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Review by Shannon Walsh
It would be unfair not to admit before delving into this review that it is with some bias. Sarah Hannah was my teacher, friend and mentor until her death in May of 2007; six months before the release of Inflorescence. Yet this relationship in itself might not have created a blind spot when it comes to Hannah’s poetry. Instead the problem, if it is a problem, is that when I read the poems in Inflorescence, I hear her read them, with every perfect inflection and intonation, a pleasure that unfortunately others can no longer have.
Reviewers often locate a work of poetry within a specific context by comparing the work with other poets or books. Sarah Hannah’s second book, Inflorescence defies location. It is a truly original book of linked poems about the deterioration and eventual death of Hannah’s mother, Renee Rothbein. Of course, this in itself grounds the book within the realm of the confessional; the subject matter of family death; the ever-pervasive form of linked poems. However, this intelligent, subtle, sometimes formal, and always darkly intense book has more depth than such labels can give.
An assortment of dualities pushes through the overarching theme of Rothbein’s death. Indeed the following lines from “An Elegy from Bells” could be a paraphrasing of the book itself, “…There are two sides to everything://The ring and its ghost, the one/Calling and the one called…//There are two sides to everything://The pain in it ringing,/And in it ringing no longer.”
The worlds of nature and human-consciousness are both juxtaposed and intertwined throughout Hannah’s work. This is especially prevalent in Hannah’s investigation into the tendency for humans to have multiple names for natural things, an idea that is repeated throughout the book. One of many examples would be, “Sky Pencil (Ilex crenata),” a poem that not only demonstrates this duality within the title, but continues to contextually explore the idea:
So we’re of one mind that there are two names for
Every real thing—in Latin, Genus, species—
More, if we can count the common ones from lore.
Many impartial
Parties call this poem’s title tree “Japanese
Holly,” but you should know right now: we aren’t here
At all concerned with neutrality.
It is intriguing that Hannah succeeds in unselfconsciously identifying that this is a poem while aligning herself with the reader. “But you should know right now: we aren’t here/At all concerned with neutrality.” Hannah acknowledges through the line-break that neither the reader nor she herself are really present in this ephemeral space of intellect and art. She then continues by instructing the reader to his own position: this is how we feel. This becomes important later, when her father enters the poem at the point of the Sky Pencil’s aphid-infestation:
“How will you find a cure,” he says, “when you don’t
Know the real name?” My father’s a classicist.
Rather, I should say
He’s an artist who paints in the classical
Style: no composition or tone off balance,
No expression without order. His oeuvre:
Dolorous women
Clothed, thinking, a vase or a peach beside them,
Or, if he’s feeling wild, both. Were the tree his,
He’d know the Latin name. Still, I retain an
Obstinate preference
For the nickname as if it were true, as if
Trees could bridge the awful space splitting ground from
Cloud and shell from star, and Wordsworth’s heart might leap…
Hannah brings the reader from the space of the ethereal and into story; the reader has lost his invitation to be a part of the action. Still, the reader recalls his placement as one who is unconcerned with “neutrality” and so is made aware of his own contrast with classic moderation. Hannah complicates this further through the invocation of her mother:
…the woman who’d have loved that name,
Who painted, let’s say, quite a bit differently,
Colors off spectrum
Flowers, heads, eye sockets, and skulls, floating, so
Thick, my inheritance: a hundred cracking
Canvases, cadmium red to mars black.
Here, even if the reader does not want to, he is forced to identify with this manifestation of an absence of neutrality, both because of the artistic extremity and also because of the woman’s preference for the tree’s unofficial name. But Hannah does not let the reader rest in this companionship; the poem reaches climax:
…There were names
For all that too: Borderline, Bipolar, Mad;
Vengeful, tender; refusing mood stabilizing
Medicines—But who
Could help adoring that common moniker,
Itself a piece of whimsy, ridiculous,
Dark cleft leaves inscribing heaven with sheer will?
So, I call experts
Who of course know every name, and I commence
A cure, as she now and then glances down from
Her work—freed from quill, lead, reed, even pen—
Rendering true forms.
Here, Hannah forbids the reader from settling on any one thing—from the ether of abstract intellect to the father; from the father to the mother; from the mother to the tree. The reader is appeased in knowing that he was right in following Hannah—that the tree’s illness can be cured even without the Latin—but is then unseated again with the question of what, exactly, is being cured: tree or painter?
The last sentence swallows both mother and tree, but within a greater space of contrast. The tree is “inscribing heaven with sheer will,” while the mother is “rendering true forms.” The tree, as pencil, writes fantasy; the mother, through an absence of language, creates truth. Hannah brings the conflict between language and nature to a head—even Wordsworth’s “common” language cannot “bridge that awful space” between real and Platonic ideal; names, a human construct, fail to make.
It is interesting to note, that while Hannah says “father,” she never says the word “mother.” She describes the painter as female, and the paintings as her inheritance, so the reader could make the assumption that the subject is Hannah’s mother—especially if the reader has read the rest of Inflorescence. Within the poem’s context, the omission of the word “mother” makes her more truly rendered than the named “father,” “step-mother, “ex-husband,” and the author and reader as well.
The clash between what is natural and what is human finds form again through invasion. Whether the invasion of an insect in “The Riddle of the Sphinx Moth” in which the author discovers that the human system of ownership is subordinate to nature, or the invasion of a flower on the imagination in “Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora)” in which trepidation of seeing the “one flower, with one turn,/Or so the Latin” could terrify in image and in name, “Like so many things, it had/Three names, three aspects:/Indian Pipe, Corpse-plant, Ghost-flower;/Single, terminal; nodding.” Or in the unwelcome invasion of a natural death as in the second poem of the volume, “Common Creeping Thyme (Serpillum a serpendo).” This is a poem through which Hannah also demonstrates the compatibility of high and low language, as in the sequential lines, “While you lie in a corner weeping dactyls (AH ha ha)//Until I reach you, grab your hands. If love’s/Time’s fool, I’m full-on schmuck…” and the duality of physical versus mental illness, “…You’ve always wanted//A brain tumor, some definitive (read: physical)/Disease people will breathe above a whisper.”Hannah sets up the reader’s expectations in the hospital as an instance of intentional self-destruction, “Another of your episodes: an overdose/Borderline lethal, perhaps; a minor/ Conflagration on the kitchen counter.” But it’s not another breakdown “…I admit I’ve never seen you//Quite like this before.” Finally the diagnoses, interrupted by names of potted herbs she asks her mother to list: pneumonia, brain tumors and:
…"Metasta—“
Rosemary! you holler, Rosemary! as your arthritic hand
Smacks down in triumph on the piled white sheets—
“Sized,” he concludes, then speaks slowly to my face.
“It doesn’t look good.”…
As brilliant as the subtle contrast between natural disease and unnatural conditions for plant growth, is Hannah’s pacing. She brings the reader through the news as if it cannot be said quickly enough, demonstrating the perception that time decelerates at our most impatient. Yet the slowness of the diagnosis becomes a wish, “I know a shape of Time I’ve only seen/You paint—trumpet, bone, and wing, and I pray//To the fluorescent ceiling: Stay this Creep…”
If in a collection of poems, the book itself is the final poem, Hannah has succeeded. The poems in Inflorescence build on themselves until each can be read in a greater context. Naming, Nature, Home, Death, Art, and Memory all figure prominently; minor things like the color red recur. One poem mentions morphine and another describes flowers the color of morphine. An italicized “Mum!” near the end of one poem becomes the intensified “Mum! Help me Mum” in the first stanza of the next; a counter-fire later turns into a structural fire. Each of these poems can be read without the others—they are not prohibitively self-referential—but as a book Inflorescence forms the complex narrative structure of a poem in itself.
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