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A Review of Julie Ellinger Hunt's Ever Changing by Stan Galloway
(Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2010)
Julie Ellinger Hunt’s first book of poetry is an exuberance of young, fresh talent. Thirty-something is not young in absolute terms, and she shows an experience of the world, its delights and its woes, but she is young like a grown kitten testing out its claws in the publishing world. Yet, this first book, in some ways, reads more like a mid-career book – assured, slyly insightful, and grandly imagistic.
While she writes of relationships, the persona of the poems lives more actively than Hunt herself, who has been mostly bedridden for several years from complications of a number of acronymic disorders. And one suspects the “state away from myself” that defines “movie night,” in the poem “Tuesday,” also defines the role of the poems in the book for the author.
The book itself is divided into three sections. She writes in the introduction: “Part of evolving as an individual is to Observe, Accept, and Love each and every moment so we can live life fully, boldly, and with more clarity.” It is these three capitalized verbs that organize the book.
The first section is labeled Observation. The opening two poems are about language, the first about words and letters, and the second exploring the concept of metaphors. “Ever Changing Words” starts the collection with a word game where words are changed through adding spaces or dropping letters to reveal paradoxes, where a window might become a widow, that which allows access might become something that is separate and alone.
The first three poems are communal in attitude, speaking of we and us. It is only with the fourth poem that the I of a persona appears, in the poem “Only Sometimes.” The poem at first appears to be narrative, beginning, “Behind an old wooden shed / sits someone I once knew.” The poem moves first into memory and then into metaphor as the reader realizes the “someone” is not literally outside but estranged relationally. The shed in the first line becomes the representation of a place of correction or a place of repeated attempts to get something right, as when a musician “woodsheds” a difficult piece, in the hope of finally getting the music to sound the way it should. The “he” of this poem represents either a recurring lover or the first of several for the persona, a certainty which the ambiguity of pronouns will not reveal.
Other observations in the first section deal with rooms, computers, and cars, before the final poem, “Lost in Orientation,” which for some will be the finest poem of the collection. This poem is purposely fragmentary, beginning without naming the subject of the poem, which is a seizure experienced by the persona of the poem. The sensations begin with the sense of the hair being pulled followed by unseen forces at work on the feet. The confusion of direction and the throbbing plea – “Inebriate me. inebriate me. inebriate me.” – accompany the persona’s attempt to “seize in aura” her sudden splintered consciousnesses, but failing. Control returns with the sounds of children – “are they / Calling for me” – and the humble acknowledgment, “I got lost again on the oriental rug.” The power of the disorientation is palpable; the empathy, not pity, of the perceptive reader becomes very real in light of the simple word “again” in the last line.
Acceptance, the second section, deals with loss in a variety of forms, the loss of a mother (“The River Collapses”), the loss of innocence and childhood, which is not often the same (“Ethan’s Poem,” “Red Sweater”), the loss of love (“In Want”), the loss of faith (“That Last Night”), and other more subtle losses. This section also introduces poems dealing with parental responses (“Ethan’s Poem,” “Kidney Bean”), where the issues of right-and-wrong and real-and-unreal are explored. The conclusion of these various poems of loss and acceptance comes on the final lines of “Untitled Soldier,” where the persona desires a belief “in something greater than we / know is possible.”
The third section, Love, is the longest of the three: 12, 15, 25 poems respectively. Here romantic love is explored in a number of ways, from the tragic – “I’m used to tragic. / tragic looks good on / me” (“If Love Isn’t”) – to the self-sacrificing – “I’d Hurt me before I’d let you hurt” (“Never Hurt”) – to the adoring – “you are quite amazing” (“Jason’s Poem”). This section deals most fully with the startling images of emotion, not an easy thing to evoke. The visual appeal of “robes in / white and cream” (“In a Dream He Came to Me”), the tactile prick of “Tingly-pins-and-needled skin” (“As I lay”), the olfactory conflation of “mortar and [. . .] mother’s perfume” (“Scars”), and even the mixed imagery of “Time tickled” (“In a Dream He Came to Me”) and “burlap hope” (“Sewn Together”), show some of Hunt’s versatility. The paradoxes are real and frequent, for example, in this persona’s question to an unnamed lover, did you know “That I would hold onto you even after I let you go” (Memory Box”)?
The book is not perfect. The editing of the collection is incomplete, leaving the reader to wonder about an occasional punctuation mark, spacing, grammatical choice, or capitalization. But the collection as a whole is more impressionistic than syntactic. Readers need to focus on the force of accumulated images rather than execution or even philosophic observations, because it is the power of images that drives this book.
Stan Galloway teaches writing and literature at Bridgewater College in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He has reviewed poetry for Cedar Creek Press, Christianity & Literature, and Paterson Literary Review. His poetry has appeared online and in print at more than 25 venues. He was nominated Best of the Net in 2011. His chapbook Abraham is forthcoming from Sierra Delta Press in 2012. He has also written a book of literary criticism, The Teenage Tarzan.
Email: Stan Galloway
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