Never Expected! Always Fresh! by Bruce Whiteman
[A] cultural responsibility that seems to have fallen to the poets in an age in which literacy sometimes seems as old-fashioned as the astrolabe is to keep alive and in use the vocabulary that exists beyond the usual wan and skinny word-hoard of most people, even readers. Judith Baumel, in her new collection entitled Thorny,[2] sent me to the dictionary more than a few times to look up words such as scoriae (slag, cinders), barbicels (small hooks on a bird’s feather), and eyeass (a falcon nestling), while fornacic, which I could find nowhere, I could scry from its Latin root (“fornix,” meaning an oven or kiln). These unusual words, as they should be in poems, are always just the right word for the moment and are never called on for mere show, though Baumel can occasionally imitate Wallace Stevens playing the role of what Siegfried Sassoon once called an “advanced vocabularian.” Here is the short opening stanza of a poem she indicates arose from “Reading W.E.B. Du Bois and Wallace Stevens”:
Hereditary Bondsmen! Barbicels,
sickle, saddle hackle, furbelow,
the feathers of a great and noisy turbit roost.
This concatenation of feathers, flounces, and fly-tying, beginning with a pair of words borrowed from Byron by way of W. E. B. Du Bois writing about Booker T. Washington (the Hereditary Bondsmen bit) creates a joyful noise indeed, something almost as boisterous as a dovecote where turbits (a breed of pigeon) are kept. Although her effects can be subtle too, Baumel likes loud poetic music, as in a poem called “Relics of the Fathers and Mothers,” which is almost an exfoliation of T. S. Eliot’s famous line “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”:
Fragments of my fearsome father
remain in my fraught Levitic core where
I keep my own collections. The Airmont Classics
Series of the Immortal Literature of the World
which subscription I ordered in the days
when one put banknotes and coins
taped to index cards in the mail.
Or take the opening lines of “Young Miss,” a poem about Baumel’s mother and the poet’s recollections of ballet lessons as a girl:
My mother pressed her lipstick to my lips;
its waxy smell disgusted me and I
disliked as well the tutu for the spring
recital Miss Antonia made a fuss
about.
Here in a pentameter environment the musical effects are more attenuated; and if the internal rhyme of “disgusted” and “fuss” is easily registered, many lines later, as the poem ends, it is still in the air for the attentive reader (“I was not a gamine. Just her girl.”)
The title word of the book occurs just once in a poem, one entitled “Hic Adelfia Clarissima Femina” (Here [lies] Adelfia, a celebrated woman). That phrase is taken from a fourth-century sarcophagus now in the Regional Archaeological Museum in Syracuse on the island of Sicily, and the poem concerns family. It consists of two eleven-line stanzas, with the second one beginning in this way:
As I will enter my niche alone, these vignettes testify
the thorny labor of marriage and its rare yield.
The poet is envisioning her own death (“my niche alone”), and her imagination leaps back to Eden, where Eve “is already covering herself” and Adam “is guided from behind by Yahweh present / in the breezy-time of the day.” But it leaps forward also to thinking about her sons whose courage she hopes will keep them safe from fire, “dew-washed and reborn as a shell.” Like many poems in Thorny, this one concatenates the intimate details of personal life and family life and childhood with history and myth. In “Open Arms,” Baumel creates a touching image of “assembling those who are gone like a doll party,” while in the concluding line she allies her emotional necromancy to “Odysseus grabbing three times the shades” in Book 11 of Homer’s poem. She often evokes the ancient world, but also poetry—there is a poem in which Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is updated by the image of a boy sporting a “hoodie that says Stop and Frisk”—and visual art, in ekphrastic poems about the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto and a portrait of Suzanne Valadon by Toulouse-Lautrec known as “The Hangover” (La Gueule de bois), now at the Fogg Museum. The wonderful concluding lines of the latter poem, just one long sentence and one short one, deserve to be quoted at length:
Now a hangover is about time:
operational time and Poincaré’s time,
imprints, pentimenti, cyclical returns,
somatic memory, the way wine brings
the taste of its own history, earth and sun
and casks and the memory
of successive samples, the way
the smell and the pour bring distant ghosts
forward to the spilled circle, bring regret
and promises to bear against the future
as if it were the moment before
some car smashes through the walls
of this café, as if a parking meter outside
were ever clicking down to zero time.
As if, perhaps, the future just proceeds
upon the street, the cold of April rain
on the rangy disappointments of forsythia.