THE SMALL DOOR OF YOUR DEATH

I sit on the sun porch of my home in New Iberia writing the review of a book about a tragic death, hoping that wherever the tortured soul of this addicted son in Sheryl St. Germain’s The Small Door of Your Death now resides, he’s no longer allergic to sunlight, as his grieving mother once supposed... and I pray that his mother no longer feels “night everywhere in me.”

This volume from the former Louisiana Writer of the Year, 2018, is a chronicle of St. Germain’s beloved son Gray’s death, by addiction and her subsequent grief —it is expressed in both tribute and lament…but does not fall into the realm of the maudlin. Surprisingly, St. Germain, like all mothers of addicts… perhaps like all mothers… gives voice to Dickinsonian hope that “never stops at all"; e.g., in “Feral”: “All you once hoped to be/still lights your face, though:/it is almost a holy light/you are trying to be a good man/you are trying to live in this world you hate/I love that you still care enough/to pretend to be/the one I named,/hoped to birth.”

In Section 3 of this volume, St. Germain tells the reader how a witnessing mother struggles with grief and her own addiction, literally stitching her fractured Self through sewing a blanket “of the most sumptuous yarns, each a/slightly different shade of gray: blue-gray, reddish-gray, silver gray, a/gray that’s almost black…and I wish I could have stitched your/wounds as confidently as I do this blanket…” St. Germain has developed a keen interest in textiles and quilt-making as part of her recovery from addiction and grief and recently visited Oaxaca City Mexico, where textile making flourishes, to help her further a second career in Textiles.

The 4th Section of The Small Door brings readers to an agonizing visualization of Sheryl viewing the body of her dead son, a dark place of realization:  “never again your body, never this vessel through which I knew you.” But she finds herself “In A Church Two Weeks After Your Death,” where she confesses, “I don’t believe, but here I am lighting a candle./She had a son too, I suddenly remember,/could do nothing/for his suffering.” Of all the Mary poems in the lexicon of poets, this one impressed me with its authentic voice, the voice of a suffering mother who is left with her son’s ashes and regrets. Here is acknowledgement of spiritual doubt, of a self-crucifixion without resurrection, again taking St. Germain to the place of “night everywhere in me.”

This volume doesn’t just trickle out and into mothers’ hearts; it touches a sometimes unexpressed deep sadness as in “Summer Solstice, 2015”: “Today, I’ll walk another day without you./I’ll carry you in me, like before you were born,/on these walks.” However, after her son has been dead seven months, in “At the Keukenhof*,” St. Germain finds resolution in viewing the color red where tulips remind her of her son’s laugh, and she expresses that she wishes she had brought him to this country she’s visiting because he had loved intensity and “would have felt it in these flowers…”

St. Germain’s “ode” to those tulips is the redeeming lyric in which she “step[s] into the sun/ step[s] into the light…” “See,” she writes, “I would have said, tulips that look like ballerinas,/fringed and frilled tulips, multi-colored parrot tulips, double peony tulips,/star-shaped tulips, lacy, open petals, thick, bold petals…” 

Here, in powerful, raw lyrics, a mother creates poetry from inevitable loss. Here, readers stand with her at the edge of a formidable chasm where she voices sadness, hope, despair, return to life, and, most of all, love. As I wrote in an e-mail to St. Germain: This collection of pain and passion reminds me of one of my own poems addressed to a daughter. “I am surprised at how agony/and tenderness/resemble one another."

*The Netherlands

LET IT BE A DARK ROUX

Twelve years ago, I began writing a blog called A Words Worth and have published at least four posts a month each year since that time. I’ve been faithful to this schedule during that period while living in both Louisiana and Tennessee. This past month I decided to pursue posting only sporadically, probably book reviews and literary events, rather than weekly blog posts written about a variety of subjects. As soon as I made that decision, books by friends and authors, and author events began to show up, and for a while, I may seem to be writing on a schedule, but I’m not. Three books are sitting on my dining room table, and the Pinyon Review that Susan Entsminger published as a salute to my former editor/publisher, Gary Entsminger, is en route, so…

Wednesday night, I attended a Festival of Words event in Grand Coteau, Louisiana that featured Sheryl St. Germain, Louisiana’s Writer of the Year, 2018, who read from two of her books of poetry I purchased that evening. Yesterday morning I opened and read through them in one sitting as St. Germain “spoke to my condition” in her intense, un-self-conscious voice. Of the two volumes I purchased, I chose to write about Let It Be A Dark Roux* because I think it best expresses St. Germain’s lifetime purpose, e.g., in “Flambeau Carriers”:

…I wanted it to be the poet’s job:

to carry the burning night

to hold high our stumbling,

astonished,

street-dancing selves. 

Here is the finest poet I’ve read in a long while, one who has a sensuous, heart-exploding voice, who is unafraid to pour out in exquisite and accessible poetry expressions of pain, nostalgia, femaleness, able to incite nostalgia and sadness, sometimes with deft, sharp blows, but always with this amazingly un-self-conscious voice. I might add that she also has an amazingly soft speaking voice, even when she reads her harshest poems and impresses her audience in Grand Coteau with her humility. Usually, I cite other poets who may seem to be predecessors in the same style as the poet I’m reviewing, but this awesome female poet is uniquely outspoken and dissimilar to any I’ve known or read. She touches readers to the bone.

St. Germain’s Cajun origins emerge throughout Let It Be A Dark Roux, and I was drawn to her “Mother’s Red Beans and Rice,” feeling that no one of Cajun origin can flip the page when St. Germain describes the

…ham bone and marrow

to make the gravy thick,

salt pork to make them meaty, smoky

…The beans would cook all day, filling the house

with their creamy onion pork smell, the sauce slowly

thickening, the beans slowly softening

…I eat them like joy.

St. Germain does not gloss over the agonies of addiction and the woundedness of a family afflicted with the diseases of alcohol and hard drugs — father, brother, son, Sheryl herself — but readers will be moved by her candid witness to these agonies and her courage displayed in recovery. Much of the raw story to which she witnesses is told in the second volume I purchased, The Small Door Of Your Death, published in 2018, but I chose to write about the healing memories/experiences of which she wrote that revealed the redeeming aspects of Art. 

Again, returning to food — the joy of every true Cajun’s life — when I read “Bread Pudding With Whiskey Sauce,” I was reminded of my paternal grandmother’s kitchen (a Vincent descended from Nova Scotian stock), and, as St. Germain writes: 

how sorrow can be transformed

into bread pudding

… dry hard pieces into soft moist bits.

Add raisins and peach halves.

Beat eggs with sugar and cinnamon,

freshly grind allspice and nutmeg.

It will smell like Christmas,

It will smell like your mother’s

happiness. Mix it all together,

bake. The house will fill

with goodness, with the smell

of grace… 

I went hunting for Cajun fare after reading that tribute to good food (and found gumbo on a cold day in Acadiana). 

Perhaps readers will not be able to breathe easily when Germain writes of the heavy breath of God and features vultures in “In the Garden of Eden.” Still she surprises these readers with an unusual take on the giant birds that sometimes cause anxiety in humans when they come upon carrions gathered on highway roadkill: 

their unfeathered heads the red jewels

of the sky of the garden.

They were vegetarian then. 

There were no roadside kills,

no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.

And they were happy.

They could not imagine

what they would become. 

Here is a poet’s poet, one who brings poets and other readers to the point of redemption and reminds all of us that “…poetry is best at howling/it’s the only way to say the unsayable.” This is what St. Germain does without mawkishness or hopelessness, bringing readers to a deep appreciation of her undaunted spirit.

Sheryl St. Germain is a native of New Orleans and is of Cajun and Creole descent. She is now retired from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA where she taught poetry and creative non-fiction and is noted for her work as co-founder of the Words Without Walls program. 

*Published by Autumn House Press. 

Crone

When you cross the rusting drawbridge leading to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, you enter a south Louisiana town long acclaimed as the Crawfish Capitol of the World that has drawn “foodies” from around the world. However, since 2014, this bustling town in Acadiana has gained added cultural dimensions with the establishment of the Teche Center for the Arts, a center on E. Bridge St. housed in the old “Murph Theatre." Foodies who appreciate art and culture as well as fine cuisine, can easily find the Center in the middle of town, a few doors down from a foodie haunt, Sydnie Mae’s Restaurant.

The Teche Center for the Arts, directed by Sandra Sarr, has as its mission to feature music, art, theatre, literary art, French lessons, history and educational exhibits for St. Martin Parish and surrounding environs in south Louisiana. As The Center was a movie house in the 1940’s, it’s complete with a stage on which poets have begun to perform readings. 

Clare Martin (r) and Bessie Senette

Last night we attended a reading of Crone, a book of poetry written by Clare Martin and dramatized by Clare and a fellow poet, Bessie Senette, before a full house of regional poets and artists. Crone has received kudos from Louisiana Poet Laureate, Jack Bedell; Sheryl St. Germain, Writer of the Year 2018 at the Louisiana Book Festival, and Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels. Clare and Bessie read to an appreciative audience that saluted them with "Bravos" when the long poem ended. I found it heartening to see so many young adults in the crowd — and I attribute this interest to the workshops and readings of outstanding Louisiana poet laureates: Darrell Bourque, Jack Bedell, Ava Harmon, and Julie Kane, as well as the long-time efforts of Patrice Melnick, director of Festival of Words.

I hadn't read Crone until this morning, and when I began reading Clare’s written version, Robert Frost’s "Witch of Coos" came to mind. Like Frost, Clare used several voices to weave this supernatural "song" that held her audience spellbound. She used primitive chants divorced from rational, traditional verse, that was further emphasized by costuming, linking sorcery and spiritualism in an imagined dialogue between a wise woman and her devotee. At the reading, the audience was mesmerized by long incantations featuring props of candles, feathers, silk scarves, and a cauldron to deliver lines. 

One of the Crone chants caused me to reread: "The undulating core/of the universe encapsulated/in a most tender bulb of skin./Her breath’s ignition/resurrects the miracle nerve./It is nothing like love,/it is nothing—/Be brave, she says,/It will hurt more than a little/when I grind the scars." Clare is unsparing in her images of female suffering; e.g., lines like "dried blood flakes from her fingers./A black tooth drops/into the cauldron," and I was startled when I heard her read this last line at the performance.

Yet she predicts resurrection and deliverance in the verse: "God’s secret name must not be spoken./And yet, you call upon it over and over./ When you are desperate to believe/you are free." From that point, Clare moves on to more hopeful imagery: "We lie between the five mounds/beneath the flowering pear./Still, the wind gossips/of summer grass." For me, that last line resonated strongly in Whitmanesque power and loveliness.

The performance ended with a quotation from Rilke: "I've been circling for thousands of years" which she uses to preface end verses: "I've been circling for thousands of years,/planting seeds of conception./I've been waiting for God to show a mighty hand./I am an Old Woman, pregnant with ephemeral dust./This is proof enough for me."

In one former comment Clare made concerning the long poem, she claimed that she "channeled" a crone, and, at times during her performance last night, I felt she was or had been channeling when she wrote the entire poem at a week-end retreat. However, I really feel that Crone is a product of the freed-up imagination of a poet who has emerged from the shadows, or her own Shadow, as Jung defines the traumas that live in our memories and cause problems and suffering.

Clare founded the online poetry magazine, MockingHeart Review and Crone is her third book of poetry. It was published by Nixes Mate Books and is available on Amazon. Contact Clare Martin to find out more about copies of this spell-binding book.