Writing with Trauma

In A Common Violence, the poet Pat Falk entertains the possibility of finding peace, or even momentary solace, in a world ravaged by violence. Falk's narrator cannot avert her gaze from televised tragedies happening in faraway countries. Even in the relative calm of suburbia, she cannot admire birds without being struck by their cruelty. Violence comes from within as well, as the poems move from the horrors of current events to familial pain and trauma passed down through acts of aggression, both physical and spiritual—scary stories and admonitions barely understood—and rejected—by the narrator, who survives but absorbs the darkness nonetheless.

Falk's stark, graphic, question-poems speak directly to us, to the self, and to God, if the poet believed in one. In "Regarding the Pain of Others," after Susan Sontag's book by that title, the narrator contemplates a newspaper article about an earthquake and its aftermath in a poor country where thousands of survivors—and one girl in particular—live in tent cities:

a young girl pulled from the rubble hadn't  died from impactjust her nails were missing     she must  have scratched them offtrying to get out

These poems are perhaps darkest when Falk's naturalistic images bear the effects of violence—the lab rabbits with eyelids "stitched open" to "test effects of toxic bleach" from "Three Bits," and the swarm of birds squabbling over "something long and furry," whose small legs dangle "like those of a dog" from a seagull's beak:

in the seagull's eyemalevolencethe arrogance of a master race

other gulls and geese—jealous or enraged—pursuing from behind

Human or animal, it seems we are enraged by nature. In "Barometric," low pressure before a storm sends the narrator reeling:

with knowledge of impending violence

carried through a synapsedown the spineinto hollow open pockets

the soul goes underground, a dusty bulbin a pit of darkness

how deceptive this darkness I am comfort    and safetyit says I am the promise of renewal

As she struggles against her nostalgia for her "pit of darkness," she makes a stunning argument about the counterintuitively addictive nature of depression, which promises the safety of well-worn path. Like other addictions, it seduces its survivors back. Just as parents unwittingly pass their trauma on to their children, depression is a cycle that repeats and comforts the victim, perhaps because, as the late Prince observed, "There's joy in repetition."

Thankfully, the narrator also sees the "softwet grey" beauty of a snail on the sidewalk after rain, "neck and head stuck out in brazen vulnerability // forked-front antenna…," whom the narrator carries back into the garden, having won it over with water:

water pouredaround it from a cup

brings the tiny monster-headto drink

full of trust and puddled nowit floats            with ease                    ontotheleaf

Here the language softens to a song almost reminiscent of e. e. Cumming's "in Just-," a paeon to spring in childhood, when the world is "mud-luscious" and "puddle wonderful." Falk's narrator makes the journey from observing to acting with empathy toward a fellow animal, suggesting that even a quotidian act of kindness can alleviate the oppression of our common violence.

In the book's second section, there are three compelling, sonnet-like narrative poems that explore the narrator-survivor's experience of family trauma. She recalls the words spoken by her mother and grandmother and, to her chagrin, recognizes that, as a single parent to her now-grown daughter, she, too played her part in passing on the trauma.

In "Cobolt," the narrator addresses her daughter as she regards a blue ceramic bowl they placed in the center of their table thirty years ago, when her daughter was seven:

I touch the rim as if it were a memory,my finger circling slowly with tendernessI may have never had to give you.    Could I not seebeyond the need for strength?

In "Grandma Sadie," the narrator...