Book Review
RAVI SHANKAR
A resonant empathy
and the long shadow
of mortality
I first learned about Eleanor Goodman’s work upon reading her translations of the Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, one of the few women associated with the “Misty” school of poets and the prolific author of more than 25 books of poetry, essays and novels. Goodman’s book of translations “Something Crosses My Mind” was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there’s a quiet ferocity in her translations which makes them utterly memorable. Therefore, it was with great interest that I picked up Goodman’s own first book of poetry Nine Dragon Island, published by Zephyr Press and in a handsome hardbound edition by HK Enclave Publishing House.
Goodman’s poems are also quiet and ferocious, but that’s where the similarities to Wang Xiaoni’s poetry ends, for the terrain traversed by Nine Dragon Island is distinctive and leavened with the sensibility of someone who has traveled across the world. The poems in the collection range geographically from Ohio and Indiana in America to Shanghai, China, even as far afield as Iceland and Zimbabwe. Furthermore, the forms employed by Goodman are equally as diverse, moving from sectioned lyrics to narrative elegiac remembrances to prose poetry, these places and modalities united by a resonant empathy and the long shadow of mortality under which we all labor.
Dedicated to the author’s father, Nine Dragon Island offers some of the most evocative and sensitive poems about dying and grief that I’ve read in a very long time. Never sentimental or cloying, the poems offer us a hard-eyed look at how we might confront our own bodies and those who we love, all of us caught in an undeniable process of decay. As the last stanza of the poem “Wanting Out” expresses:
But Lorraine says no
to mechanized breath, no
to priests and specialists, to catheters, to drugs, no to someone else’s blood.
She says no to life without life.
Now what’s left is the letting go
of what we think she should have said.
The final lines of this poem, demonstrate what Goodman is able to do with enjambment, overturning our expectations so that something wiser can emerge. Ultimately it’s not the speaker’s friend’s letting go with which we need to grapple, but our own expectations and wishes about what a person wants and how we want them to conduct their living (and their dying). We may crave they stay on life-support or undertake chemotherapy, but ultimately the most difficult thing is to respect another’s choice on the matter, and this poem depicts that effort with precision and grace. Or as the ending of another poem, “Oma’s Testament” puts it, “When my bones loosened, / I could not see, could not speak / there was no one. So this life asks nothing / of the dead, and the dead ask nothing of it.”
This book is about other kinds of death as well, like the ending of a marriage, and in one of the more poignant poems in the collection, “Since the Divorce my Mother,” the speaker discusses the dissolution of her parent’s wedding and how that has in turn has petrified her to the notion of everlasting union. The difficult truth, if we are able to be clear-eyed about it, is that such breakups are ultimately no one’s fault, even as we love to assign blame; relationships, like the ten thousand things of this world, just drift apart of their own inertia, and the realization of that fact, and our lack of control in the face of it, remains terrifying.
Another poem, one of my personal favorites, “Hummingbird,” begins with this very premise: “When I injure you, as must someday do, my silence will be like a poison drained / from a wound, and a like a hummingbird.” The inevitability of harm, the hopelessness of repair, and our reconciliation to the fact of the small and large losses that accrue around and through us every day are elucidated with such devastating skill that the reader shivers a little, considering its ramifications. Time and again, the speaker of these poems implicates herself in the suffering she observes with such exactitude.
However, the subject matter notwithstanding, this is not a bleak book; far from it. “Nine Dragon Island” pulses with vitality and sensuality, with dripping tangerine juice and fish-skinned fruit, with coils of neon and volcanic plateaus, with heat and light, sex and desire. Some of the poems I found most compelling were the ones set in China, for in them, we see a side of the country far from the official view. Goodman has managed to depict the rural poor unflinchingly and with compassion, whether legless and begging, plucking a chicken into a bucket or living in a cadaver of a home. This is the China we don’t see in State-sponsored transmissions that highlight the rise of upwardly mobile and the middle class. These people are not depicted with a voyeuristic eye but with a sensitivity that makes the poet and by extension the reader complicit in their condition.
There’s also an easy erudition in many of these poems that speak to other poets, past and present, as in the poem “To an old farmer,”which calls to mind Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking,” as well as William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say.” The allusions are subtle, never heavy-handed, and they turn the original poems on their head, for the poet always knows that poetry is her comfort and not the comfort of those who live in cities made of “rough-hewn cloth and the smell of blood.” In this way, the poems never feel superior to or beyond the people who populate the verse. Instead, the words share in the suffering of those for whom words, in and of themselves, are insufficient, which, to me, is one of the great strengths of this collection.
Finally, then, Nine Dragon Island is a virtuosic first book most of all for its restraint, for all that is held back and hinted at, for everything that lies outside of our control, for the slow, inexorable transformation of all our experiences into that of loss. Goodman’s poems are intimate transcriptions and they resonate with an inner life that is suffused with that Keatsian quality of “negative capability,” never satisfied with the easy resolution but possessed of an openness that allows for ambiguity and mystery to penetrate into the very act of perception, complicating the ways in which we love and injure one another, highlighting how the poor live in us. These poems are luminous with such suffering and ecstatic, full of a terrible tenderness and erotic charge that continues to radiate even after we’ve put the book down. That quality, its exultant sadness and clarity of perception, is the hallmark of a very fine collection, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this is Goodman’s first book. It’s the kind of debut that both devastates us and leaves us hankering after more.
Nine Dragon Island
by Eleanor Goodman
Paperback: 114 pages
Zephyr Press (December 6, 2016)
ISBN-10: 1938890205
ISBN-13: 978-1938890208
Distinguished American Indian poet, Ravi Shankar published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. The title of his memoir-in-progress is Correctional.
RAVI SHANKAR
A resonant empathy
and the long shadow
of mortality
I first learned about Eleanor Goodman’s work upon reading her translations of the Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, one of the few women associated with the “Misty” school of poets and the prolific author of more than 25 books of poetry, essays and novels. Goodman’s book of translations “Something Crosses My Mind” was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there’s a quiet ferocity in her translations which makes them utterly memorable. Therefore, it was with great interest that I picked up Goodman’s own first book of poetry Nine Dragon Island, published by Zephyr Press and in a handsome hardbound edition by HK Enclave Publishing House.
Goodman’s poems are also quiet and ferocious, but that’s where the similarities to Wang Xiaoni’s poetry ends, for the terrain traversed by Nine Dragon Island is distinctive and leavened with the sensibility of someone who has traveled across the world. The poems in the collection range geographically from Ohio and Indiana in America to Shanghai, China, even as far afield as Iceland and Zimbabwe. Furthermore, the forms employed by Goodman are equally as diverse, moving from sectioned lyrics to narrative elegiac remembrances to prose poetry, these places and modalities united by a resonant empathy and the long shadow of mortality under which we all labor.
Dedicated to the author’s father, Nine Dragon Island offers some of the most evocative and sensitive poems about dying and grief that I’ve read in a very long time. Never sentimental or cloying, the poems offer us a hard-eyed look at how we might confront our own bodies and those who we love, all of us caught in an undeniable process of decay. As the last stanza of the poem “Wanting Out” expresses:
But Lorraine says no
to mechanized breath, no
to priests and specialists, to catheters, to drugs, no to someone else’s blood.
She says no to life without life.
Now what’s left is the letting go
of what we think she should have said.
The final lines of this poem, demonstrate what Goodman is able to do with enjambment, overturning our expectations so that something wiser can emerge. Ultimately it’s not the speaker’s friend’s letting go with which we need to grapple, but our own expectations and wishes about what a person wants and how we want them to conduct their living (and their dying). We may crave they stay on life-support or undertake chemotherapy, but ultimately the most difficult thing is to respect another’s choice on the matter, and this poem depicts that effort with precision and grace. Or as the ending of another poem, “Oma’s Testament” puts it, “When my bones loosened, / I could not see, could not speak / there was no one. So this life asks nothing / of the dead, and the dead ask nothing of it.”
This book is about other kinds of death as well, like the ending of a marriage, and in one of the more poignant poems in the collection, “Since the Divorce my Mother,” the speaker discusses the dissolution of her parent’s wedding and how that has in turn has petrified her to the notion of everlasting union. The difficult truth, if we are able to be clear-eyed about it, is that such breakups are ultimately no one’s fault, even as we love to assign blame; relationships, like the ten thousand things of this world, just drift apart of their own inertia, and the realization of that fact, and our lack of control in the face of it, remains terrifying.
Another poem, one of my personal favorites, “Hummingbird,” begins with this very premise: “When I injure you, as must someday do, my silence will be like a poison drained / from a wound, and a like a hummingbird.” The inevitability of harm, the hopelessness of repair, and our reconciliation to the fact of the small and large losses that accrue around and through us every day are elucidated with such devastating skill that the reader shivers a little, considering its ramifications. Time and again, the speaker of these poems implicates herself in the suffering she observes with such exactitude.
However, the subject matter notwithstanding, this is not a bleak book; far from it. “Nine Dragon Island” pulses with vitality and sensuality, with dripping tangerine juice and fish-skinned fruit, with coils of neon and volcanic plateaus, with heat and light, sex and desire. Some of the poems I found most compelling were the ones set in China, for in them, we see a side of the country far from the official view. Goodman has managed to depict the rural poor unflinchingly and with compassion, whether legless and begging, plucking a chicken into a bucket or living in a cadaver of a home. This is the China we don’t see in State-sponsored transmissions that highlight the rise of upwardly mobile and the middle class. These people are not depicted with a voyeuristic eye but with a sensitivity that makes the poet and by extension the reader complicit in their condition.
There’s also an easy erudition in many of these poems that speak to other poets, past and present, as in the poem “To an old farmer,”which calls to mind Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking,” as well as William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say.” The allusions are subtle, never heavy-handed, and they turn the original poems on their head, for the poet always knows that poetry is her comfort and not the comfort of those who live in cities made of “rough-hewn cloth and the smell of blood.” In this way, the poems never feel superior to or beyond the people who populate the verse. Instead, the words share in the suffering of those for whom words, in and of themselves, are insufficient, which, to me, is one of the great strengths of this collection.
Finally, then, Nine Dragon Island is a virtuosic first book most of all for its restraint, for all that is held back and hinted at, for everything that lies outside of our control, for the slow, inexorable transformation of all our experiences into that of loss. Goodman’s poems are intimate transcriptions and they resonate with an inner life that is suffused with that Keatsian quality of “negative capability,” never satisfied with the easy resolution but possessed of an openness that allows for ambiguity and mystery to penetrate into the very act of perception, complicating the ways in which we love and injure one another, highlighting how the poor live in us. These poems are luminous with such suffering and ecstatic, full of a terrible tenderness and erotic charge that continues to radiate even after we’ve put the book down. That quality, its exultant sadness and clarity of perception, is the hallmark of a very fine collection, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this is Goodman’s first book. It’s the kind of debut that both devastates us and leaves us hankering after more.
Nine Dragon Island
by Eleanor Goodman
Paperback: 114 pages
Zephyr Press (December 6, 2016)
ISBN-10: 1938890205
ISBN-13: 978-1938890208
Distinguished American Indian poet, Ravi Shankar published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. The title of his memoir-in-progress is Correctional.
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