Book Review

Blessing and Curses
by Anne Whitehouse
Poetic Matrix Press, 2009

(Now available directly through Poetic Matrix Press, and through their Book Club. It is also available on Amazon)

Born of the poet's reflections on nature, human nature, and her own experience, Blessings and Curses is about life in balance, and life out of balance. The book, a collection of short narrative poems, opens with a story of a story, Moses' farewell to the Jewish people. Moses relates how each person could choose between acts which bestow divine blessings or curses on them, or life and death, respectively. The first poem, entitled "Blessings and Curses," introduces the theme of the book, and is one of only two poems that combine these two words in the title. The final poem is the other poem which combines the two words and is entitled "A Blessing and A Curse." It describes a Tibetan sand painting, painstakingly painted into beautiful and prescribed patterns by Buddhist monks, and then intentionally erased or destroyed by them. It is the epitome of beauty and transiency combined, a poignant reminder that impermanence is a basic feature of the physical world. The Tibetan sand painting could well represent the human answering call, to Moses' call, that people examine how they live their lives. This collection of poems flashes out the textures and subtleties of the Tibetan sand painting, and then fleshes them out before us, in fables of Blessings and Curses.

Though it begins with a Hebrew story, the poems are also filled with the wisdom of the Asian spiritual traditions. We've noted the Buddhist focus on the impermanence or transiency in nature, and in human experience. The poems also express Taoist naturalism, (and Western romanticism, to some degree), i.e., that human beings and art should strive to imitate and unify with nature. In states of clear consciousness, the mind, at least for the moment, stops projecting itself on the person's immediate experience, and one simply is. The poet describes such meditative and unitive experiences with nature, as on Sanibel Island, an island off the Florida coast. Poems on Blessings include a description of the beauty of the island, and the raw power of nature, as a storm approaches (Blessing XIV).

Another aspect of Taoism is that things exist in relationship to their opposite. This is the principle of Yin and Yang. Yin is contractive and Yang is expansive energy. The Blessings and Curses could also be understood in this way, as being opposite but complementary. Thus, there are disquieting or Curse-like elements in many of the Blessings, in which a limit to the being's growth or expansion occurs. Conversely, there are hopeful or positive Blessing elements in the Curses. In the end it seems to be the outcome itself that determines if a particular course of events becomes a Blessing or a Curse. Thus, a poem about a brother and sister who speak haltingly to each other after 30 years of silence, is called a Blessing (XVII). However, the poem of two runners who collide, resulting in the injury and anger of one, while the other patiently waits for the ambulance to arrive before leaving, is a Curse (Curse VIII). The poet's mixed description of her experience as a tutor (Blessing XVIII) leads to quite an interesting paradoxical image as, from the final line of that poem". . . the impersonal glow of her ease and warm maternal confidence."

A Blessing involves one's commitment with their full being and sense of participation, while a Curse involves a contraction, a holding back of full commitment to the situation described. One Blessing describes how her lack of receptivity while dreaming, limits the poet's receptivity to her dream (Blessing XIX). Another Blessing poem (Blessing XXIII) describes an interrupted phone call, in which the poet's aunt didn't have a chance to express her immediate reaction to reading a book by the poet. This is near the end of a very poignant description:

Try as I might,
I couldn't elicit her first reaction a second time.
In its place, a sober, loyal assessment was taking shape.
And I never heard her sounding like a young girl again.

My hope was deferred to one of those afterlives
where only our imaginations take us,
where we rehearse to our satisfaction
what could have been, but was not.

Her lost response was intoxicating,
like that wildness that steals over our nerves
just when the snow is melting, and wetness
streams in slick rivulets down the back streets,

where the sun's reflection bobbles and dances,
and nothing is fixed or solid, but trembling
and thawing and flowing and changing -
like a bubble wavering in balance on the Great Divide.

—from Blessing XXIII

That opposites are complementary, is expressed in the Yin and Yang symbols of Taoism, each of which occupies a small circle within itself of the opposite color. This signifies the existence of Yin within the Yang element, and vice versa. Thus, a Blessing contains element of a Curse, and vice versa, which helps give the poems poignancy and beauty.

Sometimes human beings impede the flow of nature, as in the Curse poem on the broken pigeon egg (Curse IV) or broken friendship (Curse XIX). Miscommunication also causes a person to not be in the moment, but the experience en toto might be considered as a Blessing rather than a Curse, as in the above description of the tutoring (Blessing XVIII).

The relationship between poems of Blessing which affirm life, and poems of Curses that affirm death is dualistic and cyclical, and could be expressed in Yin-Yang symbolism. In a fundamental sense, Life and Death are the two fundamental poles of attraction which repel each other but attract like elements. Thus, Death figures most prominently in the Curse poems. And so, for example, like her mother who died seven months earlier, the poet's pet guinea pig dies, which is a Curse poem (Curse XIV). The death of the girl or a woman, cared for, lovingly, in a private luxury room, is also a Curse, presumably because it involves death (Curse XVIII). But, there is at least one Blessing poem in which death is part of Blessing—the life cycle of the singing insects is a Blessing (Blessing VII). Thus, limitations and death enter into the Blessings, as well as the Curses.

Each Blessing and Curse could beget more of the same quality, and so, cycles of blessings and curses are created, even multi-generational ones. This cycle of cause and effect is karma, in the Eastern spiritual traditions. Karma, and its retributive aspect—an eye for an eye—also figures prominently in the Hebrew Bible. The flow of negative karma figures prominently in the Curses. In several Holocaust and one atomic bomb survivor stories, the memories of the experiences so traumatized the persons, that they become encapsulated in those negative feelings, unable to move on in their lives. Not moving on with their life becomes another curse, curse begetting curse, as it were.

This interspersing of blessings and curses makes this work very much of a musical work. What comes to this writer's mind is Philip Glass' score for a movie called Koyaanisqatsi (1982), which is a Hopi word meaning life out of balance. His modernist atonal score accompanies cityscapes photographed at high speed. So, we likewise see images here both of life out of balance, which applies to the Curses, but also life in balance, which are the Blessings.

The cadence of the Blessings and Curses has its own orbit into which it pulls the reader. The poems are very simply told, in narrative style—form and function influencing each other here. The text seems restrained but natural at the same time though it contains some lovely lyrical folds within, as in the above quotation.

In the series of poems, the poet observes the rise and fall of circumstances and lives, noting the observations of the participants, and whether they seemed to be fulfilled or unfulfilled. As the readers proceed, they will note the layers of dramatic tension within each poem, and between the poems. In the end, each poem, with all of its various hues and points of color is resolved into a single color; a choice must be made—is the poem to be designated as a Blessing, or a Curse?

And the world, our whole world of experience, what is it then, in the end, Blessing or Curse? Let us revisit the scene of the Tibetan painting in the American Museum of Natural History, and accompany the poet as she walks to home plate to await the final pitch. There's the pitch. A call must be made, but. . . Moses is not present, nor is there a Heavenly Umpire in sight. There is only. . . the observing mind of the human being, who endeavors to look at things with compassion and detachment, mindful of both beauty and impermanence. Is it a Blessing or Curse that the beauty of the Mandala cannot last? The last part of the poem reads:

One of the younger monks explained
how the museum had invited them to New York
from their monastic exile in northern India.

They carried the images they made in their heads.
The Mandala would take two months to finish.
"And then?" I asked. He smiled, and his gold tooth

winked at me. "We will take the Mandala
to the Hudson River and offer it to the water.
The museum wants to preserve it.

They will use sprays to fix the sands,
but they won't work. It will be given back;
the cycle must continue."

I remember the lightness in his voice,
the ripping muscles of his lifted arms,
a grace that seemed without sex, outside of time.

I was older than he, though still apprentice
to my art. I thought of the beautiful designs

of the Wheel of Life, their inner meanings
and mysteries, and the interplay of colors.

It seemed tragic to me, but not to him.
His inner equilibrium wasn't disturbed.

It mattered not to him that nothing lasted,
and I counted it a blessing and a curse.

—from the final poem, "A Blessing and A Curse"

Surely, the reader will conclude, to read Blessings and Curses by Anne Whitehouse, is a Blessing.

Reviewed by Paul Dolinsky
editor@thegoldenlantern.com