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Three Books from Rain Mountain Press, reviewed by David Chorlton
www.rainmountainpress.com
My Father’s Window, Maya Mary Hebert, 2006, 90 pp., paper, $11, ISBN 0-9786105-4-7
Here is a family history told in a fascinating prose/poetry combination that reveals
the narrative through exposing a scene at a time rather than the continuity one might
expect in a conventional chronology. This technique strikes me as the right choice to
show a life the way we invariably remember, with isolated incidents appearing as flashes
of experience. Hebert offers her readers her father’s life, one that began in 1909 as
the son of Italian immigrants in New York and ended eighty-seven years later after
spending the final four in a nursing home.
Hebert writes in a way that channels her emotions through the images,
the physical details, that make up the picture of past or present.
Visiting the home, she tells about fitting a hearing aid:
“As I push it in, matter-of-factly, I take an inventory of all
his body parts that have been replaced with plastic: Besides his
ear and his teeth, there is the tube in his arm that hooks him
up to dialysis for his dead kidneys, the valve in his gut where
his bowel used to be that ends in a plastic bag. How much replacement
of the body with plastic can the mind take?”
Not to suggest that this is a book dominated by such depressing reflections,
rather one in which the sadness of the end is balanced against the light of
a summer landscape in 1959 and the inevitable dramas of family life. Unflinching
in facing up to the sadness, Hebert is equally adept at sketching different moods:
A girl in green cartwheels
effortlessly across the grass.
Her friend in pink runs
with glee and a small fog.
The storm passes as
I lay and breathe with the Earth
watching the children
create the world.
Some books come to us as ones that had to be written and My Father’s Window is among them.
It is a gathering of pieces into a whole that is the author’s way of establishing continuity
from heritage to her own life, much as her mother gathered pieces of her own:
“Among my mother’s belongings found in her 1935 cedar hope chest
was every card my father ever sent her, a medal for playing tennis
when she was fourteen, and her wedding dress and veil that crumpled
to the touch like moth wings.”
These pages are more enduring than moth wings! As personal
to the author as the story may be, I came away from it feeling
more of a participant than an observer. Such is the result of
a well conceived and executed work in which Hebert renders the specific universal.
Insect Dreams, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, 2007, 64 pp., paper, $13, ISBN 0-9876105-2-0
Saturated with the colours and rains of tropical Surinam during the lifetime of Maria Sibylla Merian
(1647 – 1717), Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s evocative book is a journey through the senses in the
company of the naturalist whose passion for insects took her from Holland to South America. To
write history in this way is to create a kind of reality that a dry, factual account can never
provide. Insect Dreams employs lyricism from Merian’s journey by sea to her explorations and
studies of small life forms in Surinam.
“The sailors believe that if they come too close to the equator they
will turn black like the natives who live there. Or that if they sail
too far to the north their blood will congeal and turn to ice in their
veins. But tonight there is nothing but the black of black waters. the sea
of darkness, the stars in the heavens.”
“The sun throws glints of light that catch from time to time the defensive pose
of a pupa; still, still, breathless, nothing that moves, nothing that will give
rise to movement. It looks like the dropping of a macaw, or like a piece of wood,
a bit of broken twig, the pupa waiting to unfold.”
Being transported into another time and place gives the reader a respite from his/her own time,
sparing us the commercial onslaught and plastic sterility of contemporary urban life. Of course,
saying this does not imply that all was well and fair in the past that is coming back to life
on the pages we are reading. In the midst of Maria Sibylla’s examination of nature, the author
presents flashes of the horror’s involved with slavery and the plantation. No illusions.
“The sudden raids and the enslavements. The spirit cast down a thousand times, a thousand times and gnashings . . . bitter bitter.”
We might search for, and find, in the text some metaphors for a personal odyssey other than
the one described, and it may not be going too far to see the painful wound the book’s central
character receives on taking hold of one specimen as the sting that awaits anyone venturing far
away to grab at an ambition. With or without such philosophical reflections, it is impressive
to glance back from the end of this compact book and realize how much is contained by way of
narrative, natural and social history, as well as the sensuality of the writing, often delicate
as moth wings and even sharp enough to wound.
Eilat, Luna Tarlo, 2007, 153 pp., paper, $13, ISBN 0-9876105-6-3
“The devastated landscape stretches to infinity. Helen, an empty soda bottle in
her hand, stands in the shade and watches the Persian couple.”
This opening to Luna Tarlo’s novel, set in the summer of 1965,
is the embryo of much of what follows. The landscape is that of
southern Israel, a point located at its extreme point, and Helen,
an American woman touring, holds to a vestige of comfort in the
heat and watches in the manner expected of tourists. Helen looks
out of her tour bus window when the guide points out a spot where
camels come over the mountain from Jordan to feed, but she quickly
closes her eyes and thinks instead of swimming in the Red Sea. Luna
Tarlo shifts from scene to scene in the gradual manner many movies whose
unfolding rests more on psychology than action. The pace of the story encourages
the examination of gestures and details, such as the wedding ring missing from
Helen’s finger. She talks about her husband to a French girl from her bus and
explains that he could not make the trip because of his work obligations.
This leaves Helen to travel alone and as much in the spirit of adventure
as of discovery.
Travel as a tourist easily tempts a mood of detachment with people stepping outside
their own lives to live briefly as observers. A degree of sterility is inevitable in
the world of buses and hotels with restaurant meals, but this is the surface through
which Helen breaks as she meets two men. The first is from Iran, the second is an Israeli
engineer. The two encounters unfold in different ways. With the Israeli, Helen goes into
the water where other tourists simple sail by and look into the sea from their fibre glass boat.
“His arm slips off her shoulder and he dives straight down into the pit, touches bottom,
and then ascends, his hair drooping over his face and cheeks. He surfaces and holds out
a small white shell similar in shape to a conch shell, with a bright blue rim along its fluted opening.
“”What is it?”” she asks.
He shrugs and turns the shell in his hand.
“”It’s pretty,”” she says. He hands the shell to her and dives again.
This time he pulls something from the side of the pie and when he comes
up, hands her a branch of perforated coral about the size of a finger.
He removes the snorkel from his mouth. “”It’s forbidden,”” he says.
“”What is forbidden?””
“”To take the coral from the reef. Hide it.””
Eilat is a novel told in an effectively spare manner, one
in which experience and adventure are contrasted with the reassuring rituals of meals
and bathing, and the inner life with the surface one.
David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several
years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. He enjoys listening to very old music, birding,
and hiking in the Arizona landscape. Along with poems in magazines, he has a list of chapbook
publications with Places You Can’t Reach (Pudding House Publications, 2006) being the latest,
and recent books: A Normal Day Amazes Us (Kings Estate Press, 2003), Return to Waking Life
(Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2004), and Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press, 2006).
Email: David Chorlton
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