Book Review

Other Clues
by Grace Marie Grafton
RAW ArT PRESS, 2010
rawartpress.com

1.

What happens if you combine the following: the surrealist credo of all freedom to imagination; language which pushes nouns and verbs beyond their customary limits; respect for nature and natural processes with highlights of one's own personal history? If you're fortunate, you will discover Other Clues, Grace Marie Grafton's latest book of poems. Writing in the first person, the poet's imagination turns toward her experience of growing up on the farm, and in orchids. The poems are written not as verse, but as prose poems—perhaps the poet wishes the reader to confront each poem as a unitary life-form, conjured up by the poet to express each experience as unique and irreducible to the movements of its parts.

The intended reader of the poems is not the rational mind, but the aesthetic sensibility and transfigured imagination of the reader. Thus, it helps to approach the poems with an open attitude, free of presuppositions or expectations. They poems aren't written to be coherent or incoherent. They are what they are, life-forms of the imagination. Starting off as bits of stream of consciousness and the flotsam and jetsam of dreams and sensations, the poems offer other clues to the imaginative realms explored by the poet. For instance, in a poem about sewing, while facing an urban landscape, the poet ends the poem with these two paragraphs:

What am I to do with imagination but create a studio where buttons approximate orchid's ovaries and I invent indoor grass? (From "The moves," p. 45)

The poems, then, like works of magic, summon the essence of the poet's experience and seek to recreate it in words and image. The reader is not unlike the figure on the cover of the book (who seems to be the young bride who appears in the poems ), who peers around the corners of things in the dreamscape-landscape around her. Similarly, might the reader tilt their head, and examine the poetic landscape in which they find themselves, a landscape of transfigured imagination, dream, archetypal image and sensation. Indeed, the reader might well ask themselves this question, which is also the title of a poem, How many stories are the jewelry of the world? (p. 41). In this poem the poet ponders on the fairy tale of the wolf, and writes:

But real doesn't enter story. Mind's power: osmosis—cellular explosion. The queen mother wears the apple crown, lacquers her hair with wind. Open the lid of the box, drink her syrup of answer. (p. 41)

2.

The book is divided into three main sections: the poet, as she grows up; as bride; and as aging woman. In all of these phases, her desires and sensibilities are not necessarily in harmony with what is expected of her. This seems to go back to the very moments of her birth. The book opens with a description of a child struggling to be born:

when the umbilicus could not leave off quarreling with blood that stained the birth bed… (From "Allure," p. 15)

While the second section of the book is entitled "The Experienced Bride," we also meet the experienced bride, by name, in the third section, where she's been, presumably gaining more experience, as she tries to integrate the new and the old, in her life. She declares,

I decide to be the experienced bride. Harmonics of orbit-change, perpetual repeat of the new. (From "Evidence," p.51)

Her concerns also concern larger social issues, particularly as these proceed from her experience. Thus, the poem entitled "Dis-order" is a very cogent consideration of the relationship between civilization and the wilderness, as expressed in the issue of introducing her wash into the local watershed (p. 34).

3.

As the poet chronicles her own mental states, we could discern several modes of awareness:

(1) There is the self that watches and sees the roles that the poet assumes in her life passage. Grafton confronts the mortality of her life and art with a Buddhist-like sensitivity to impermanence, and the beauty of moment-to-moment awareness. This is described very nicely in the final few sentences of this poem:

I'm mortal, I use what vehicle I can to haul my walls into the shimmer that matches molecules dashing about my blood's luster. I know, even they are harnessed to eventual non-identity but: a present salon in my living room, conversation on the rim of darkness, echo of planets' ghostly presence. (From "Impulse," p. 37)

Besides the Buddhist, there are several others ways in which the poet describes her experience.

(2) She assigns great importance to the senses, in her approach to poetry. Without necessarily making any judgments, she incorporates sensation in her experience in a significant way, and in the very fabric of the poem. Perhaps, her closeness and obvious affection for nature, as farm and garden, facilitates this.

It might be helpful to our understanding, if we put this in a wider philosophical and literary context. Besides being a famous philosopher, Aristotle was a biologist who incorporated naturalism into his theory of poetry. He rejects the view of his teacher, Plato, that art is but a shadow of a shadow—a reflection of the physical world which is itself but a shadow of the supersensible world of Forms. Aristotle extols the view that art imitates life. This is mimesis, or imitation, in which the artist endeavors to reproduce nature through their art. In this artistic approach, called naturalism, the artistic tries to reproduce the vitality and realism of the physical object onto the canvas, or through other modes of artistic expression. Historically, this attitude of respect for nature becomes part of romanticism. Romanticism, however, often separated out emotion and sensation from its naturalistic basis in the world, leading one away from the world into extreme subjectivism. in which one loses touch with the natural world. In this collection of poems, the senses remain as touchstones for the poetic imagination, in its flights of fancy. And, not unlike a naturalist, Grafton keeps her attentiveness on the detail and the beauty of the natural world.

(3) There is the phenomenological stream of images, in which the poet recounts the story of the poem, sometimes with dispassion, other times, with emotion. This is not unlike moment-to-moment awareness in Buddhism, as described above. Among others in the book, her ekphrastic poems illustrate the importance she assigns to observing and describing the subjects of her poem. Ekphrastic poems are poems about works of art. Near the end of the book, there are a number of poems about painting, including some of the works the poet acknowledges as inspirational in her acknowledgements.

Grace Marie Grafton has herself been a teacher and developer of poetry programs in the schools, in California. So, it is perhaps not surprising that she describes here, in the voice of the student, or the teacher as student, the philosophy that underlies her approach to art. This poem offers a concise and clear statement of this. We will cite it in full, and with it, conclude our discussion.

A word glances off my teacher's cheek, sound's filament, a tiny tie between her mind and mine. No purposeful scroll, but strands where memory conjures and fumbles—we as mediums for myriad leaves. What else dangles just beyond sight? Some say concentric circles, existences I have not yet surrendered to. Futile, any wish I might employ to caress them into revelation. My foraging remains: to hold day in sight, coin earned from the game of the senses. Sit idle, feel time gather droplets against my skin. Let my teacher patrol the elusive limits, I'll borrow her shirt when I essay the journey. ("Beacon," p. 72)

Other Clues by Grace Marie Grafton could be ordered directly from its publisher, RAW ArT PRESS (www.rawartpress.com), and also from www.amazon.com.

Reviewed by Paul Dolinsky
editor@thegoldenlantern.com