cover credit: Jacar Press |
Reckoning
by Edison Jennings
Jacar Press (2013)
Reviewed by Angele Ellis
Edison Jennings’s chapbook, Reckoning, is a masterful elegy in multiple voices that is also by turns
rough and tender, wry and devastating.
As a young aircrewman in the U.S. Navy, Jennings
“… from a P-3s vantage point, / watch[ed] Beirut burn.” In “Flight,” he
connects this wartime experience with a boyhood memory of shooting at buzzards
above an American farm, an activity the thirteen-year-old narrator and his
friends find futile and mesmerizing; the predatory birds prove to be impossible
targets. In the following passage, the narrator’s frustration and wonder are
palpable:
…if we could only hit one,
to blow a hole in any bird that fed on carrion.
Still we wondered
silently, how they rode the breeze forever
as if sanctified.
As the poem progresses, the images of flesh-eating
birds become more powerful, mystical, and foreboding—“great-winged vultures”
that pharaohs “deified,” “Dante’s circling song to death”—until the now-adult narrator
becomes one with them above a flaming foreign city, “…charmed / flying in
circles, like an icon.”
A range of responses to tragedy is at the ravaged
heart of Reckoning. As Jennings (who
now chairs the Division of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Intermont College) reminds
the reader by quoting Webster’s dictionary
on the book’s dedication page, one of this resonant word’s multiple meanings is
being called to account.
Reckoning
is dedicated to Jennings’s daughter, Lucy (1989-2010), who passed from cancer. Lucy
appears, both directly and indirectly, in many of these poems. In “Reckoning
II,” the narrator totals his enormous personal grief as a bookkeeper might.
However, minimizing Lucy with this method serves only to magnify her. The loss
of even one child tips the balance between life and death, as demonstrated by
the emotion that breaks through the dry tone of the following passage:
The law of small numbers
implies her entry will be lost
in the long ledger of the dead…
so small and unaccountable.
In “Litany,” the narrator, elderly and possibly suffering
from dementia, kneels in nightly prayer and keeps a more personal list of
losses, ranging from “Fred” to “Haitians… nurses… Sudan.” But this aide de
memoire is not enough—“twofaced sexanddeath outpaced him.” His “confusion” over
the growing list leads to emotional overload, a form of amnesia. To this good-hearted
but befuddled man (as to the reader), this seems necessary, a shameful penance:
…one night he even forgot his daughter,
bald and sick from chemo—with so much need
his knees would hurt, with so much yet to plead.
And in “Brown Eyed Girl,” the narrator’s grief
stretches to the beginning of human history, linking his Lucy to a “Denisovan
fossil” of a hominid girl who lived 2.6 million years ago. Time seems to
collapse as the first brown-eyed girl becomes not only an ancestor but also a
sister to the one newly dead, bringing the narrator a strange sense of comfort.
The twinning of the two girls in the following passage signifies not only
kinship, but also completion:
…My short-lived daughter, too,
had brown eyes and hair.
That makes us kin:
she through me and me though you.
Reckoning
is not without moments of humor. The spunky old woman who narrates “Durable
Goods” disposes of her worldly possessions with devilish glee, spitting in the
eye of the death that is about to overtake her. Her “will” is as tart and
refreshing as the spirit Jennings captures in these lines:
…“The body’s estate?” she said, “just stuff to stuff,
amen. Burn it and be done…Give Louanne
the four-post bed now that she’s found a lover,
and dare her to wear it out, if she can.”
And in “Rainstorm,” death takes a holiday on a
road trip to rural Georgia, reminding the reader that life’s little but
satisfying pleasures can be found in a “…Caddy [that] shimmied in the curves /
and fish-tailed down the straights” and in “…lunch[ing] on RCs, Scooter Pies, /
and watch[ing] the wipers skim / momentary half-moon vistas / lush with peach
and pecan groves.”
The reminders of loss, however, lurk in many
places in Reckoning: in the corpse of
a poisoned mouse in “Nuptials,” whose “…tail ringed my finger, / wedding me to
death”; in an old house’s coal furnace in “Feeding the Fire,” as the narrator
“wipe[s] the smudge / of pitch-black dust that seams the lifeline of my palm”;
in an unhappy woman’s vacuum cleaner—a Hoover Vortex Master—in “The Sympathy of
Dust,” which preserves rather than obliterates “…a diary of dross…fragments of
a narrative / she tracks from room to room.”
Reckoning
circles back to Lucy in the book’s final poem, “Saudade” (in Portuguese, a
feeling of intense melancholy or longing, a word with no English equivalent). Despite
the narrator’s commitment to “commonsense things” to “keep the cold out” of his
“ramshackle house,” saudade “…seeps through the floorboards, / pools in the
corners, and laps up the stairs.” His diligent housework becomes irrelevant.
Through the narrator, Jennings is drawn to examine—not for the first or the
last time—the “vacuum” left by his daughter’s death, the icy center that
connects existence and non-existence:
…I retreat to the wreck of your room
and wonder—the closest I come to prayer—
are you warm out there, beyond the world’s rim?