of poetry" she would seek to preserve. Nevertheless, this is an important book. Anyone with a stake in contemporary American poetry should be aware of what Fulton has to say about the state of the art in the U.S. (MB) Hummingbird House by Patricia Henley MacMurray & Beck, 1999, 326 pp., $22 182 · The Missouri Review "What were you doing while the poor were suffering, their humanity and their lives consumed by flame?" This question, first posed by Guatemalan poet Otto Rene Castillo and later offered to Kate Banner, an American midwife working in Nicaragua, lies at the heart of Patricia Henley's debut novel, which was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. How is it possible to go about one's life—to prepare a meal, bathe, sleep, fall in love—once you've become aware that horrific acts of violence and injustice are taking place all the while? Ifs a question Kate faces the night she helps a woman give birth in the midst of a hurricane, only to watch that woman die the next day, leaving her child without a mother. Tired of good works that seem to reap little reward, Kate leaves Nicaragua and her longtime boyfriend for a few weeks' vacation in Antigua. "Ifs a question, once you ask it, you have to ask it every day," says Father Dixie Ryan, Kate's housemate in a home that's become a meeting place for world-weary souls. Dixie's arrival opens the novel, but his...