rev. of Letter from an Outlying Province by Patricia Cumming
In
Personal Effects and
Letter from an Outlying Province, two books published by the consciously feminist Alice James press, there seems to be a serious failure to "speak the loving word." The vision of Patricia Cumming's
Letter. . . is one of anger, the voice dissonant and jagged. Where Sarah Appleton would say "here the song is lyric sorrow" ("Sound"), in Patricia Cumming there is no lyricism, and sorrow remains unrefined. The topics in
Letter. . . are mostly those that have come to be associated specifically with angry feminists — mothers, aunts, the humiliation of the body — and most of the poems are spoken in the persona of Raggedy Ann (who appears on the rather tasteless cover):
now her voice poisons
me from my ownguts: armed with search
warrants she wields fate
like a parking
ticket or an enema
And a poem like "Other/Words for Children" ("I'd like to kill them. My parents./I'd put each of their heads in a vise/And vomit") shows poor impulse control.
The quote from Henry Michaux at the beginning of the book says, "Je vous ecrit du bout du monde," and indeed the tone of these poems expresses that. The poverty of language, reliance on cliche (the blurb on the back cover which says of the author that "whenever possible she lives in the country and grows herbs"), and the childish violence of this book are all qualities of one writing "from the end of the world," and an end of which we would rather not be reminded.
Of the three poets represented in
Personal Effects, Helena Minton goes farthest to avoid cliche. There is something painfully familiar, limited, and particular in such lines as
Sexual Politics
We lived behind windows made by others
(Zuckerman, "Turning Point")
You wave goodbye.
I leave you, stalled in a jet.
And in Chicago, someone is waking
to meet you at O'Hare.
(Becker, "The Airport")
On the whole, while the language of Helena Minton is not much more careful or distinguished than these examples, the concerns of her poems tend to be somewhat more extended. A very good poem, I think, is "Raccoon Skeleton at Long Plain Creek":
Wading upstream we bump his carcass
with our ankles, He jiggles
like the needle of a compass
scattering silt until he's pure
milk white. . .
all the soft things are gone,
bone gets its turn.
