The
Threads of Meaning
:a
review of The Unraveling poems by Gay Allison, Williams &Wallace,
pub. 85 King Street East, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1G3 Canada, np.
These poems by Gay Allison are not a collection; they make up a book
of poetry. The title, The Unravelling,
looks backward to a past wholeness, the innocence of childhood, even the
completeness of life in the womb, and the thread of the line moving outward away
from innocence is at the same time moving forward into the experience of a
constructed future integration. The book begins with the image of the (poetic)
line moving outward, just as it ends with a gathering of that line into
resolution.
and dyes it green
...
the threads shape into waves
...
She gathers them in her lap
in the shape of a globe
She could be holding the world
"Holding the World"
The
unraveling from the mother's sweater is the line out of the labyrinth if we are
wise enough to use it to feel our way to the life these poems advertise.
This book of poems is but one sustained poem; the single isolated poem
ceased to be interesting with the romantics, certainly with the imagists.
Even that amorphous thing called the long-poem is not adequate to our
times. It is the poem as a book
that promises to be true to the complexity that even a single utterance is
emerged within.
We know the story of the labyrinth, the minotaur, and the love of Theseus
and Ariadne (or we should, would if the schools were anything but a conspiracy
against education). It was
Ariadne's love that provided Theseus a way to perform his heroics, killing the
beast/man, and escape to hear the poets sing of his exploits. It was she who taught him that the isolating dependence on
sight would fail him, that to succeed he needed to learn to feel, to touch the
thread, to follow the unraveling, the life line. The labyrinth, of course, is also the womb (Greek, labrys,
double‑headed axe, moon sign, related to labia).
And these poems are poems of birth, but also poems about death,
relationship, love between women, love between the poet and her husband, and
rebirth: the birth of the poet's daughter and her own birthing out of her
mother's dying.
Near the end of the book is a poem called "Ritual," a poem
about many deaths, Georgia O'Keeffe, her father, her neighbor, victims of a mass
murderer, but also about birthing. The
poem begins: "The birth that is death / is our only beginning and in death,
the family / gathers itself gently and carefully /...."
When the mother dies "Someone breaks a length / of red hair, ties it
to a golden ring, places a hand / over belly, gathers energy from old graveyard,
/ old tales." The hair must be red, just as the sweater that in the first
poem was dyed green must now in this next poem be red: "Unwinding what she
knows / a red sweater falls / to the floor, a soft pile / of wool, the color of
blood." Red in these poems is
blood, more exactly it is the color of menstrual blood.
These poems should be re(a)d with the awareness that the book is
announcing a ritual, a participation in the celebration of the word as a woman's
body. The poems are about sex and
generation but not sex only as generation, the woman only as producer of babies.
The sex of these poems is more closely related to tantra; the word is
related to loom through the Sanskrit root tan, meaning stretch.
The consciously practiced sexual act, like these constructed poems, is a
weaving in order to create a sensually alive existence.
The poems have the appearance of being experimental. This is not so. The
poems are not unsure, groping, moving with hesitation toward some unknown and
away from some standard base of meaning. The
poems weave their meaning as they take us along the line of relationship created
as we go with it. Reading these
poems is serious business; literally, they are life and death matters.
But we must remember that the Greek Ariadne is at the same time the
African Anansi, spider, weaver, rescuer, but also the trickster who became Aunt Nancy when the Blacks brought her to North
America, helping them to bear their imprisonment. And I suspect that several readings of these poems will
reveal more than the obvious word plays and delight in language, the various
trickeries poets indulge in to remind us of language's resistance to the tyranny
of single meanings. It may have
been the poet's mother who unraveled the red sweater, but as she knitted and
talked to the poet I suspect she also was Aunt Nancy telling us to read the
poems as the poet is instructed to live her life, as a deadly serious game, with
an awareness of the animal powers, tense, alert, with all senses activated, to
inhabit the place "where the owl sat/ motionless & hungry/ watching for
signs/ of moving grass."
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