Review of...
Intersection of X and Y

by Susan Ludvigson, The Southern Poetry Review (Savannah, GA)


The Intersection of X and Y, Rebecca McClanahan’s third book of poems, is her best so far. Its preoccupation is family connections--difficult, sometimes nearly impossible love, and how it survives. McClanahan’s muse is the infant sister who died the year before she was born. The real as well as imagined (as if the imagination were not real!) effects of this event on the poet’s life and work are profound. In many of the poems collected here, the dead sister’s presence is felt even when she does not appear as a character. In other poems, she is a character, important to the “plot” of the poem as well as to the poet’s life. Let me not give a false impression about this, however: poems are rarely, if ever, strictly reportorial. Though the autobiographical frame is apparent, we are aware of these poems as fictions, inventions, artistic products of the poet’s journey through loss and recovery--a recovery, finally, of self. 

In a fine collection of essays on the art of poetry, One Word Deep, McClanahan tells us that conscious recognition of her sister’s obsessive presence in her life came late, though the evidence was already appearing in the poems. Like many artists, McClanahan has learned how the unconscious guides us into work that knows far more than we know. “As is so often the case,” she says, “the poems were smarter than I.” 

One of my favorites of the sister poems is “Second Skin,” where the metaphor of the orphaned lamb must have been irresistible to McClanahan, whose complex feelings about her sister’s death, which partially determined her own existence, are perfectly continued in the story of the orphan wearing the skin of another in order to survive:

My shepherd friend tells me
how this trick is turned:
with a knife he unzips

the carcass of the dead lamb
which peels off in one piece,
tail and all, even the sack
of each slippered foot,

all the way to the muzzle
and the twin leaves of ears,
a perfect body stocking
which fits neatly over

the orphaned lamb
who now double warmed,
twice blest, wobbles on new legs
across the blood-dried straw . ..” 

The language is simple, reminiscent of Blake’s “The Lamb,” quoted in an epigraph, and in its rhythms and depiction of the animal, of Maxine Kumin. Characteristically, McClanahan’s diction is clear, crisp, direct, while the overriding metaphor beguiles us through the details of the story. Like the engaging fiction writer she also is, McClanahan knows that the way to the reader’s heart and mind and gut is through details. Her poems tell stories that are, in themselves, “page turners,” as all good writing is. McClanahan’s particular strength is in how she segues from one story to another, metaphor threading the poem, and in the end, the connections made coming to far more than the tours-de-force they also are. 

Here is a small section from “X,” the books first poem, which itself becomes a metaphor for the whole collection: 

I learned a blond hair from an Iowa woman
formed the cross-sight for Hiroshima.
When I questioned my father, he nodded
slightly, sadly, and kept on plotting 

the quadrants of my algebra homework,
tracing for the third time that night
the puzzling intersection of x and y. One
chromosome, my friend is saying. That’s all it takes. 

We are sitting outside in old-fashioned
lawn chairs that press against the backs
of our thighs, forming an intricate latticework.
Inside the house, beneath the marionette strings
 
of a circus mobile, her baby sleeps,
his slanted eyes and dry fissured lips
linking him to thousands of genetic brothers
and I think of childhood Bible schools 

The leap to “one chromosome” takes us by surprise and leads to a contemplation of the mysteries of chance, love, and survival, mysteries that continue to be explored through the rest of the collection, culminating in a poem that circles satisfyingly back to the first. 

The making of metaphor is of course the poet’s stock in trade. But, as Dave Smith says in another context on the book’s jacket, “Oh the difference in the right poet’s hands.” In “Traveling,” McClanahan begins with the details of Egyptian death rites and slides so smoothly into the speaker’s stuffing of a baking hen that the reader does a double-take. This is another narrative surprise, a delight to the mind: 

When the Egyptians packed their dead,
the brain was first to go, pulled
with tweezers through the nose.
Then a slit in the side and the rest
poured out, the soft parts they tamped
separately into Canopic jars
or simply bandaged and stuffed back in
like giblets I rummage from the cavity
of the baking hen and present
to my cat, who slurps the juicy heart,
and in this I stray one step
from the Egyptians ...  “

Traveling” continues through an accumulation of seemingly unrelated examples and details to a conclusion that carries the original metaphor without having to return to it explicitly; and as is the case in nearly all of McClanahan’s poems, the conclusion is a significant reminder of what matters. 

Returning from a moment to the collection of essays, One Word Deep, I am drawn back most often to “Composting: Notes From a Writer’s Journal.” A poet’s essays tend to illuminate her poems, and McClanahan’s are no exception. Why we as readers want to know more about the writer’s process and the background for the poems is another mystery; some readers don’t in fact seek out these additional paths into the poems. But for me, as for many others, the poet’s circumstances, beliefs, sorrows, and aesthetic concerns often reveal patterns against which the poems can be laid for enriched effect. McClanahan’s prose is lively, lucid, intelligent, and well worth reading, even if one were not looking for insights into her own poems. 

In one entry of the “composting” fragments, McClanahan tells us: “Yet finally I believe that art must not only break our hearts, but heal the break, all in one sweep. I want my writing to give something back to the world, something that transfigures the ease of anger and blame and acknowledges that place where sometimes I arrive, by accident or blessing--not memory, exactly, but a place between first memory and now. I want to catch that feeling before it flutters away.” This is what she achieves, it seems to me, in poem after poem. 

As always in a collection as strong as The Intersection of X and Y, there are far more poems I’d like to notice carefully than time and space permit. But here are a few of the ones I especially recommend: 

“Her Nakedness,” for its understanding of the intricate links among our assumptions and definitions of beauty and aging and love. 

“Demons,” with another epigraph by Blake. The movement from despair to joy is utterly persuasive, partly because the poet is wise to keep the dark--the temptation of the dark--alive in her vision. 

“The Angle of Shadow, The Angle of Light,” which recognizes not only the power of language, but also its limitations. 

“This Side,” with its wise comprehension of both loss and the impulse to lose oneself to it, the reluctance to return to ordinary life when the pull of grief begins to weaken. 

“Missionary,” a poem of situations instantly recognizable to anyone attracted to the broken-winged. The poem moves with great energy from one event to the next, so that the final rueful insight feels inevitable. 

If I have any fault to find, it is minor. I felt occasionally the urge to edit a few lines, to tighten a poem slightly. In “Her Nakedness,” (a poem I otherwise love), for example, the description of the skin of the old woman’s hands as “tissue-thin” seems predictable and detracts from the marvelous images surrounding it. On balance, however, such cavils count for little against the excellent of these poems. As well as providing pleasure through its primary material--language--fine literature both disturbs and consoles. The Intersection of X and Y succeeds in all these ways. The proper response, I think, is gratitude.