Review of...
Naked as Eve

by Dannye Romine Powell, (The Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, NC)


McClanahan's forte is discovering unity in divergentthemes Each poet possesses certain gifts. One for lyricism. Another for narrative. This one can make metaphor. That one spins language into a buttered frenzy. One offers insight. Another, leaps of imagination.Poet and essayist Rebecca McClanahan is the master of finding unity in disparity.For 15 years, she headed the Poetry in the Schools Program for Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In 1998, she and husband Donald Devet moved to midtown Manhattan. 

Her fourth collection, "Naked As Eve," just out from Copper Beech Press ($11, paper), openswith the poem "Invocation," in which she presents six people who are dying and the variousfigures they call out for. The kamikaze says he was trained to cry out to the emperor at the end.

I thought I might call Father, but it is hard
to cry Father when you are dying.
I remembered a geisha I had loved,
Thinking when the time came
I would call her name, Misaka. 

If death can propel us toward the odd, it can also force those at bedside to take on unaccustomedroles.

When the old man in his last moments surfaced
from the morphine, calling Mom
like some fevered child, his daughter
rose from the cot and stumbled toward him.

The act of reaching out is, ultimately, the most compelling.

My dying aunt called simply, Somebody
-and a janitor, sweeping the corridor
outside her room, answered. 

This magnificent poem sets up two things the following poems will echo: Our need for intimate connection and how various that connection can be. McClanahan writes of a nephew who is "as close / to a son as I can manage."Of the uncle whose mother just died and how he "took himself in his arms and rocked and rocked."Of the friend, Suzanne, long divorced, who "keeps / a husband on her bed, a big-armed pillow/made of durable material." McClanahan's characters exchange and rename each other.When "disaster returned" the straying husband, he is "astounded / at what accumulates."

But love, she says, "was the ghost whose shape kept
shifting. For us, it did not mean babies
those plump incarnations the minister
had promised - flesh of our flesh,
our increase.

Which is exactly the point of this wise and stirring collection. Rebecca McClanahan shows us that increase, like love, is odd and various and resides ultimately in the eye of the beholder.