Roll the Bones

Page 11 March–April 2008 Roll the Bones Paula Koneazny the marvelous Bones oF time: excavations anD exPlanations Brenda Coultas Coffee House Press http://www.coffeehousepress.org 140 pages; paper, $15.00 In The Marvelous Bones of Time, poet-investigator Brenda Coultas returns to scavenging and collecting , pursuits that underpinned her wonderful first book, A Handmade Museum (2003). Once again, she hitches (or hinges) together two seemingly disparate manuscripts, “TheAbolition Journal” and “ALonely Cemetery.” In her author’s statement, she explains that these two projects are “connected by my exploration of narrative, folklore, found materials, and place.” Billie Holiday’s chilling rendition of “Strange Fruit” might be an appropriate soundtrack for such investigations into anAmerican heartland still marked by the legacy of “that peculiar institution,” slavery. Perhaps it is precisely the strangeness of this history that brings forth all manner of conjure—from UFO abductions, monsters, and ghosts to séances and spirit guides. For here the borders between the normal and the paranormal, between phenomena and dreams, tale tales and true tales, horror stories and historical accounts, prove permeable indeed. In “The Abolition Journal,” Coultas turns her attention to the North/South, free state/slave state border that separates Indiana and Kentucky. For her, border crossing is at once literal and symbolic: I was born between the free side and the slave side, my head crowning on the bridge. I fully emerged in an elevator traveling upward in a slave state. I have shopped in the slave state and eaten barbecue there. I have walked along the riverbank in the slave state and looked out at a free state. Her use of such expressions strikes me as salutary; she’s not just rehashing history, but examining how it has become embedded in a landscape and language with which she is on intimate terms. Many of the poems in “TheAbolition Journal” include lists of town names, team names, colloquial expressions, taunts, and jokes. The author states that she wanted to explore “what remains of the past in the local idioms of my county, including the lost origins of the names of villages and townships and the traces of ninteenth-century Americana still present in its culture.” She connects her personal history to communal history, situating herself in relation to certain touchstones; for example, the date of the last lynching in Indiana (“I was born fifty-eight years after the lynching of three in the county seat”) and the Emancipation Proclamation: Born ninety-three years after My mother born in Indiana sixty-two years after Her mother born in Kentucky 1896 Her mother born in Kentucky, and during her lifetime The first grandchild born 121 years after the news of Emancipation In the course of her inquest, Coultas searches county records for evidence pertaining to her ancestors : “Question: are there any abolitionists hanging from my family tree?” It is with such lines that this poet truly shines, as she packs significance into a few ordinary words, probing the sore spot where experience becomes metaphor. When reading “The Abolition Journal,” one must recall Langston Hughes’s famous poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” for rivers and bridges are prominent features of American landscape, history, and literature and connect so much, including Brenda Coultas andAbraham Lincoln. Lincoln, also born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana, resembles the author in another more provocative way: “We were white and so could cross the river.” Blacks also crossed the river, of course, some ferried from slave state to free; others kidnapped on the “free” side and “returned” to the slave side by unscrupulous men, both Northerners and Southerners. Nowadays, Coultas reports in what sounds like supreme irony, anAfricanAmerican man commutes from L.A. to Kentucky to visit family members who, once having returned there, refuse to leave. He calls Owensboro, Kentucky, their new hometown, “Heaven.” Coultas probes the sore spot where experience becomes metaphor. Whereas “The Abolition Journal” proves to be as necessary a piece of writing as the author’s earlier “The Bowery Project,” “A Lonely Cemetery,” book 2 in The Marvelous Bones of Time, does not seem as essential. This subsequent, independent investigative project is divided into four parts: “A Lonely Cemetery ,” “The Robert...