KANGAROO GIRL, REVIEWED BY JOYCE PESEROFF
I’ve often felt that books by Judith Baumel have been too few and too far between. She won the Walt Whitman award for her first, The Weight of Numbers, in 1987. Now arrived eight years later, and her third book, The Kangaroo Girl, was published in 2011. So I was excited to see Passeggiate listed among Arrowsmith’s latest titles,and happier still to have this beautifully designed chapbook in hand. In her fourth collection, Baumel’s signature mix of gravity and brio approaches new territory as she finds—no, constructs—a fresh language for life’s sweets and sours. Identity and history, New York and Italy, and Baumel’s sensuous feel for words remain continuing pleasures as Passeggiate goes even deeper into the well that her poems draw from. A passeggiata is a leisurely stroll, usually taken in the evening, for the purpose of socializing — a way of seeing and being seen by one’s neighbors and, reflectively, one’s self. The first line of the book’s second poem — “I want to look this way and be looked at this way” — shares a playfulness as well as a perspective with Baumel’s earlier work. The line beckons to Eros but also to Thanantos — the poem is set in a crypt. Now begins with a morning walk “from Tenth to First in a white sun … / From within that obliterating light come shades, / figures loading and unloading cargo, holding briefcases or babies.” There’s a hint of the underworld in “shades” and, as the present dissolves to a scene from the past, Baumel describes how children in a hellishly hot classroom take turns at the water fountain by playing a game. As they walk through the room and touch the thumb of another until “all thumbs, all mouths are touched …,” each child is transformed by another’s attentive glance (“Thumbs Up”).
The Kangaroo Girl also begins with a child looking and being looked at. Since “Photo of Author in Kangaroo Pajamas” refers to the book’s cover, the reader immediately, intimately shares in the poet’s act of scrutiny, almost peering over the writer’s shoulder as the poem is composed. The girl in the photo “will not be written/refuses to be written” or “recovered” — she’s as much of a mystery to the poet as she is to a random viewer. The photo resists being read — the words “refuses/refusal/refuse” beat a tattoo down the page, and the lines themselves stutter: “four fingers and thumb did/the shaking hand did — / haul herself to a new hand, did — / vanquish or varnish, did — /harden the view/the voice/the verse.” The poem staccatos like a bird breaking out of its shell until a new self emerges, drawn by Baumel’s tenuous memory across “the dross of years.”
The years turn Baumel’s hand to elegy, a form that moves forward and back like the stitches described in one of them, “Hem-Stitch Hemi Stichs.” “Hemistich,” or half-verse, derives from Latin; the poem, printed in two cascading columns, mimics the action the speaker learned from her grandmother. Baumel recalls her grandmother’s clothes “given away / at death, those drops / of magic made/from scraps.” But memory is fallible — “Did I really hem/this way or have/I invented the pattern?” Like her grandmother’s dresses, the poem is made of bits from various sources, its form both invented and inherited. The Kangaroo Girl offers a personal reading of history’s effect on inheritance. In “Winchester,” Baumel asks, “Can you explain how it is the flesh- / and-blood Jews become the theological Jews, / the Judensau, sorcerer, goat, horned/demonic pig …?” then answers herself, “Never mind… / … / those are tired old questions. / I need to answer my own, / my own people’s willingness / to compromise and not, to go on and not.” These conundrums aren’t unique to Jews — they’re at the heart of shaping an individual life, as well as a people’s — and they become central to Passeggiate.
Much of Passeggiate is set in Sicily, a land conquered by “Athenians, Carthaginians, Romans, Saracens, Normans”who “left their Y chromosomes” behind (“Passeggiate and Cena in Erice”). The olive grower in “Spuntino in Gerace” confounds a stranger by answering every query with “No,” but strangers don’t remain strangers long: “Don’t say. I’ll tell you. The invaders didn’t call these cultivars nocellara etnea e Moresca and Biancolilla as we do now but it is what kept them here, wave upon wave, until we did not know the difference between them and us.” Luscious as olive oil, Baumel’s dialogues compress past and present into a seamless lyrical now.
Passeggiate is suffused with the poet’s need to express how history feels. “After the Battle of Long Island, the Battle of Pell’s Point” identifies ways we go on — and not — by casting the experience of 9/11 in terms of a classical dialogue. Virgil’s shepherds speak in iambic pentameter about Meliboeus’s commute “across the Throgs Neck Bridge” past ground, Tityrus reminds him, “where General Howe/escaped Hand’s Riflemen” on another September 11. The poem jumps between the revolutionary battle and Meliboeus’s tale of how “the sirens streamed past and I was stopped / …by incurious reservists.” Tityrus’s rejoinder blends an offer of hospitality straight out of the Eclogues — “Friend, stay the troubled night. / I have ripe apples, mealy chestnuts, pressed cheese” — with his vision of the “powder of computers, /asbestos, concrete, paper.” The poem ends with a gorgeous pastoral image that, like Tityrus’s response, fuses the past and present through language: “in the Sound the lozenge boats, / their sails rolled up, were scattered brilliant white/like a vial of Ambien spilled on navy silk.” The sailboats could be Virgil’s, but the Ambien is ours.
Although it flashes with allusive wit, Baumel’s work doesn’t depend on dazzle. A humble list poem can also bend time and shift shape. The reunions in “Privately-in-Public and Not Publicly- in-Private” include those who have “smelled the Depression under the ‘Trenton Makes/The World Takes’ bridge.” And “Class Roster as Sicilian Atlas Index, PS 97, Mace Avenue, The Bronx, 1964 (A Reverse Ovidian Meditation)” is exactly that — a list of names that morph from “earthly towns to American children.” Swayed by a memory from second grade — I was assigned to read Dick and Jane to the new kid from Italy — I speculate whether the poet’s awareness of living history began in such a classroom. By viewing Passeggiate as a sort of capstone, I find myself reading Baumel’s work as one interrelated text. Erudition has always served her urgency to respond to calamities large and small, from the deaths of friends and family to the expulsion of England’s Jews and the disaster of 9/11. But she’s also a poet of joy, finding grace in a water fountain and “the thorny labor of marriage and its rare yield” (“Hic Adelfia Clarissima Femina”). Her new collection reflects on ways people, and peoples, manage to survive under time’s figured wheel. While poems often shout, “Look!” Passeggiate counsels, “Look again.”