Flinch of Song by Jennifer Militello (review)

colorado review 168 Flinch of Song, by Jennifer Militello Tupelo Press, 2009 reviewed by Stuart Greenhouse Jennifer Militello’s first book, Flinch of Song, concerns itself, in its compact and syntactically otherworldly poems, with finding a self in a world where everything hurts. It begins with a lovely epigraph from Lorca, “The genuine pain that keeps everything awake / is a tiny, infinite burn on the innocent eyes of other systems ,” two lines that contain many of the imagistic-affectual elements essential to Flinch of Song. That is, a concern with pain as genuine and necessary to accurate perception, with darkness far outstripping light, with fire as emblem of emotion and fused intimacy, and with tremendous distances that threaten emotional annihilation. The book moves through these themes in a style that works on various levels to subvert our expectations regarding the normal interactions of this world: “Something about your blood draining the soil dry / rooted you to something other than the fading / that made death. . . . Some jungle / ate out what was the whole of you with a hunger / that let pain equal one million ants attacking / and the absence of flesh. That lack / threatens me when we embrace.” This passage accomplishes this as a matter of narrative logic—the blood is draining the soil dry, not the other way around—as well as of imagistic synergy. We have soil, roots, and jungle, but they are not combined in the order we would expect them to be; we have blood, draining, fading, and death, but again, they are not connected, as a matter of narrative and syntax, as we would expect them to be, were we just glancing at the page and picking out a few words to get an impression of the subject. By constructing a reality of their own perception to this degree, these poems have undertaken the work of mythology—that is, their terms do not mean what we expect them to, but steal a little material from the heart of those expectations and build one another in the balance of what is left. On first encounter, this style becomes a flurry, a chaotic progression from image to image with little sense but the instant motion of, as suggested by the title, flinching. This surface 169 Book Notes disorientation serves to slow down our intake of the syntactical , emotional, sonic, and imagistic patternings of the poems. As we do, we become intimate with certain motifs, including (though this list is nowhere near exhaustive) horse; flower; bird (both as bird and as emblem of poetry); innocent singing children; animals (both predator and prey); pain and wounding ; various low-throat sounds; a stuck, physical distress; jaws and jawbones; bones in general; rope; glass (often broken); and blood. They all occur and recur with such regularity, it’s as if an ur-poem has decomposed and its elements are undergoing a process of relentless recombination, manifest in the form of these poems. This style runs like a current through four bildungsromanesque sections. The first concerns itself with a very childlike, sensational experience of the world, specifically the experience of pain as being what comes from the outside, and the (highly ironized and isolated) experience of pleasure as a song one spontaneously sings (“Lost in / the scatter, we hummed ourselves a song / once sung to us in a room the image / of porcelain. Those voices of secondhand smoke / dragged long in us.”). The second adds an erotic, other-oriented motif to the mix, and introduces a more distantly-subjective undertone (“When you touch me I become a child I see / hiding, a smallish wind, a stifled cry.”) In the third section, “Identity Narrative,” a stable sense of personality comes into being by the force of two pressures: foreknowledge of age and death—“I feel it in the temperaturesensitive nerves of my teeth,” from the poem “Living Where Halyards Can Be Heard,” is a lovely condensation of sensation and omen—and the sustained trauma of living in a world of pain-unto-numbness which threaten a different sort of dying (“I am separate from this. / I will die and then grow old”). This section’s externalized cynicism is penetrating. How to live in a...