Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Cheryl Ann Passanisi
Informed
by Alison Stone
New York Quarterly
May 2024, 108 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1630451073, paperback
Informed by Alison Stone features a different form of poetry in each section: Pantoum, Ghazal, Villanelle, Sonnet, Sonnet Crown, Haiku. All of these forms arrive to the English language from different traditions and cultures, received as models to contain thoughts and emotions expressed in the images of poetry. On the blue-violet cover is an image of the Great Mother figurine – a form, a received form that projects a template of the feminine, not the disempowered fragile feminine of current ingrained ideals but the broad-hipped Mother of all who pushes humans through her body, who establishes connection and community through her connection with the earth and the soil of the earth laced with the star dust from which we were formed. This in turn, implies a model, projected throughout the poems, of transformation, of received history, often painful but manifest into a vessel that can be handled, examined: informed.
The sections of pantoums are compelling and gripping. She explores loss, memory, childhood scenes/trauma, shifting relationships, family/heritage, and health. From the first poem Visit:
Wherever you’re going, you won’t get there from here
an owl’s hoot warns small, scurrying beasts.,,
I didn’t know when we kissed
that our future had fluorescent hospice light.
The virus bloomed in your blood.
You visit, then leave me, in dreams.
The repetition in the form haunts as the sound of the “owl’s hoot” resonates throughout and intensifies the sense of loss: “fluorescent hospice light”, the glare, the unflinching acknowledgement that the “virus bloomed” in the beloved and yet, inescapably: “You visit, then leave me…”, the abandonment relived repeatedly.
What I love about Pantoums, and what is evident in Stone’s Pantoums, is that each line must be strong and durable in order to serve in multiple stanzas within the form and have the versatility and universality to be held in contrast against images that differ in each stanza. This fascinates me about Pantoums, creates an incantatory mythic quality and allows the meaning of a line to transform juxtaposed to shifting images, adding depth and resonance. Stone accomplishes this throughout the sections of this form.
She demonstrates again the strength of a line; from Picket Fence:
The mother drinks in secret.
The father punches his shame into a wall…
…How did love end up like this?
…as the TV blares fake mirth.
…Dinners finish in tears,
though everything’s wiped clean.
In pictures, they all smile
on beaches or the front lawn.
These already provocative lines are bolstered by the repetition as Stone relays the early childhood trauma of observing violence and dysfunction, and being a silent witness. The dissonance of mother drinking and father smashing walls and the associated shame is poignantly contrasted with them smiling on “beaches or the front lawn”. These images come alive and are viscerally experienced; the language’s precision cutting.
In Cargo, she recognizes that all her loved ones are retained within her wherever she travels, to Rome or all over the world, complete with grandmom’s “Yiddish curses”:
I travel with my friends and relatives
past masterpieces and churches.
This whole crew I won’t let go of.
Everywhere I go, I take my dead.
She muses that her mother would love the churches and her grandmother was afraid to board a plane, but they are present with her none-the-less.
The sections of Ghazals and Villanelles are less convincing or compelling and these forms, at times, seem force. In these sections she continues to explore memory, loss, pandemic as well as rebellious teenage years. In Lost Ghazal she asserts: “want to die fully spent, each heart-stone
turned” and
“cushioned by taken-for-granted mother
love. Her alive. In dreams she can’t find me.
My daughter channels Williams. This note’s to
say I took your rings. They sparkle. Signed, Me.
Gold frames hold old Alisons – newborn, pig-
tailed, sulky teen. Young, muscled, unlined me.
In many of these poems she addresses herself at the end as “Alison” or “Stone”. At first is was startling because it seemed a new character was being introduced at the end of a poem and then it became a comforting refrain at the closing because what are we doing in poems but talking to ourselves, sometimes talking ourselves off a high ledge, trying to find a throughline that gets us back safely on the ground from our physical or mental journeys. Not that every poem has to “land” safely but this search for grounding, the soul searching for a home, is often the impetus for these poems.
The crown of sonnets, Suburban Development, again taps into family dysfunction and brings scenes from childhood into focus with chilling directness. Scenes from the writer’s childhood neighborhood, friendship, disappointment, shame, difficulties of growing up in a family with an alcoholic, first crush, and loss come to sharp focus in the sonnet series:
I starved myself to safety, transcendence,
skin pale as the angels I imagined.
Did angels start as humans and then die?
Ann Stevens had a problem with her lungs.
She was skinny but still came to Brownies.
Then an ambulance parked in her driveway
and her parents and sister moved away.
My parents acted like she went with them…”
Or from another section of Suburban Development:
We were lying, of course. Everyone knew
there were secrets under the tablecloths,
the makeup. In the trunk of the new car.
I envied Sue her family’s honest mess…
Sue was strong so no one teased her.
The poems are raw and pull the curtains back to reveal intimate family dynamics and heartbreak. Death was real and claimed a young neighbor and she wonders about an afterlife and “starved myself to safety, transcendence”. With no real example of how to live, she had to “transcend”, “starve”, develop an eating disorder as a way to survive the death and destruction around her that was felt and yet hidden, unspoken, unacknowledged: “under tablecloths,/the makeup”, stashed in the “trunk of a new car”. As a young person captured by the family drama of alcoholism and violence, she makes due, controls what she can in order to preserve her “self”.
With the return of Pantoums in section 4, scenes emerge from the recent pandemic while she explores the nature and results of the quarantine. In Quarantine Morning she revisits the startling quiet and nature sounds as humanity retreated and nature seemed to surge with more bird songs and sightings of wild animals on streets:
The air is sweet, the sky clean of machines.
…since people have been forced to pause.
The flagrant magnolia starts to unpetal.
Waxy pink and white carpet, soon to brown…
small window between beauty and decay…
What is the meaning of the dead stars’ light?
What are the songbirds saying?
Stone works with memory throughout and often wonders why some memories are more prominent than others. In, One to Keep, she wonders if we could choose a memory, which would we choose:
…smell of sawdust, the walls’ exact gray…
Attention fixed on what’s long-dead…
many of us miss today’s light.
As we grieve what we’ve lost to the pandemic,
the air cleans and animals claim space…
Buffalo on beaches, elk in yards –
Humans forced from places we took.
Acknowledging the vulnerability in the unknown, Stone muses on what else can be lost to the pandemic and what we did to fill time during that period dreamily recalling in Something More:
There’s always something more that can be lost.
Locked down, I drift through blended days,
drag the dog on yet another walk…
My older daughter’s bored enough to bond…
Bodies pile up like rocks.
The lungs of parents, spouses, children fail
in the news I hate but can’t turn off.
As in the earlier pantoums each line is weighty with significance, image and diction. Stone will often change a few key words in the repeating lines to stretch the image further. In this case, “flesh” becomes “memory”: remembering felt in a visceral way. Generally, Stone, trusts this process yielding powerful results.
About the reviewer: Cheryl Ann Passanisi was born and raised on the central coast of California and went to school at California State University, Long Beach, and University of California, San Francisco where she earned a master’s degree in Nursing. She lives on the San Francisco peninsula and works at a teaching hospital as a nurse practitioner. She is active in local community theater and opera chorus.
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