Book Review: Wen Kroy (Sheila Black)

Reviewed by Michael Northen

In "Expiration Date," the opening poem in Sheila Black's recently released book Wen Kroy (Dream Horse Press, 2014), the author writes,

                                                  This is
the season for giving up the stories we
have repeated through the long dark of who
did what to who. What would be a world
without history?

History is a singularly human invention. One might even argue that it is what gives life, particularly an individual life, its meaning. Without it, as Black suggests, life is patch of bare yard scraped by wind and rain.

In envisioning her own story Black admits to sometimes seeing her life as on a heraldic tapestry:

At times, myself as in a tower,
the woman who hides
her lover in a cage
("Muse")

And it is easy to imagine one's life as immortalized on a sort of endless Bayeux tapestry of heaven, but Black also adds "At times/ myself, the woman after stitching." We are not merely the subjects of the tapestry, but its creator. As much as we may like to be delivered "from this world of things, cold, hoof, sod, breathing" to immortality on Keat's Grecian urn, our own stories are much too messy. Black sets out to look at the stories she might tell that lead to her current view and life, asking (with apologies to Tina Turner) what loves got to do with it.

Black was one of two Witter Bynner winners chosen in 2012 by U. S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, and anyone familiar with Black's previous books knows her skill in recreating detailed descriptions of place, especially of society's underside. This ability suits her perfectly in evoking memories of New York where many of the poems are set and, whose backward spelling, forms the book's title. Representative of that talent are these lines from "What I Know of You":

Bus stations in the dead hours
when the girls comb their hair in
the cracked mirrors of the four-
for-a-dollar booths that provide
backgrounds of Marilyn or Chuck
Norris and the junk sick hold
themselves like blown-glass
horses on a spinster's shelf.

Nevertheless, Black's poetry, as deft it is at summoning up shadowy settings, is more than noir photography.

After the book's initial introductory poem, the titles of the four poems that follow, set readers up for the tension that runs throughout that book. "Broken World" and "Garden" suggests the contrast between the world of the streets and the world that Adam and Eve lost, between the mutability of our daily lives and the tapestry. "Broken English" and "Getting Over Fear Of Form" clue readers into the difficulties in shaping and expressing the stories.

Ironically, the world of innocence that now seems lost, existed within that very world of Wen Kroy and those various exotic places – Paris, Thessalonkika, Barcelona – that her searches for happiness brought her to. "How impoverished my dreams now seem" she says, referring to those times. "What a fool I was, how little I knew, etcetera, etcetera." Innocence – notwithstanding of how seamy the surroundings appeared at the time – is the garden that she was expelled from. It is the old biblical lesson, that loss of innocence is the price of knowledge – a theme that accrues towards the end of the book causing the poet to conclude:

                        I now inhabit the world
of the mother, changed, reduced as sauce is reduced
to the hunk of meat, the tender bone. I care only
for what will keep the fire stoked
("Numinous")

Even so, if searching through the stories of her past, layering, winnowing, and reducing them to a sauce has brought her to this conclusion, it is not one that even now she can totally accept. In "Goodwill" Black says,

                                    I am looking for
you in the pockets of the coats; each time
I put in my hand, a small cool moist that
might be you, but isn't

Though the present tense verbs of the poem pull readers back into the past that Black is describing, they may also function as another iteration Faulkner's observation that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Just who that you is that the poem's speaker is looking for is never really knowable. In part it is the person who is the subject of her memories, in part it is who she imagined that person was, and in part it is the idea of love itself. It may also be herself.

Throughout the book the speaker seems to be searching while simultaneously constructing her story. As she says, such construction of history is not stringing beads. The images in the poems overlap and pile on each other. There are the bare tenement apartment, the senseless drinking, the sound of jazz through the early morning, the flicker of neon, the unexpected silences among shadows, and all of the excesses of New York City, seen through the eyes of those who are young and driven by something they don't understand. Black is adept at ferreting out the contradictory impulses that so many of these settings spawn and using precise language to recreate them in words.

Readers who are already familiar with Black's poetry and recognize her as one of the editors of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability or for her performances as a featured reader at this year's Split This Rock Festival may be surprised to find that unlike her earlier book, House of Bone, almost none of the poems, despite their seemingly personal nature, have to do directly with her own personal experiences with disability. The lone exception, "Las Dos Fridas," may even be taken by those who do not know her for a persona poem. What is not absent from Wen Kroy, however, is the ongoing commitment that many writers with disabilities have to the body, and to the corporeal world that, unlike the one held in the firmament of a tapestry, is mutable. In fact, it is just this mutability of bodies that is one of the flashpoints of disability literature. In "Recovering" Black asserts,

We misstate the word frangible,
able to be broken,
as sea-sponge, content under
pressure, gel spilling out   a waste,
but also the inverse, the capacity
to be penetrated by what
Is other, the capacity
to shift, mutate.

Throughout the book, in poem after poem she pays tribute to "all the motley and messy details of ordinary life."

Most poets who come to their writing as a true vocation probably hope that with each new book they are striking out in new territory. Sheila Black is recognizably the same writer that she was in her first collection, How to Be a Maquiladora, but no one could accuse her of warming up left-overs. It's not just that the landscape is different (New York instead of New Mexico or Iraq) but that she is drawn to ever more complex problems and more subtle means of expressing them. Part of this is the result of experience not allowing one to reduce life to simplicities, but it is also, as in Black's case, becoming better and better at what one does. Because of that, Wen Kroy should be welcomed by both old fans and new readers. Old, because they know her work and will want to read what she has in store for them now. New, because virtually every poem in the book gives the reader both the intellectual and emotional workout that they come to poetry for.

Michael Northen is the editor of Wordgathering.