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Reviewed by:
  • Mimi’s Trapeze by J. Allyn Rosser
  • Kjerstin Anne Kauffman (bio)
Mimi’s Trapeze, by J. Allyn Rosser

In the title poem of her fourth collection, Mimi’s Trapeze, J. Allyn Rosser wonders if all mothers don’t fantasize at moments about life without their children:

She joined the circus, and left her son behind,my Grandpa Louis.Shocking, yes, butat some point I bet every mother imagines,in a little corner of her heart—Well no,not that we’d actually go. Not that we would.

With characteristic irony, Rosser considers life caught “in the middle,” between one’s past and family history and one’s present decisions and their implications for the future.

The speakers in Rosser’s other poems face similar dilemmas as they come to terms with their own backward and forward looking. In “In the Middle of the Old Man’s Talk,” for example, an aging man realizes that his memory, so central to his sense of self, may be abandoning him for good: “It’s the first time he can remember / not remembering. He has / hesitated before, but never / about this, whatever it is.” Selfhood itself is usually twofold here: “You half-liked the left-handed attention,” the speaker of “Dyahe” admits, “and you half-loathed yourself / for putting yourself in that position.” This simultaneous sense of self-regret and self-satisfaction consistently animates Rosser’s language, offering what Ellen Bryant Voigt has called “double vision”: the awareness that two contradictory feelings may occur as simultaneously true, and that a poem depends on such multivalent revelations.

Mimi’s Trapeze embodies a past-future double vision even in organization. The collection opens with a section of memory-driven narrative poems, many of them in blank verse, and ends with formally intricate, visionary (even apocalyptic) poems, like “Swan Song of the Last Believer,” a 17-line series of questions in interlocking rhymed tetrameter, a “Sonnet Predicting the End of the World with Bumper Stickers” (recalling “Fourteen Final Lines” in one of Rosser’s earlier collections), and “Children’s Children Speech,” a tour de force terzanelle broaching our global and collective responsibility to the future.

But it’s not just time that the poet has to come to terms with; Rosser’s sense of “middleness” extends to a conflicted relationship toward art. The [End Page 294] speaker of “Mimi’s Trapeze” keeps an actual trapeze (an inherited gift) on her desk, and is unsettled not only by her potential to flee one obligation for another, but by her tendency to view art as an allurement. This unease seems more prevalent than in Rosser’s previous collections as the poet comes to terms with her own successes and failures, and the ways in which her art is received. It’s reflected in titles like “Self Pith” and “Ambitions Futilities.” It’s also perhaps reflected in the tendency toward second-person projection, which works as a form of reader implication (we’re all guilty here), but also as a kind of emotional defensiveness (protecting the self by projecting the self). In “Listless,” for example, “you” are described as “almost grateful” for “the empty-parking-lot-air / and the soil’s spent ennui / which permit you to feel / you’re not wasting mortal minutes.”

Then comes the busy little thoughtthat it’s precisely these gray days…when you can hope to get things donewithout beauty’s distraction….so you start making your list,your lists, you chafe your handsand start warming to the taskof getting all fired up again,to more efficiently burn upthe rest of your existence.

What writer has not struggled with the pressure of time? And yet one cannot help being drawn in by this poet’s metrically controlled, dissembling admittance that the struggle is, for her, monumental.

The use of second person is not a new tactic for Rosser, but it is one of many things that point to an equally increasing sense of audience in this collection. “The Shell,” for example, is couched in terms of relayed experience: a women walking with a friend along the beach picks up and admires a shell. But what’s interesting...

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