Adagios: Orestes’ Lament
by Judith Fitzgerald
Oberon Press, 2004
Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston
In this, the second slow-movement in a four-part epic,
Fitzgerald mourns brilliantly the breakdown of contemporary
civilization, from economies, wars, famines, to the
environment, against the background of the Homeric Oresteia, and does it with dense imagery, rich with biblical and
literary undertones. Orestes’ Lament resonates with the language of Lamentations: ‘How deserted lies the city, … Once
great
among nations, now become a widow; once queen among
provinces, now put to forced labour!/ She weeps bitterly in
the night … … Her friends have all betrayed her; they
have
become her enemies.’ (Lam.1:1-2) Thus Jeremiah cries pain
for his world and those who have been deported.
Fitzgerald mourns the separation between individuals,
the lack of hope:
Horrors accumulating, our house collapsing in crises,
I endure dislocations to find talismans by firelight,
curl inward in my obsidian cavern, clutch certainties,
barter for better days, and pray mourning begins at
midnight.
(p.26)
Her meaning is, on occasion, shrouded and mysterious,
as Fitzgerald speaks from the depth of the human heart
where grief cries in an agony without words.
This is also an extended poem of madness, Orestes being
chased by the Erinyes, those mad goddesses, serpent-haired,
dog-headed, bat-winged, sometimes regarded as pangs of
conscience, with an underlying reminder of Lear’s madness
and despair:
We live in a world bearing down on being, a whitened
world
where, following full brightness, the moon falls apart
in our
XXXXXXXXXXhands,
falls victim to our obsessions with grave sights
invisible …
(p.12)
Biblical echoes are frequent in the poem, ‘Give us
this
day our portion/ of poetic grace …’ (p.9) which reminds
the
reader of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us this day our
daily
bread’ but asks for freely given, mysterious, covenant
love
rather than the practicality of everyday food.
Then Jesus’ statement ‘I am the way, the truth, and
the
life’ in John 14:6 is recalled in the ‘shimmering
images of
the way, the truth, and the damned facts’ (p.20). Here
Fitzgerald emphasizes 20th century dependence on facts
though these may not be the inner truth. There is also a
satiric echo of Ecclesiastes 8:15 ‘Eat, drink, and be
merry’
in Fitzgerald’s ‘Eat, drink, go fishing’ (p.40).
Few 20th century disasters have been been omitted, if
any, from ‘profligate propaganda or scabrous
disinformation
dispersed’ (p.39), to Ethiopia’s famines: ‘our
hunger’s so
vast only gods can wholly comprehend it ‘ (p.30); or
with
this one-letter twist on ‘Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5):
… but, there’s no place like Hell and the
meek
shall inherit the dearth; here, on this amusement-park
planet.
(p.36)
In other words, the meek will inherit scarcity and lack the
means to sustain life, while everyone else plays.
She writes scathingly of our treatment of the
environment:
The breaking sea’s endless wreckage incurs stilled
calamities,
settles scores, silences voices raised against harsh
enemies
teaching harsher lessons vis-à-vis our lists of
things
to doom.
Why must we pitiless you and me provoke gods?
… This carnage eclipses all meaning.
(p.45)
The death of fish stocks and species used as revenge
between peoples, nuclear waste, all of which creates havoc
on land and sea. She pulls no punches in this endless
threnody.
And on to 9/11 ‘with the disastrous crash of towers
crumbling in noxious flame’ (p.38).
The hard-hitting language of the lamentation, sharp
consonants and short vowels, give immediacy to the poetry,
while the biblical echoes give spiritual depth and broaden
the perspective on grief. Fitzgerald uses internal rhyme:
‘in the shameless jaws of attritions or death’s
disquisitions’ (p.26); end rhyme:
I wrestle with terrible angles among grief’s
indifferent
XXXXXXXXXXconstellations,
rail against matricide and mourning’s bloated
revelations.
(p.27)
She incorporates alliteration: ‘bled-red edges of
sense
-/ glorious refrains going, grinding, gone…’ (p.30)
with
a musical expertise that creates syncopated rhythms which
interrupt the flow of images and add emphasis to the theme
of a broken world.
Fitzgerald challenges awareness to the depths. She
twists the knife with precision in First World conceptions
as she moves through the madness of Orestes’ journey to
that place where the reader must ‘stay the course until
the
moon rises to reveal the blood on its underside.’ (p.51)
Joanna M. Weston -- THE WILLOW-TREE GIRL for ages 7-11
|
|
