by Jenna Le
NYQ Books, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
In Jenna Le's accomplished debut collection Six
Rivers, the poet draws inspiration from the bodies of water she
has known – from memory, from her mother's reminiscences, and from
the collective imagination.
Exhibiting a rare natural ease with demanding forms
ranging from the familiar sonnet and villanelle to the lesser known
French triolet and Japanese haibun, Le imbues even her free verse
poems with a certain formal sensibility. Nothing in her style is
haphazard, yet the poems' narrative candor and lyric intensity keeps
them fresh and vibrant and occasionally searing in their brutal
honesty and self-deprecating humor.
The narrative trajectory of the collection can be read
as a sort of bildungsroman told from the perspective of a
second-generation American who achieved the proverbial dream her
parents aspired to, for themselves and for her, at a young enough age
to feel the limits of its promise. In "Ada Lovelace," we
hear the tale of a young woman gifted in the pure science of
mathematics who could not entirely elude the vestiges of poetry
lurking in her genome, the legacy of an absent father once larger
than life and subsequently repressed by a pact between mother and
daughter that took the form of linear equations and geometric proofs.
The poem ends with lines addressed by a friend of her
father's to young Ada on meeting her at a party: " 'Young lady,'
he mused,/ "your mouth is exactly like Lord Byron's.' "
The collection begins beside the Perfume River of
Vietnam, the narrator's ancestral home, where in the opening poem we
learn that her mother once lived in a "brick house overrun by
chickens."
The first river of the narrator's own childhood is the
Upper Mississippi which flows through her native city of Minneapolis.
In "Trick," she employs a simple but potent analogy to
tell the familiar American story of an immigrant couple's attempt at
assimilation, with its attendant longing and persistent alienation
that is subtly transmitted to their American-born child: "America,
you're/ the Halloween costume/ my immigrant father/ rented and never
returned." The poem continues, "Dressed up in you,/ my
father seduced/ my starry-eyed mother/ behind a tall hedge.// But now
the costumier/ is demanding you back./ He calls our house daily,/
ringing the phone off its hook."
The next section, set on Boston's Charles River, begins
with the poem "Remonstrance" that sets the tone for the
sensual poems that follow with "Here in Massachusetts, brine
scents the sky/ in a way that masks the small individual/ odor of
your sex."
The section set on the Hudson River continues in this
sensual mode. These lines from "Three Short Poems on a Common
Theme" are pitch-perfect in the subtlety of their eroticism:
I
couldn't sleep a wink all night: my brain agitated its solitude
like
a washing machine/
filled
with copies
of
your immaculate white shirt."
Knockout lines are the exception here, though, as the
collection isn't riddled with extractable gems that outshine their
context. The punch in these largely narrative poems is in their
skillful construction and their delicate unfolding. The surprises
they yield are subtle but satisfying.
In the section entitled "The Aorta," Le draws
on her medical background for inspiration, and in a poem about
Claribel Cone, one of the first American women to attend medical
school, she quotes Henri Matisse, of whom Ms. Cone was a patron:
"Matisse described his art/ in this way once: 'It starts/ as
flirtation, but it ends// as rape; it ravishes me."
Looking beneath the provocative phrasing, this quote
seems to apply as well to the literary artist. Is Le thinking of the
revision process, in which the roles of poem and poet, subject
and object, are often reversed, and the poet in the end serves the
poem?
In “Ada Lovelace,” the narrator speaks of her math
tutor: “He seized up geometric concepts as though they were
cold-blooded eels,/ sliced off their heads, and proceeded/ to dissect
them with sexless fervor.”
In poems like “Art Lessons,” where “if there are
no straightedges,” love, art and violence are again mingled: “...
My dear// if I'm ever reprieved from hanging, we shall/ be lovers.
But if I'm ever reprieved from love,// we shall be hangmen, and your
silken voice/ the rope.”
The collection's final section, entitled "The
River Styx," includes a "Hymn to Aphrodite," which
closes with:
Teach
me to stop trying to mix
shyness
and love,
two
substances that are as averse to mixing as
oil
and tears.
In these bold yet delicately crafted poems, Le's unique
voice and formal technical prowess present the substantial promise of an
emerging poet with much to offer.
No comments:
Post a Comment