Review - Lemon House by Sina Queyras

Lemon Hound
by Sina Queyras
Coach House Books, 2006

Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston

Queyras rightly quotes Virginia Woolf at the beginning of the ‘Virginia, Vanessa, the Strands’ series of poems: ‘Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being … that is a rough visual description of childhood.’ (p.47) because she captures life in quick images, seen and gone, in a kaleidoscope of movement.

There is a sense in these prose poems that Queyras is viewing people on the street. They rush by and she tries to isolate each face, name them, tries to imprint them on her consciousness, but her reaction is also to see them as conformists to a norm. They appear as a group and function as such, everyone doing and being the same:

The mothers were feminists. The mothers marched. The mothers wore purple and read Betty Friedman. The mothers listed to Janis Ian and Ferron. The mothers dropped out. The mothers went to Michigan and danced topless. The mothers used menstruation cups. The mothers tie-dyed everything and cooked meals from Moosewood. The mothers had committee meetings. … p.32

She sees a few as individuals, though hazily, without clear-cut edges; they blur in the crowd:

Years crimsoned before her. Windows appeared and were washed. White, the laundry clung to her magnetic feet. She meditated on the iron, willed permanent press into existence. Sunday mornings the hallways hollow. …. p.33

… He keeps busy, the lover. He walks to the bar in town where he has heard they have fights. He plays pool badly, and loses. Afternoons he tosses a baseball, always only at first base. The one he loves has red hair and is firm. He will not have her, and perhaps he knows this already. (The lover, p.82)

Queyras writes in simple sentences: subject-predicate, subject-predicate, with little variation. The poems, blocked on the page, become hard reading due to the sheer number of such sentences. The variety lies in the changing predicates, but even they become overwhelming, difficult to absorb, as they pile one on the other. They read as an attempt by the poet to be as varied as possible, to include every possible image, they become instead a list that inundates the reader.

She is feeling brisk at the heel. She loves feeling brisk at the heel. She is feeling brisk at the heel and rivering her thumbs. She is at the edge of cool. She runs her thumbs along the hinge of river. She loves running her thumbs along the hinge of river. She feels river. She feels thumb. She is brisk and thumbing. She is numb and loving. She is feeling loving. She is feeling loving about feeling. She loves feeling about loving. … (The river is all thumbs p.12)

and it continues down the page. The poem evolves through the repeated verbs and nouns in a way reminiscent of Escher’s art, though Queyras’ poetry doesn’t change from one view of the subject to a totally different one.

Some of the images have great vitality, almost reverberating from the page: ‘Years soft as spaniel ears.’ (p.33) ‘[Buttercups] are so good she wants to eat them, but they are singing, all along the roadside, and she cannot eat anything that sings.’ (p.77) ‘Sees birch as a breastplate.’(p.76)

Each of these images could be developed on their own as metaphor and would have the greater strength, rather than being lost in the midst of the deluge. Queyras’ poetry has merit but it needs to be read and savoured over a considerable period of time.

Joanna M. Weston THOSE BLUE SHOES and THE WILLOW-TREE GIRL for ages 7-12 http://www.islandnet.com/~weston/