A Mother’s Sigh: Review of Cat Dixon's Too Heavy to Carry by Sally Deskins

cover credit:
Stephen F. Austin State University Press

Too Heavy to Carry by Cat Dixon

Stephen F. Austin University Press (2014)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Cat Dixon’s Too Heavy To Carry takes you to that dark place—the moment of realizing life isn’t a fairy tale. When the rug is swept up underneath, life continues and you have to keep standing—and in Dixon’s case, the children must as well.

When her world comes crashing down after a husband’s affair, in Too Heavy To Carry, Dixon doesn’t prettify or hide—she delves in, as though relishing the despair. We wonder throughout: Will the anguish eventually envelope her in madness? Her writing seems to waver that line, but, it seems, her children keep her on the side of the here and now.

In a few poems, Dixon considers nature and animals—moths, snake, fish, water, a gully, a farm—but her writing shines and is perhaps most raw when seizing the trial and embracing of motherhood. As a point in case, “Commiserating with Another Parent” stuns with brutal honesty. She writes:

…No one has ever
agreed with me before and as you
pour, we talk of childless times—
before—all grand.
We pretend it’s that time again.
The mosquitoes buzz into
the sweet bottles. We watch
as they fly inside the glass—
then you cork them, trapped.

As a rare parental admission, Dixon unapologetically exhibits a yearning for the liberated life before children. Still, her affection isn’t compromised by angst, which consequently presents the oft-dreaded love poems to children as authentic and even delightfully engaging. As in the down-to-earth “Daughters Over Sons,” the unflowery self-reflective note to her child recalls the love that was. She explains:

…I want you to know me, know your father, know that once I snuggled him at night and prayed for him to be safe when he raced off to fire calls. I danced with him in the room that is now yours to Bruce all night and kissed him, and I will never love like that again nor should I. Life came after that…. The sky cries for a month knowing you will love me—you will never know me.

Through the remarkable irony of parenthood and childhood, from idolizing to hating to accepting, she seems to state that her child will never know the “old” real, naïve, liberated self before the stun of childbearing. But unabashed ferocity reigns again in “A Wild Boar Stampedes My House at Night.” It is a dream read as though scribbled the morning after and suggests that it was based on reality. In the burly tale, her husband’s “whore” sends a boar to attack the narrator. As Dixon races to protect her child, her friend appears to help. But the child is still attacked. She describes:

From behind, Shawna shoots the boar with a .22, and it falls dead…. ‘If you had that, why didn’t you use it before, you idiot!’ I roar. I recall the evenings after we put our son to bed how I’d rant at my husband over our sexless existence, over how he could use Viagra with his mistress, but not with me. I pick the child up, hold him in my arms, and apologize for the boar. I leave Shawna to clean up the mess.

The dramatic saga recalls the mother’s relatable and profound yearning, but inability, to keep children safe from intermixing with the muddled marriage. Optimism is displayed via the assurance of a close friend, but also a subtly dreaded dependence upon this friend to pick up after her.

The collection’s existential objective is put plainly in “Gully,” in the perspective of a tree that for decades, “was peacefully standing, a hostess seating / birds, squirrels, leaves… till the land, like a throat / was opened and roots, bloody / tendons, shot forth. / Then it was all downhill / from there. I began to rot / and the other trees / slowly slipped onto a conveyor / belt…” With this, readers see the light turning to dark, the goodness rotting, and the once organic, happy nurturing life now becoming dully mechanical.

Although the last poems “Glacier” and “Does God Play Dice” attempt to answer existential questions to qualm the despair, readers are left not with comfort, but with appropriate confrontation. Dixon writes:

…These polished slopes, ridges
or caps, none are accidental.

The trouble with sorrow, affliction, and imperfection, she suggests, is its immanence. Reading the aching melancholy of falling apart in Too Heavy To Carry, alongside the dichotomy of affection for and burden of parenthood, we may wonder about the said children: When will their cross over come from naïveté to staid awareness? Alas, that isn’t the point. In an overhyped child-raising society, parents’ thoughts and selves can be viewed as secondary—discontent with motherhood prohibited! Dixon daringly and admirably reveals and carries her heft onto these pages. Highlighting the ugly, her resolute writing makes the sweetness and beauty of motherhood legitimate, albeit not without travail.

Bittersweet Blossoms: A Review of Sara Henning's A Sweeter Water by Sally Deskins

cover credit: Lavender Ink

A Sweeter Water by Sara Henning

Lavender Ink (2013)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Sara Henning’s second poetry collection, A Sweeter Water, is a tough read. As the title suggests, there is a sweeter place out there, and this unsweetened story is about a woman struggling to find it. Much of the poetry collection involves nature with a keen sense of Earth and country. But it takes a few pages to get under the skin of this book and begin to understand what is going on, which is the relationship of the narrator and her father. Henning presents a child’s point of view in the first section and then quickly comes of age after a tragic incident. Readers experience the narrator’s world through her eyes as she literally looks up to her father.

The first piece presents perhaps the happiest moment of the book, “Birthday,” with brief imagery presenting philosophical queries, and intimate foreshadowing for the somber story ahead. Henning writes:

To be a self is to be an incompletion, a yearning for parts…

The day your father looks in your eyes and says daughter is your first birthday.

His eyes the minute they go out, the candles blown.

The poems that commence the collection are abstract, dark, and sometimes disturbing. For example, “How We Love” tells of a python eating a leopard cub, but somehow Henning brings it all back to love:

…Even the leopard carried the cub’s body to a field close to her den, chewed it tenderly to pieces, swallowed each down. Even I still look for your effigy everywhere, practice your body until it is raw susurration, burned not by my throat but my heart. Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges?

Themes about animals and the body further interweave as the narrator delves graphically deeper into existential dilemmas, such as in “Three Themes on Rescue.” As she tries to save a hen found lying on the side of the road, readers see her love of animals and tender spirit, her deep yearning for saving something from death, and the sadness of her past:

I held her still
when she brooded,
cloaca tight with the next
egg’s clench and spasm,
imagining my mother
on the bathroom floor,
blood from the miscarriage
like urine staining
the animal’s tail,
Father three weeks dead.

Direct emotion is displayed in “How She Loves Me,” a standout piece where the raw despair of experiencing a paternal suicide is realized through her relationship with her mother. Henning explains:

…so I’d learn to want her apology pressed onto
my heart like a spray of oleander, on it the words
sunder, daughter, bitter indictment, something to hold
at the end of my sorrow: sorry he left us without flowers.
Sorry he’s never coming back.

Readers further witness the narrator’s troubled adolescence as she seems to grow up in an instant. Her body continues to play a strong role as she grasps at the living. This is powerfully stated in “Lost Things.” Henning writes:

…all these failed translations that feed my mind and not my heart. The tom was cold when I touched my face to his fur; my brother is marrying a woman I have never spoken to, and yet this urge is here to name things which I am not: hen’s wing ripped off by a dog, mother burning my childhood on a pyre, childhood expunged from my body like a struggling sack of sugar.

She comes of age in “Adolescence,” a stellar rendition of the wretchedness of age thirteen, especially in her state, with poignant visualizations. She states:

I tried to read their futures
from the tealeaves of their broken hearts,
beer stolen from neighbor’s basement coolers,
cigarettes dangling between slim, shaking fingers,
where could they situate
the blank slate before a boy (which boy)
could bruise them, is it redemption
in the liberty of being left out past curfew,
longing for a future
that won’t martyr them silently

Moving and despairing realizations during intimate moments reveal her anguish of “the hinge between girlhood and womanhood exchanging masks. And through sleepovers and her first kiss, readers experience how much the narrator’s body is interwoven in girlhood and becoming a woman, and how heartbreak can impact relationships. But there is hope toward the end of the collection with “Glass Negative” and the last piece, “To Speak of Dahlias.” The narrator allows deep and sad reflection on her childhood, adolescence, her body, past relationships, and the present. She writes:

…
instead of howl—buried them
until frost became
dahlia blossom,
luminous material
growing from earth
that once burned.
 *
“And I’m left with dahlias,
deluges, ladder to nowhere
but the sky.”

These metaphors of “howling” as perhaps crying, and the beautiful flowers growing from the earth that “once burned” suggests that through it all, reaching bottom, there is nowhere to go but up. So ends Henning’s truly raw and telling account of one woman’s life through parental struggles and her own as she deals with the regular struggles of adolescence, relationships and life’s meanings. Through intimate relationships with nature, animals, and the body, readers witness and recognize an important exploration and elaboration of extremely intense sides of life.  A Sweeter Water is a welcome, albeit complex, introduction to Henning’s work.

A Queen's Man: A Review of Laura Madeline Wiseman's Queen of the Platform by Sally Deskins

cover credit: Anaphora Literary Press

Queen of the Platform by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Anaphora Literary Press (2013)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Poet Laura Madeline Wiseman burrowed through hundreds of historic newspapers, three books, and letters, poems, and hymns while researching her great-great-great-grandmother, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman (1842-1909). Although “a photograph of Matilda has yet to be found,” the author introduced us to her kin in Men And Their Whims. With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman lets readers in deeper with the 19th century lecturer, suffragist, and poet, as well as Wiseman herself. With her graceful rhythmic flare, and real and imagined homey narrative, she presents upended views of the meaning of equality via the men around her suffragist ancestor in the time before women could vote.

In Men and Their Whims, readers see deep insight into the relationship between Wiseman and her brother, Civil War veteran and accused murderer George Felts (1843-1921), as well as her first husband, John Fletcher. But in Queen of the Platform, readers see more of Matilda through her second husband, Wiseman’s great-great-grandfather, minister Albert Wiseman.

Readers peruse Matilda’s first meeting with Albert in “A Door Opens.” He is seen as a “doorway of light,” which foreshadows his heartening presence. In “Prothalamion,” the title refers to a poem by Edmund Spenser, composed for the twin marriage of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester. Although Albert Wiseman does not become married to two women, perhaps his two marriages are to Matilda the woman and to her speaking career. She writes:

“Do you wonder

that when you travel alone
whether he will light the lamp,

clip the paper headlined
by Matilda Fletcher,
and wait
for the distant roar,

for a whistle
to pierce the night?

Don’t wonder. He will.
His heart is man.”

As the story continues, we observe Matilda as a professional woman before women could vote. She asks herself honest and still resonant queries in “Votes for Women:” “Who deserves rights? Which of us gets to be fully human? ...Which doors are shut to women? ...What do I want to do?”

Matilda’s active spirit is risen again as she dines with Susan B. Anthony in “Traveling with Luminaries with Friends,” wherein the author takes readers on a dreamy spin, as many-a-women have wished to dine with their heroes. She writes: “…She squeezed my hand. / I felt myself go pink as I thought of my talent / for the platform, my ambition, this life I chose. / I squeezed hers and said, I’m adding my voice.”

The anticipation and excitement for the cause mounts with “A Spirited Lecture.” Wiseman writes: “Equal Rights Party delegate meeting to nominate their presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull, New York, May Day, 1872.” And readers feel the thrill as the author describes the sounds, garb, the moment the first woman was nominated for president: “All arms lifted in the call to her, Victoria! A country girl / turned millionaire, Victoria! A Wall Street Broker, Victoria! / / A leader who listened to voices, Victoria! A namesake / of victory, Victoria!”

Perhaps the most striking poems of the book come from the last personable pieces that read as though they are written from the author’s point of view, and instill feminist mutual support. In “Speaking to My Dead: Matilda Fletcher Wiseman” she movingly questions her own research, echoing that of Matilda’s previous own questioning and self-actualization. She asks:

“Will the dead hear me, Matilda, if I call? Will you?
...
You patented a traveling trunk for women. You wrote bills
passed into law. All of your brothers served in the war
….
You’ve been dead a hundred years. I begin this search for you.”

Wiseman then collages descriptions of Matilda in “Spell for Appearances: Clipped Notes on Matilda” and “Charms Against Critics: Contradicting Opinions,” exemplifying the cyclical nature of politics, sexism in media, and hearsay. Too, the ever-diligent life of a professional woman in “II. Judge Hilton and the Women’s Hotel” is displayed as doors literally open and close for Matilda. Wiseman describes:

“…Lady physicians couldn’t
Have libraries in their rooms. Lady artists couldn’t have
Easels. Lady musicians couldn’t have instruments.
…
Sheesh, she hated to kneel to any man for charity.
…
It isn’tLike a kingdom. But if it were, he’d never be selected as King.”

Ironically or considerably, then, the author claims a man as Matilda’s main support system—as almost the reason for her strength and contentment: “a good husband.” For example, in  “III. Secrets, Spells and Love”:

“Her neighbors seethed. She had an enchanting disposition
and a good husband. Wise woman! All this, her secret.”

In the 1960s, a feminist slogan was preached widely: “Behind every great man there is a great woman.” With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman suggests that there is a great man behind—and moreover, beside—each great woman. In “A Memory of Trains, of His Consumption,” she explains: “Is man an angel? / —mine were, Al, John, Geo.” Again, Wiseman challenges perceptions of feminism and justice, with her poignant and heartfelt writing via the perspective of the inspiring Matilda and the men around her, whose “names are written in water / and this history is all that we have / rippling between us” (“The History Between Us”). These lost stories of strength and endurance are brought to life as echoes through Wiseman herself: “I write to you” (“Speaking to My Dead: Matilda Fletcher Wiseman”).