Cloistered

AMBTiCM HCVKW Cloistered Roger Mitchell MOTHERHOUSE Kathleen Jesme Pleiades Press http://www.cmsu.edu/englphil/pleiades 104 pages; paper, $18.95 On the surface, Kathleen Jesme's Motherhouse — winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award—concerns a woman who put herself through the rigors of a Catholic novitiate. Fortunately, it is not another book in which someone either displays her piety or tries to arouse ours. Jesme's book is more about the larger desire that urges some to put the world and the self behind as unreal or inconsequential (one thinks ofThoreau, for instance) and try to connect with what is true and real, which is often referred to by one or another name for God. Jesme fails, finally, but in quoting Teresa ofAvila in the book's last section—"I cannot say with certainty that I saw nothing"—she makes a similar claim for her arduous undertaking. The book is written tightly but constructed loosely, as though what she could see was bright and vivid and what lay beyond that was murky and uncertain. Narrative progression keeps the book together and moving forward, but its eight sections are more like clusters of imagery and quotation than chapters in a story, which they could so easily have been. The poetry in each of these clusters, while terse, is open, untitled and fragmentary. Rather than make whole contained poems out of her experience, which itself was neither whole nor contained, Jesme writes poetic notes on it as the experience swarms over her: The fountain pen: if Mother knew how much it is loved she would ask for its sacrifice. That's Mother Superior, of course, not her parent who, by this time, "had been sent away." Love of the fountain pen, of the truth of her feelings, which the pen helps her find, becomes her undoing: A kind of hoarding happens one private place—the inside of her Holy Rule, a book where no one ever looks.... She keeps scraps of paper tucked away: so many that notes and little cards fall often. And, in the list of losses, absences, and vacancies toward the end of the book that serves to measure the degrees of final separation from the Order, this: "The card fallen from the prayerbook." We are not told what was written on it. Much of the book's drama is necessarily taken up with the scourging of the self required by The Holy Rule. "I give up // my name, my hair, my memory // for love," and "Belonging stretched [as if a pregnancy] / then snapped." Something like exhilaration rushes into the empty spaces at first, "the hour it was not the same." Memory, however, is a more resilient and elusive animal. The speaker recalls the "crab apple wars" of her childhood when she and her friends roamed the neighborhood like feral animals stealing crab apples, throwing them through open windows as well as at each other. Home later, "our shirts // dark-stained in front and shapeless, we settled / tamely into bed, empty of longing." The "longing" to get at least out ofthe house, if not away from home and all that it represents, back to something harsh, passionate, and uncivilized, also becomes part of the speaker's mature spiritual longing, something she finds in the spareness of the novice's life, at least for a while. One night the novices gather fuel in the woods long shanks, dried limbs blood-brown leaves, a tree split by lightning... for the bonfire and at dark, when all the old ones leave, we leap around it wild with heat. As with the children and their crab apple wars, the novices are straining against the decorums of authority , though Jesme's framing of this "wildness" strongly suggests that she thinks it is in keeping with the knowledge of the divinity, not in violation of it. Almost certainly Jesme does not wish to be criticizing The Holy Rule, but I think it fair to say that the Order's inability to accept this wildness is one of the things that leads to the speaker's disenchantment . If there is a failure here, and certainly there is a departure, the blame...