|
|
REVIEWS - by Ted Bookey |
| GATHERING THE EVIDENCE HARD |
| by Nancy Henry. MuscleHead Press, 2003 There are some things about which it is nearly impossible to be honest. Honesty measures not only the accuracy of an account, but the speaker’s attitude towards it; she must be free of sentimentality & other kinds of evasion, without slipping into a clinical objectivity that cannot feel what it describes. The hard-hitting, honest poems in Nancy Henry’s HARD come of her experience working with severely head-injured autistic teens at a rehabilitation center. Henry brings to transfixing notice, the everyday atmosphere and wrenching dramas of our willed ignorings. We blithely go about our distracted business-until the searing moment of attentiveness batters consciousness and what we have held back out of denial and disinterest gains entry. No Thumperism, the emotional pit and philosophy so many in the helping professions fall into-that if you can’t say anything hopeful, say it anyway out of a well meant warmth and sincerity of feeling, an attitude I believe grows out of stupidity and make one want to retort with Adorno’s famous remark about the impossibility of poetry after Auswitz. There are candidates for honest bad-mouthing, reaching from one’s relatives to the alleged leaders of our world. When he wrote A
smooth forehead betokens Brecht was prescient, probably more than he even knew. In our bloodiest of centuries, an estimated 187 million perished. In World War I, the proportion of military to civilian casualties was ninety to ten. Today for every ten military casualties there are on an average ninety civilian deaths-atrocity become normative. And when might it all end? It probably won’t. In the short term the best wisdom may be pessimism. In the long term. optimism. And vice versa. Even were this not so, we find ourselves in an aleatory world where dangers are irregular, inconstant in their times and seasons. Everything is got by actions that may involve us in other and obnoxious consequences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. Unknown consequences flow from the past and dog the present, the future even more unknown and perilous; by that fact the present is ominous. Those so far lucky enough to have escaped can feel like they’ve gotten away with/from murder. So many things can, perhaps yet will, befall us. We are all potential players in the local tragedies and black comedies of our lesser worlds. One of those worlds-one enabled by nature’s haphazard distributions of genes, further enabled by human cruelty is the subject Nancy Henry’s Hard explores with skill and insight and reminds one of the Objectivist Charles Reznikoff’s later poems, based as they are on documentary evidence gathered from records, and presented in a series of details, fragments cut away from their horror. No explanation of the depicted events are offered , nor does she provide explicit emotional or moral response to them: she leaves us alone with our own silences. Seemingly flat, documentary, particularized, most of the poems function like a mosaic of salient incidents: Skateboard
King Heroes
of the ordinary: "Is
it good to have hope?" Henry just tells what she sees, there’s little editorializing (the best poems contain the least), the author simply avoids the temptation to bleed her emotions onto the poem, let’s the brute images work as an imagist poem might: One
week all the boys A place is made for the observer/poet to register her frustrations and feelings of impotence. The difficulty is knowing when to stop so that the poem does not distract itself and the poet’s tears are kept from splashing the poem-an irresistible temptation, difficult as managing everyday things as Henry pushes her charges into reality You
know you cannot rescue them, You
are only there She becomes, for a moment, the incredulous reader: Under
the short brush cut You think I’m making this up. And acknowledges the dark comedy that can so often accompany the grotesque in human behavior: The boy with the Harry Potter glasses- his mother, in Philadelphia And the horror and shock of what it must be like working among these autistic beings. The poem RED-HOTS moves from the opening: I wonder where she got the candy to a bloody (literally) horrific ending.
I was relieved coming upon images of light and color in her description
of Trevor The poems are not all dark and bone bare.
Look at the transformations Henry wrings out of a pencil in the
poem of that name: Follow the teeth images moving through the lines. going from "clean as a fox tooth" to a "chunk bitten off to "bitten to a point" and finally to "jagged edges menacing like teeth." Then read DEMOSTHENES to see how the poet brings the Greek orator’s world into her arithmetic class of autistic children, the sage who put pebbles into his mouth to "cure" his stutter and these hapless kids who must be kept "from eating things they find / upon the ground / some things that could kill them." Hard isn’t all about Henry’s wards. It speaks also of "a thing that holds you / close to people you’d not chose to know /in any other place than here, but here, you know /t way they like their coffee, /when they’re on their last nerve"" (TRAUMA BOND) In PEOPLE WHO TAKE CARE the rewarding nature of the work is described. It might have been all too easy for Henry to sink into a kind of If I have made just one life better" Thumperish sentamentalism. She doesn’t, stays real, knows what a shit (literally at times) job her job is, how the people who take care of people "get paid less than anybody/" are not worth much / " not respected by other people / " who make more money / tell them what to do / never get shit on their hands / never mop vomit or wipe tears / don’t stand in danger" and ends with sometimes they fill a hollow / no one else can fill / sometimes through the shit / and blood and tears / they get to a beautiful place, somewhere / those clean and important people / have never been." When someone we love is dying, has a stroke, when we have been there with them through it, when we have done what we must, we know the truth of Henry’s final line in ICE, "It’s all we can do."
|
|
|
