Review: Melissa Crandall's Weathercock

Weathercock by Melissa Crandall

Tortuga Loca, 2010,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Melissa Crandall, whose short story collection Darling Wendy was reviewed for our debut issue, sent me a copy of her first non-series novel, Weathercock, a fantasy set in an alternative-reality medieval world where gender roles are directly inverse to traditional gender roles in the majority of known human societies.  In other words, men's lot in life was rather bitter.

I admit I'm not very familiar with the fantasy genre, so I asked for some feedback from my partner on this, and it was interesting to get a male perspective on the story.  He found the female characters easier to relate to than the male ones, simply because men in the world of this novel are so unlike the typical picture of a man in our society, while women in the novel's world do resemble men as we know them, exhibiting both what are perceived as positive as well as negative typically masculine traits.  It seems the reversal in behavior stems from the respective genders' stations and the effects of those roles over generations, through a feedback loop of heredity and environment

For reasons unknown to the lead characters, men were born more rarely in this society, and they were often sterile.  "It was just the way things were in Duine, the way things had always been." 

The result of this scarcity is for men to be treated like commodities, essentially as breeding studs.  Women set up "households," which are comprised of several wives, one of whom actually "owns" the husband and therefore wields most of the power, and others who exist lower in the hierarchy and have less say in household decisions.

Kinner, the lead male character, son of the "Firstwife" of a household, finds his future in jeopardy when it's discovered that he is apparently sterile and therefore cannot contribute to the household in the manner expected of him.  The only alternative to execution for a sterile male is monkhood, and so Kinner's mother undertakes with him a long journey across the country to a monastery where he can live safely among other men in his predicament — although we later learn that Kinner's mother, Holan, who is a blacksmith, has misled the other wives about her son's sterility because she wanted a pretext to travel with him to this distant place of refuge as part of her quest in relation to a special sword she has forged in honor of a god, the Weathercock, whose worship is forbidden in a society that instead worships a triune goddess.

The inverted parallels to medieval European Christendom are obvious, but the questions this allegorical adventure tale raises are provocative and compelling.

Has our own society, even today, afforded equal worth to half its members even if they do not assume traditional procreative roles?

And, political measures like affirmative action aside, what would women today be achieving in non-female-dominated professions if they had not been treated as second-class citizens since time immemorial?

Kinner, raised to be docile and not trained in battle because he is a man, does not emerge as a hero in the war between the corrupt queen and her discontented subjects that provides much of the action in the novel.  (Many of the subjects are miffed that the queen keeps stealing their husbands in pursuit of an heir.)  In this way, the story is realistic, unlike anachronistic Hollywood films that cast every other ancient or medieval heroine as a Boudica, rather than portraying them within the context of their time, where courage did not necessarily manifest itself in dazzling swordplay.

And political feminism didn't win all of its early battles, either, but the closing of Crandall's tale allows for hope that change is in the air for men like Kinner, not from martial victories but from mutual understanding between the genders one person at a time, which is how all true and lasting peace and progress tends to be won.

I admire the author for tackling this territory and think she has written an original, idea-driven adventure story worth checking out.

The book is available directly from the author, as well as in ebook form here.

Editorial: Relic From The Mix-Tape Years

Sorting through a box full of cassette tapes that survived my handful of moves from over the last decade, I reread the story of my adolescence and early adulthood, spelled out on the handwritten covers of my mix tapes.  

Ah, the mix tape, a short-lived, essentially obsolete art form.  A few of my eighth and ninth-grade classmates had made them for each other, with photocopies of kittens or puppies as covers.  As an introverted chick with few friends and less confidence in matters of influencing others' taste (but plenty of confidence in my own ability to know what I like) I made tapes for myself.

In high school the tapes, titled "Hits of 1980/90-whatever (I'm going to pass up the chance to show my precise age here)" and adorned with hastily ink-drawn musical notes, were songs I caught off the radio, recorded on the fly.  I depended on my not particularly quick reflexes to catch the songs in their entirety, and so they appeared in no particular order.

Then in college I got a bit more sophisticated.  I titled the series of tapes "Sonic Potpourri" and made them only from other tapes or (increasingly) CDs that either I or my brother owned.  I could only make them when I was at home from school, where my treasured once-state-of-the-art stereo stood in my girlhood room.  On the frequent occasions when I was home for a weekend, a new tape would be my major weekend project.  I labored over the tapes with the attention I should have directed to my homework -- the attention and the passion.  Maybe it wasn't coincidence that the only A I received my first freshman semester was in the history of jazz.

The tapes told the story of my life -- not from day one, but what was going on right at that time, in narrative form, although the narrative would probably have been comprehensible only to me.  Much of it was centered around my relationship at the time, my first serious one, and my efforts to find my own voice in the world.  Typical college stuff.  Speaking more recently to friends, I realized that almost everyone made mix tapes in those days.  My boyfriend at the time had made some for me, stuff he thought I might like, or hoped I might like, or thought I should like.  I lacked the confidence to pass on my own finds to him.  

Later on, my tapes began to tell the story of my burgeoning feminism -- since this was the '90s, a Second Wave, Riot Grrrl-influenced feminism -- my own untattooed, still-introverted but increasingly confident version of it.

I found one tape that captured this moment in time, a "special edition" called "27 Songs by Women."  One of my signature ink-drawn notes is encircled by a Venus symbol.  Reading the list of songs really took me back.  Some remain staples of my playlists.  Others I haven't heard since the '90s.  Tori Amos, Veruca Salt, Shonen Knife, Hole, PJ Harvey, the Breeders, Belly, Throwing Muses, Heather Nova, Bjork, et cetera.

"Silent All These Years" leads off, and Indigo Girls' "Language or the Kiss" closes with a question, one never answered, but replaced with different questions.  

Yes, I have my playlists now, but I can tweak them with a quick right-click of my mouse -- a bit too easy.  In comparison, those tapes have staying power.  Like the spiral notebooks I scribbled in as a kid, they're immune to hasty single-fingertip deletion.  And every once in a while, I'll probably find myself combing through that dusty box of tapes and retrieving a gem. 

I had faithfully kept journals in spiral-bound notebooks and later more attractive blank-paged hardcover books, up until my last year or two of college.  I don't know why I stopped journaling.  I continued to write poetry and dabble in fiction, but at some point I stopped allowing myself the luxury of written self-reflection.  The mix tapes filled the void, and allowed me to tell my story (if only to myself) in music.  

I never did go back to handwritten journal-keeping, but eventually (after a few resistant Luddite years) started up a live journal, which offered the slightly unnerving opportunity for me to share my personal thoughts with other human beings, albeit at a safe distance.  Eventually, I replaced my highly personal blog with others more topical in nature.  I suppose sites like Facebook filled the more personal niche, or maybe, once again, I stopped believing I have the time to journal.  And I'm probably right, unfortunately.  It's difficult enough to make the time for poetry and fiction.  But occasionally, I jot down a quote or a few lines and file them away in a safe place.  

And I have my playlists.  The one entitled "Melusine" does, oddly enough, share a few tracks in common with my rediscovered feminist mix tape.  All is not lost.

Melusine is a Hibernating Creature

Hello — just a note to say that Melusine is headed on vacation shortly.

Don't worry, we're not going anywhere warm.  Winter will remain very much with us in our travels.

In any case, our nonfiction/review series will be on a two-week hiatus until we return.

Look for a new post the last weekend of this month, and have a lovely Valentine's Day!

P.S.  Don't forget about the poetry contest — just two weeks left before the March 1 deadline:  http://www.melusine21cent.com/mag/contest

Merlaine Sivels: Daddy Issues

When I was younger, he stuck around. He got an apartment nearby, dropped in whenever mom went to work and my brother went to play basketball. He would rent movies, a new one every week. We would watch them together. Eat all the frozen pizzas in the house together. 

The next day, mom had warned me not to let him do that again. She’d said it was bad for his blood pressure.

As I got older, he drifted farther away.

Location-wise, he was a nomad. 

Parked his truck in empty fields and slept in it. He only parked in places where he knew he wouldn’t get a ticket, and he would call me, telling me the newest place he’d managed to fall asleep. It was dangerous, his like of work. People robbed trucks and shot truckers, I was told, and for the longest time I would spend nights awake, wondering if I would get a call from him the next morning. He always seemed to make it, and by day, he emptied the truck to the designated store. Then be on his way again. 

He had sent me postcards. 

Alabama, Washington, Las Vegas, Utah, Texas, Maryland, California.

I still have them. My favorite was Virginia. He would call and ask me if I’d received the latest postcard, and I would reply with a yes, I had, but Virginia will always be my favorite. For a while, she let him come back, my mom.

She let him stay with us and we played house again for a while. He was the daddy. She was the mommy. I was the daughter and my brother was the son. The roles were intricate. My part was easy, but everyone else struggled. Eventually my mom got sick of pretending. She wanted him out. He left. She apologized to me.

To my brother. My brother took her sorry to heart, as if he was the one who’d been wounded. 

I remember going into another room and calling him, tell him that she apologized. He never picked up. Never called back.

I am a girl of false hopes, my mother told me once. He promises me things. I cling to them with all my heart, all my soul. When he doesn’t deliver, I am heartbroken. But he makes more promises and I cling some more.

Nowadays she tells me that I don’t remember the old him. The one who sent me to bed without food. Who pushed me to the ground whenever I would kiss her goodnight. The one who pinched me so hard he split my tender six-year-old skin in half for biting on a straw. 

She says that if I remembered the way I would cry in her arms while he was outside mowing the law, the way I would wail in my bedroom at night after he went to work, the way I would shake in his presence when I did something he didn’t like. If only I remembered that side of him then I wouldn’t hold on the way I did.

But all I can say to her is that he is my dad, and you can never let your number one fan go.

He doesn’t call me on my twentieth birthday. I don’t wake up waiting for it, but at the end of the day, I realize there is one voice I haven’t heard from. When I call him, he assures me, yes, he did call, and he even left a message. While he is speaking, I check my phone for the voicemail sign. 

It’s not on.

I ask him when I will see him again. It has been almost a year. We make plans for Sunday. He has a delivery in Miami for Monday, so he will pass through Orlando for a few hours. 

I am excited. Not just to see him, but just to be in his presence. To hear him talk in person, for once. To see his facial features, that huge smile I got from him. I miss it all.  He does not call me on Saturday.

On Sunday, I wake up early, dress, and put my keys in the ignition, as my phone buzzes with a new text message. I don’t need to read it. I pull my keys out, go back inside, undress and go back to bed.

At my door, my mom, is on the verge of tears because she can hear mine. False hopes, honey. False hopes. 

Three days later, I read the text message. We have new plans for Sunday again. He will be there, my phone assures me.

He does not call me on Saturday. On Sunday, I wake up early, dress, and put my keys in the ignition. My phone is silent the entire drive.

Since sixteen, we have met at the Navy Exchange, even though I am twenty nothing has changed. I drive around the parking lot, looking for him. I find his truck. 

The purple eighteen-wheeler is tall behind the old lawn and garden building. When I pull up he is not there. I park behind it and go look for him. I find him exiting the barbershop. From faraway, he is my dad. My daddy.

The man that woman would swoon over at my brother’s basketball games, at my job, in restaurants, in theme parks. He is tall and poise, walking with his back straight, like the military taught him. His hair, which has been balding since before I could remember, is cropped closely to his head. From far away, that smile is bright with memories of his little girl, and momentarily I expect him to run to me and scoop me into his arms like he used to. But he doesn’t. He keeps walking, and when we are standing face to face with each other, I realize that I have made a mistake. 

This man is not my father. 

His hair is salt and pepper instead of black. His eyes, usually vigilant and alert, are tired and baggy, as if they threaten to close at any moment. His stomach, once flat and muscular, is now heavy with the threat of a gut. His muscular arms are skinny.

And his face.

He is handsome still. But his face is accented with heavy lines around his mouth, around his eyes, on his cheeks, like origami art that has been deconstructed. 

I stare because I don’t know what to say. What do you say to a stranger?

He speaks first; a loud obnoxious greeting that if I was still thirteen would have made me laugh hysterically. Now it makes my bottom lip quiver. 

I greet him, closing in for a quick hug. He embraces me and even manages to lift me off the ground an inch or two. I do not stay airborne for long, and it scares me to think that there will come a time when he will no longer be able to do that.

When he releases me, my cheeks are wet. I tell him it is allergies. He believes me. 

We walk and he tells me about the allergies he had while in Alabama. He throws his head back in a laugh and says that I wouldn’t last a minute there. I nod, still looking at him, never looking away. I want to be able to see when this man will turn back into my dad. I want to watch the metamorphosis. He asks me what’s wrong? It’s my birthday.

I should be happy.

I reply that I am old now. He laughs again. That same laugh that sounds like my dad’s. He asks me how I have been. How is my boyfriend? How is my brother? How is my car (he can’t help but comment that it still looks like shit)? 

I tell him everything is good. Everyone is fine.

I don’t tell him about how I have moved in with my boyfriend, how my brother has moved out because of fights with mom, how my car stopped working in the middle of the highway the other day, how my heart stutters when I laugh too hard or sleep on my stomach, about my puppy, about my grades. 

He doesn’t pry.

He tells me about his fiancée. He calls her Mrs. Sivels. 

When he says this, I laugh for the first time. I picture my mom. She isn’t, but to me, she will always be the only Mrs. Sivels. It is not as funny to him as it is to me. To him it is not funny at all.

We walk around the exchange for an hour. When he finds something he likes, he gets my attention by calling my name and begging me to look.

It reminds me of our road trips when I was younger. When we would pass a field of horses or cows, he would nudge me repeatedly. 

 

Look! Look! Cows!

I indulge him by feigning interest. 

In return, I point to things I like. He merely nods, continues walking. Makes a comment about my mom buying me something if I want it bad enough. When we pass the jewelry department, he shows me the ring he plans on buying for the new and improved Mrs. Sivels. 

It is five thousand dollars. He informs me that she is worth every penny.

He does not have time to take me out to my birthday lunch as we planned. He admits that I took too long getting there. We eat at a sub shop.

I do not like subs, but I don’t speak up. He doesn’t ask.

He eats quickly, almost swallowing his sub whole. 

Mouth full, he confides in me that he loves their subs. How does mine taste? As he is speaking, mine slips out of my hand on to the floor. He laughs. My stomach growls. I did not eat breakfast that morning in order to have room for lunch.

He says oh, well. He shrugs.

We are silent as we walk to my car and his truck. I cannot help but still look at him, but this time I know he is not going to change. For me, there will be no metamorphosis into the man I knew.

He pats me on the back as I stop in front of his truck. He tells me that he has something for me. I cannot help it, I get excited. I did not expect anything from him. He dashes into the cab of his truck and rummages around for a few minutes. The longer he takes the more my heart sinks. He yells down to me that he might have lost it—Oops, he found it. He steps down the cab with two envelopes. One blue. One yellow.

Both of them read To My Favorite Girl.

Before I can open them, he tells me that he has to get going. He’s sorry he can’t stick around.

I understand, or at least that’s what I tell him.

I admit to him that I had a good time. It had been too long since I last saw him.

He is already in his truck, turning his keys, and pressing buttons. He pulls the string that hangs by his head, and the sound of his horn reverberates through the parking lot as he exits on to the highway.

When I can no longer see him, I open the first envelope. The yellow one. 

It is a Valentine’s Day card. When I open the card, it sings a quick song and to the side he writes a simple message telling me to be good, don’t do anything he wouldn’t. I smile, close the card. Slip it back into the envelope, and slip the envelope in my bag.

I open the second card, the blue one. 

There is a small postcard inside. There are big city lights and people smiling, showgirls dancing, casinos and gambling all on the front. Las Vegas, it reads in pink lettering.

When I flip it over there is a small greeting. To the right is his scribbled handwriting:  I always remembered that this one was your favorite. Happy 22nd birthday, young lady.

Merlaine Sivels is pursuing a degree in English education and has promised her mother that she would publish at least one story during her lifetime (her mother's, that is, not that she plans on passing anytime soon.)

 

Lisa Gurney: The Mane Mutiny

Being bald is at the very top of my mother’s lamentation list.  By age sixty, her crown was completely naked, hugged at the base of her skull by a Franciscan-like ring of thinning wisps.

Within an hour of meeting someone, my mother will invariably pull off her wig and say “Isn’t this sad?  Look at what happened to me, and at such an early age, too.”  Annoyed, I promptly respond, “Stop it!  Your circumstance could be far worse.”  Her face falls from the pain of being misunderstood, though she does mutter a weak “I know.”

At the onset of my fortieth year, however, I’ve become more sympathetic to my mother’s plight.  My hair is starting to follow the same ebbing path hers took.  My locks are losing weight, becoming anorexic, exposing a bed of bright white skin. I can clearly see where my follicle future is heading, and it is all down-scalp.

I’ve begun to understand that it is more than just about diminishing hair.  The loss speaks of waning beauty, growing old, and about losing a tool in the feminine wiles arsenal.  It is a sign that I am on the “other side” of my life.  There is a breadth of emotion packed in those dwindling strands.  What else is going to thin and eventually disappear?

Now, I no longer get annoyed or frustrated when my mother sits with a sad look in her eyes, head bent so my husband can shave the remaining and tired tufts that poke through her wig.  I feel sad too.  And I wonder why my response to her has been insensitive when she raised me to be kind of heart, empathetic, and generous in relationships.  Perhaps I am putting up hard words to shield me from unpleasant realities, my mother’s aging and her inability to view it as anything other than a heavy burden.

Luckily, I have the aptitude to view my own aging differently, and I will have a say in how I let the mutiny of my mane affect me.  When the time comes I won’t whip off my wig to near strangers.  Instead, I’ll discover if blondes really do have more fun and if red-heads are fierier.  Brightly patterned turbans will adorn my head, accompanied by large hoop earrings, sweeping bohemian skirts and sandals.  Who knows, maybe I’ll get a tattoo that says "Bald is Beautiful" and just go commando. 

Lisa Gurney quit her Fortune 500 job in 2007 to pursue her dream of writing full time. Since then, her fiction and essays have been published both in print and online in the U.S. and Canada. She is the recipient of the 2007 National PRNDI Award for Commentary for her essay "A Witness to Violence."  She resides in Worcester, MA and welcomes comments at lisajgurney@gmail.com.

Editorial: More Light?

Because it's the holidays—at least for another day or so—and because the holidays mean that submissions tend to slow down toward the end of the year, I thought I would write an editorial-type piece in this blog on a holiday theme.  I've been meaning to write an editorial-type piece on something or other, and this seemed as good an excuse as any.  I knew it wasn't going to be something warm and fuzzy, although the impulse sprang from a holiday sort of place—the desire to offer something, however modest in value it may turn out to be, for the sake of offering it.

That seems to be one of the most consistent impulses surrounding the Winter Solstice holiday that has evolved into our Western Christmas and concurrent religious observances, often lumped together as "the holidays" as if they all occur at precisely the same time, even on years like this one when Hanukkah concluded on December 9th. 

Gift-giving is obviously paramount to the holidays these days, since without retailers to remind us of our obligations to our loved ones and mere acquaintances as early as late September, what would a modern holiday season be?  But an even more basic and ancient impulse was simply to ward off the darkness a little bit by lighting a candle.

It's hard to imagine a time when things like candles on a tree—or the safer alternative of flashing LED lights—were not merely symbolic holiday tropes, but there was such a time, and I think the deal of how it all started was as basic as this.  Year after year, after the harvest and first frosts had passed, people noticed that the days were getting so short that it seemed, at the rate they were going, they would eventually disappear (thus the need to appease the sun gods) and the growing cold from the retreating sun only exacerbated the feeling of darkness.  People huddled inside around their fires much of the day, and probably grew more guarded and fearful of the world outside—and they had reason to be.  Their children may not survive the winter.[1]

It was a brazen, foolhardy and generous impulse to run out into the cold, dark village lane or town square with a torch and an amphora of wine or horn of mead to share with one's neighbors.  But after enough of the stuff had been imbibed, and with everyone glutted on the slaughtered livestock who wouldn't be surviving the winter, anyway, a merry mood was inevitable.[1]  It all must have happened quite naturally.

And that's the problem with the modern Christmas, lamented by Bethlehem-minded observers like "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz in 1965 as well as more secular-minded critics holding an equally dim view of commercialism today:  Nothing about it seems quite real.

But the thing is, it isn't that the rest of our modern lives feels solid and substantial, and only our Christmas is phony.  It's that our comfortable, everyday world is made of aluminum, polystyrene, and silicon (or silicone), and our Christmas is no exception.  Our Christmas is part and parcel of our time, just like it was for the Victorians (and it's hard to say now exactly how the Victorian Christmas was before its repackaging by nostalgia) and yet our Christmas still seems somehow wrong to us—because it doesn't match up to Dickens or even to that 1965 "Peanuts" cartoon.  Everyone (or so it seems) wants to be old-fashioned at Christmas, but very few know how, and the uninitiated are afraid those few will take their secret recipes to the grave.

Who would be familiar with the work of Currier and Ives these days if they weren't enshrined in a familiar carol?  What the heck is a wassail, anyway?  If it's spiked, as I presume it is, I'm game, but I hope someone else knows the recipe.  (Yes, it is, and here is the recipe.[2])  But who has the time to bake, construct and decorate a gingerbread house?  A few very dedicated purists here and there, and some TV pastry chefs. 

To most of us, it's just another trope, like the holly and the ivy (medieval symbols for male and female, "when they are both full grown"--and you can guess which medieval gender is the bright, upstanding holly and which the clinging ivy) or Santa Claus (an incarnation of the Norse god Odin later melded with a 4th Century Greek saint [4]) and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, who at least makes the misfit in all of us feel more at home at a time when it seems everyone else knows where they belong in the scheme of this holiday thing.

The two-to-three-month buildup to Christmas has a way of making the most romantic among us feel like Grinches.  On December 23rd, I found myself humming "Eleanor Rigby" instead of "Deck the Halls."  I knew so many people newly or long-single, geographically distant or estranged from their families for whom I could only imagine this season to be a long, grim slog. 

Should we tag as foul-spirited Grinches anyone who feels a bit cranky at all the product-peddling clichés whirling around them?  I don't think so.  Even with family to go home to and with a loving partner at my side, the pressure of the season had been grating on my nerves, aided by a perennial case of seasonal affective disorder.  This year, I hoped for a light therapy box under my tree.

For the reluctant among us, instead of just "Consume, consume," the advertisers have to sell the idea of Christmas first, and often do so by implying that all would-be consumers have a dormant sense of Christmas buried deep inside them that is just waiting to be sparked.  Maybe one of their more scientifically-minded consultants convinced them there is some kind of Christmas gene, and one of the ways it's expressed is by making the phenotype in question rush down to the Apple store or Jared, The Galleria of Jewelry. 

If Charles Schulz were still around and someone managed to convince him to make a second sequel to his famous "Peanuts" Christmas cartoon, what might he have to say about the way commercialism has truly blossomed since 1965, and even 1992, when the first sequel was aired—about how it's exploded into the full-grown monstrosity that it is today? 

What might he say about all the ways we've found to imitate items once found in nature or even the factory with digital, virtual representations of them?  (At least a pink aluminum Christmas tree exists in three dimensions.)

If he were a paleo-pagan instead of a Protestant, (although it's interesting to note that later in life he referred to himself as a secular humanist [5]) what might he, speaking for our ancestors, say about what has happened to the simple impulse to light a candle rather than cursing the darkness, and to share a little of what makes a person merry with one's neighbors and friends?

Oh, sure, it didn't take long even for the ancients to pin down this impulse into stagnant ritual.  That's one of the things groups of humans do best—suck the feeling out of something and replace it with a "how-to" manual, and then put the manual up for sale, along with some devotional trinkets.  That's no modern phenomenon. 

What we've managed to innovate in the last century or so is a world where, due to our cleverness, our success as a species, we don't need candles to light our dark nights anymore, and so we've logically come to believe that all we need is the idea of a candle, the trope of a candle cut into a rough shape for a cookie or synthetic fabric mold. 

I have to emphasize that I count myself as someone who is in favor of the future—meaning that I detest the idea of cursing progress, proclaiming all that's modern to be corrupt and decadent, because much of what we have built for ourselves over the millennia has proven light years better than what we started out with, and not only with regard to technology.  Much of our way of thinking about our fellow human beings is more inclusive and tolerant and less self-serving and violent.  Although we obviously have a long way to go along that path, on the whole we are kinder and gentler. 

But I do think we might do well, in the midst of hunkering down and wishing coziness and comfort for me and mine, to remember the despair, and disparity, that persists in the world outside our weatherproof doors—in the parts of the world map lit up by the electric grid and the parts that as of yet are not—and light a candle with that darkness in mind.  

Apparently Goethe's apocryphal last words "More light!" turn out to be a posterity-minded paraphrase of his more banal instruction to "Open the second shutter so that more light may come in."[6]  Does it really matter, though?  Letting the sun in is one way of letting the world in, and maybe the reverse is also true.

Thanks for reading—here's wishing you a happy and luminous New Year!


Because there's much in the world I don't know (but the World Wide Web does) I consulted these sources:
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20cohen.html?_r=1
2. http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php?title=wassail
3. http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/2731/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_M._Schulz
6. http://www.utne.com/2002-07-01/famous-last-words.aspx

Review: Marsha Mathews' Northbound Single-Lane

Northbound Single-Lane by Marsha Mathews

Finishing Line Press, 2010,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Marsha Mathews' first chapbook Northbound Single-Lane was recently published by Finishing Line Press in a lovely handcrafted-looking edition with a cover illustration of a magnified grasshopper that immediately drew me in.

Mathews' disarmingly accessible style kept me turning the pages through this 19-poem collection, and I appreciated the arrangement of the poems both chronologically in terms of the speaker's personal narrative but also, true to the title, directionally northward, albeit with a detour here and there.

And, of course, the final poem brings the speaker home both to her native Florida, the point of departure, but we also realize by this point in the collection that "northbound" has another meaning as well, as does "single-lane."  The speaker's decades-long journey, taken in the company of two daughters who occasionally aggravate but more often inspire, ends when she finds herself sitting alone but un-lonely, finally free from the domination of two powerful griefs, first for a father who passed away and second for a husband who walked away, on the dock her father built:  "On this dock I once watched/ the horizon through my father's eyes./ Cigar scent choked the salt./ I now see the ladder at the end of the fill."

By this point, the speaker has come a long way since a poem early in the collection, "Merry-Go-Whorl," in which the dissolution of a marriage was portrayed as a slowly dawning horror:

You snuggle

into this complacency

till one day

the person you love most

averts his face.

Living room walls open

& out prance

blue unbridled hyenas.

Your house crumbles

into a powdery rubble of questions.

In a later poem,  "Lone Goose," Mathews shows her skill for crafting an interwoven conceit when she compares the goose's morning call and its disruption of the fragile security of a tranquil lake to the fragile psychic security she has tentatively begun to build while taking refuge at the lake, also shattered by the same noise, like a jarring meditation bell.

The daughters appear as constants in the narrative, comfort amid the uncertainty.  In "Abigail's Antiques," one daughter panics her mother by practicing ballet steps oblivious to the breakable merchandise in the eponymous store, but Mathews gracefully turns the poem to make apparent what is ultimately of value to the mother:  "... for her, there's no breaking./ Even if she leaps."

This territory is risky when it comes to avoiding the maudlin, and Mathews doesn't always manage to steer completely clear of it, but she does avoid going over the edge.

And occasionally, a more caustic tone emerges, as in "The Sectioning," a pitch-perfect and in fact one of the strongest poems here:

The first time you see her

she is crying.  For weeks,

screams tear the air.

As you drive to the grocery store,

her voice rides in your temples.

You check the mirror,

sure that she is following.

The relatively long final poem is the natural culmination of the collection, and it begins compellingly:

On the dock my father built

I watch lights from beach houses

quiver toward me,

streak across Boca Ciega Bay.

The moon shoots itself

to the water.  Light spins, flashes

like Spanish doubloons.

They dazzle, tempt me with miracle.  
Yet the neighbor's dog howls.  
A gull pounds the air with its wings.  
A mullet slaps the surface.  
The grainy boards beneath my feet
are real enough.  What then?

Halfway through, the breakthrough:  "I remembered laughter." 

The closing lines of the final stanza leave us with the collection's most luminous imagery:

Tones draw into seawall's hollows,

lamp shells.  They cluster

& shine like pearls,

holding off everything

empty.

The speaker's quest for identity began in the opening poem, in which she as a girl injected a grasshopper with red dye because "I ached for something/ to inject myself with/ to make me shine."

In the final poem, the world makes its presence truly felt to the speaker, and is moved in turn by what she discovers in the penultimate stanza, "... music never before heard:/ my notes."