Scars and Splendor

Page 17 November–December 2008 B O O K R e V i e W s ScarS and Splendor Walter hess reMeMBering fireflies Pamela Laskin Plain View Press http://www.plainviewpress.net 77 pages; paper, $14.95 huMan/naTure Lance Lee Birch Brook Press http://www.birchbrookpress.info 116 pages; paper, $16.95 In this universe, what set of arrangements, groupings, compositions do we know better, more completely, than that of our families? All evasions of that knowledge are surely based, somewhere, on that knowledge. What lies nearer to love than anger? Fear maybe? With Remembering Fireflies, by Pamela Laskin and Human/Nature from Lance Lee, we have two explorations, two reports, familiar and unique, of that human landscape, so often dotted with both beauty and with scars. Sigmund Freud shows up, but rarely. The cover painting of Pamela Laskin’s book describes a young woman whose lips are set and strong, but whose somber, inward gaze provides a sad recognition of something gone. Still, when one turns the pages and begins reading the first few and generally brief poems, the lines short, and even when one encounters the first poem, “Abortion,” one is surprised by the ease of delivery, the simple diction, the cool and even nonchalant air where the past seems hardly as charged as the young woman would have it. Laskin divides her book into three sections: the first is “Pregnancy,” then “Mothers and Grandmothers ,” and finally “Children.” The first several poems that speak of pregnancy seem gentle, and generate smiles of remembrance and recognition in one who only observed the process (The one undergoing the process might want to swiftly kick the shins of the observer .) until one comes to the title poem, “Remembering Fireflies.” And while the speaker’s tone is almost offhanded, perhaps by necessity, here one enters a world of tragedy, of sorrow, of regret; the poem speaks of an abortion. It focuses on the unfairness of choices, the blank inequity in the immemorial issue of why this one and not another? Yet underneath, there is an anger that tinges all the rest of the poem in the speaker’s bald assertion: “It was a conscious decision / getting rid of you….” Before going on to the following section, “Mothers and Grandmothers,” there is a brief coda in which birth is once more celebrated, where in a wife’s pregnant body a father sees, the outline of an arm rubbing against the flesh like it is rowing ready to paddle itself out of its sea any moment. The paddling out into the sea of “Mothers and Grandmothers” gets a bit rough at times. It is an ocean that has no place for a canoe, nor does solid land offer a landscape fit for evasions or genteel explorations. We are on the ground of our precursors , and while the notion of birth still variously persists, more persistent still are the variations on illness, and the recession of life. With telling detail, Laskin pictures the physical needs and the emotional burdens when the generations are forced to exchange roles. And while the focus in these poems is often narrow, the past tends to broaden out, and we seem to be allowed into a family history that borders on the novelistic. It is, perhaps, a third-generation immigrant family with which we are concerned where the resentments are ancient and angers are always available to be renewed. In one poem, “A Fairy Tale ofThree Mothers,” grimmer than Grimm, one mother is a hag, another “pretty but dumb,” as well as a witch with whom the speaker found herself “orphaned.” The speaker becomes the third mother who now “is through with mothers.” I’m throwing them out into the brambles and branches of some terrible dark woods, while I, on the other hand have discovered the exit from this forest and am lusting and mothering in the light. It is a decision that propels the volume into its last section, “Children.” The section covers almost half the pages of the book; it contains a bit of lusting but a great deal more of mothering. We are given a cool catalogue of feeling with which a reading parent easily...