United in Love & Violence

Veronica Golos’s Rootwork packs structural elements as densely as the underground root system of a tree that graces its cover and many of its pages. She weaves at least three different organizing principles into her material, starting with the absolutely beautiful graphic design, which is dominated by the cover’s crisp photo of a sculpture of a root in electrical wire, paper, acrylics, and fabric, created by contemporary Cuban artist Jorge Mayet.

Each chapter begins with a block of yellowing parchment, as if from an antique book, on which we see the chapter number, the years covered by the chapter, the Mayet root image, and the words of a popular spiritualist. After a blank page, the second printed page of the chapter always contains quotes. To the right of the poems, presented as letters or diary entries of either American abolitionist John Brown or his devoted wife Mary Day Brown, sits a postage-stamp sized image of whoever’s voice it is. One or more poems in every chapter is printed over a shadow image of Mayet’s root. With occasional variation, the book repeats this visually rich and antique-looking design pattern eight times.

The second structural layer is the story told in Rootwork’s seven chapters plus coda. The narrative takes a circuitous route, going back in time from Mary Brown mourning her husband’s lynching in 1859 to the early days of their 1833 marriage when he was twice her age, and then forward to the end of Mary’s life.

The third level of structure involves the interweaving of the three types of documents that Rootwork comprises, all written by Golos even when attributed to either Brown or his wife: entries from Mary Day Brown’s notebook and letters primarily between the Browns, plus the reconstruction (from someone’s notes) of a speech Mary gave near the end of her life; a “chapbook” of May Day Brown’s poems titled “Water Cure” that stands roughly in the middle of the book; and very modernistic poems that Golos calls “ghost code” poems.

Each of these types of poems has its own typeface, and each is written in its own style. The contrast between the aesthetics of these three styles is striking. The letters and notebook entries are prosy and plain-speaking, light on imagery and very heavy on narrative: “Mrs. Frances Harper has agreed to deliver this letter. I trust her completely, as do you. She will help, I believe, in the days to come. Trust also in the Lord”; or “We have the slate and coal to mark the lines & together we copy the words of God.”

What makes these poems compelling is the story they tell: the history of their relationship focused on the Browns’ self-appointed mission in life—to root out slavery. In Rootwork, both John and Mary are equally devoted to their spouse, their god, and the abolitionist movement—both with a blazing fervor, but of a grim sort, as if the most tender of loves could not be made to crack a smile.

In stark contrast to the plain style of these imaginary historical documents stand the imagistic and open-ended ghost code poems. The ghost code poems unfold in stark images, changing perspectives, unconventional syntax, and a relentless musicality:

into the hair of tidesI am still dampwhen I wake from before deep in thisin-between

or

blaze:(a whistlecan kill) conjure wish

shout putscreech field holler blues(for)king

or

in froth foam in free domesdress in the skins of

sky and horizon

divedown

The 14 poems of “Water Cure” stand somewhere in between the open-ended modernism of the ghost code poems and the prosaic narrative of the letters and notebook. They speak in a straightforward manner but with the elevated sense of meaning that is the essence of poetry:

We namedinto each other, named in orderto press each wordcleanly, our forgetting fleshso fragile.

or

YesterdayI knelt in dry dirt...