When I read Donna de la Perrière’s poems I keep in mind Rilke’s “bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender.” The pervading disquiet— bodies in trouble, homes collapsing, loved ones missing or dying—is connected to something too frail to call ‘hope,' so let’s call it ‘forbearance.’ A current of stoicism runs through them, assuring the reader that although the learning curve may be harsh, the body pulls through—if only just.
In “Hereditament”, the inheritance inventoried includes not only real property of dubious value (“old cars”, “stained linens”, “dry rot” etc.) but also quite a few skeletons in the closet (“cancers”, “shock treatments”, etc.) and violence (“gunshots and falling bodies”). Curiously, then, that the poem should end with this: “There is all of that. There is none of it. This is only the beginning.” The simultaneous acceptance and denial of so much physical and psychic damage assures the cycle will continue. Or will the self-cancellation offer a clean slate? The open-endedness leaves us wondering at the possibility, however slight, of an alternate future.
Time, uneasy muse, is also at work in “Close Reading”, where the self and the soul have differing (and competing) agendas. The body is “trapped in its skin” while the soul, “flapping in your hands” has “a granite face”; one thinks of gravestones or sheer cliffs. The central peril in this poem is time, which “can spool forward, more and more loosely strung” in the “book of sins” where “night falls fast.” How to account for the past, when one wishes to be firmly rooted in the present, but keep an (uneasy) eye on the future? In the end, the poet pleads, “What I would like to know now/is how to know, then how/to bear it.” In a close reading of our own lives, this just may be the most one can hope for.
In “Hereditament”, the inheritance inventoried includes not only real property of dubious value (“old cars”, “stained linens”, “dry rot” etc.) but also quite a few skeletons in the closet (“cancers”, “shock treatments”, etc.) and violence (“gunshots and falling bodies”). Curiously, then, that the poem should end with this: “There is all of that. There is none of it. This is only the beginning.” The simultaneous acceptance and denial of so much physical and psychic damage assures the cycle will continue. Or will the self-cancellation offer a clean slate? The open-endedness leaves us wondering at the possibility, however slight, of an alternate future.
Time, uneasy muse, is also at work in “Close Reading”, where the self and the soul have differing (and competing) agendas. The body is “trapped in its skin” while the soul, “flapping in your hands” has “a granite face”; one thinks of gravestones or sheer cliffs. The central peril in this poem is time, which “can spool forward, more and more loosely strung” in the “book of sins” where “night falls fast.” How to account for the past, when one wishes to be firmly rooted in the present, but keep an (uneasy) eye on the future? In the end, the poet pleads, “What I would like to know now/is how to know, then how/to bear it.” In a close reading of our own lives, this just may be the most one can hope for.