The Ms of M Y Kin by Janet Holmes (review)

171 Book Notes The Ms of M Y Kin, by Janet Holmes Shearsman Books, 2009 reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson Janet Holmes’s The Ms of M Y Kin is an erasure project working with Emily Dickinson poems from the first two years of the Civil War. Like Travis Macdonald’s recent book The O Mission Repo (in which Macdonald did erasures of The 9/11 Commission Report), the erasures themselves release and reveal startling material while the manner in which the text is framed is highly important to the expressiveness of the text. In Macdonald’s book, each chapter is visually redacted in a different way so that some sections of his book are largely blackened, and others blurred, while the final section is arranged as though it were a musical score. Holmes by contrast opts, page by page, for a lyric simplicity worthy of Dickinson: there is plenty of white space here. The clutter of Macdonald’s book lends itself to narrative suspense and chaos as the events of the day leak through and into his erasure. By contrast, Holmes’s condensations are poignantly spare as they gesture toward the greatness of loss and of national shame resulting from recent us interventions abroad. Her use of Dickinson’s poetry and her titular claim to be “kin” to Dickinson frame the book as a lament for the ceaselessness of war, violence, and political arrogance across time. Her statement of kinship with a Civil War–era poet carries the implication all wars are civil wars: that we are always killing our own—our own brothers and sisters. Much as Travis Macdonald employed the sequential structure of The 9/11 Commission Report to develop narrative tension , Holmes uses sequencing, though hers is a different mode of temporality. At the top of each new section of text, she includes the year Dickinson wrote the poem: “its year in the current sequence, and (in parentheses) the Franklin numbers of the erased poems,” for example: “1862.41 (413–417).” In this way, history lodges like a ghost between the original poem and the new poem that Holmes has created from it. The parallel forward movement through time(s) heightens the losses of war. Holmes takes advantage of this temporal plasticity to ironize the ongoing arrogance of war-makers, but also to draw out human grief across centuries. colorado review 172 Perhaps most audacious in Holmes’s framing of this material are her “Notes” at the back of the book. Here she writes that “People and events referenced in these poems, and occasional speakers of the poems, include . . . us President George W. Bush; Osama bin Laden . . . soldiers, terrorists, occupiers, insurgents, and combatants on both sides of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Her list goes on to include many others whose involvement in recent news has been notable. The claim that such presences could be manifest in poems originally written almost 150 years ago is initially jarring. When the reader encounters “Pearl” in a poem, there can be no doubt that Dickinson meant the nacreous object that is produced in an oyster shell, but Holmes’s own meaning is unmistakably a memorial to the murdered reporter Daniel Pearl: “One life / would pay– / Pearl– / That / cost / burns.” In such moments, Holmes is decisive in turning not from, but within, her source material to the confidence of her own moral, emotional, and poetic authority. Holmes’s play at exactly this boundary, the line between one voice and another, is a centrally animating feature of The Ms of M Y Kin. In one two-page poem we find the following: “To Him / ’tis’ / solemn! / the press / Imagery / Parades– / Flags, a brave sight– / triumphant– / He went / Lit with // A Power / just adequate / –an Ampler Zero– / Citizen / Who / Ignores the News / The ends / of / lives / put away– / By / His / power.” This sharp indictment seems clearly directed at Bush, but then again, it might be focused on Cheney or Rumsfeld. This ambiguity is effective within the poems as similarities or sympathies emerge. The speaker who says, “I was / stationed” might be a soldier on any side of a number of conflicts just as a grieving parent is a transnational phenomenon. Holmes...