Lighting the Shadow by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (review)

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy … re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, in her fourth book Lighting the Shadow, blends the body and the poem—“your very flesh shall be a great poem”—into a coherent yet indefinite entity while discussing the interplay between the two. Griffiths begins with the image of shadow in the title, the first poem, and the following epigram, the first poem bearing the book’s title within it. The word shadow and its variations show up nineteen more times in the poems that follow. Its recurrence is important. The first epigram of the book, from Czeslaw Milosz, states: “What has no shadow has no strength to live.” And these poems are about living, by negotiating the space of light and shadow and the borders created by them. Near the end of the collection, the speaker formally admits the condition in “Elegy”: “I am learning how to be a shadow.” In the face of Milosz’s statement, this is a declaration that she is learning how to live. Shadow is the condition of the absence of light, but paradoxically a shadow can be formed only by the presence, and obstruction, of light. For the twenty uses of shadow, there are sixty-five uses of light, often in compounds, such as sunlight, twilight, streetlight, and lightning. It is the presence of so much light that makes the shadows navigable. When she writes in “Somewhere,” “I turn into every shadow I’ve ever been, / stare at them until they form another / woman,” the speaker is recognizing the fluidity of identity, and the continual redefining each of us makes as we move through our worlds.

This titular image serves the reader as does “a frame of light, / in a museum, without a painting inside, / without a self-portrait” (“The Reckoning of Relics”). Light and shadow frame the book, but the body is the central motif, the picture, in this collection. The word body occurs twenty-five times, the word flesh, sixteen. Griffiths merges the concept of the poem with the body in an invocation to the Creator: “Write the world / as a clear chord in this body / you blew from mud” (“33 ages for solitude”). The body and the poem are mutually representative. In “My Dress Hangs There,” a poem responding to a painting by Frida Kahlo, she writes, “History stalks my body, examines my teeth, my scalp, & thighs.” The teeth, scalp, and thighs, all places suggesting some level of intimacy to examine, are the details of the poem. The verb “examines” is essential to convey the scrutiny the speaker feels in putting her (or his) work in public, or perhaps even work not offered but taken, mildly, like a paparazzi, or more violently, like a rapist. It also echoes the scrutiny inherent in a slave at auction, suggested in “Woman to Lightning.” In “July 22, 2012,” she writes, “I’ll have lost the sensation of what any useful word can give the body.” Again the shifting between corporeal and written bodies is evident. The body’s sensations are empowered by words. This is a poem of loss, dedicated to Griffiths’ father and his mother, and the loss is in both a physical mass and a written text. In “Self, Traction,” the integration of body with poem is clear: “They pull the light out of her skin, pull the lilac out of her skull, pull the poems, wet & writhing, out of her, wringing the body in opposite directions until the line is perfectly straight.” The birth...