Raising Petra
by Michele Battiste
Pudding House Press, 2007
22 pages, $10
Reviewed by Susan Jo Russell
Who is Petra? I enter this book through the first poem, titled, simply, “Petra,” and I’m introduced to this girl who is supposed to be asleep but isn’t. OK, I think, this is about the author raising her daughter. Am I really going to be able to sustain interest in her child-rearing ups and downs through 16 poems? Petra—an ordinary girl, it seems, who “loves/her new, short haircut and pinafore/with lemon ruffles.” Oh, a girly girl, I think. Even less interesting. But soon something different happens—the poem careens around some corner:
If only it were morning, the cats dozing
in their baskets, the house warm with running
bath water and butter melting
into toast. She would jump up
and into that pinafore, shake
her head like a puppy killing, . . .
Killing? That line, ending with such an undecorous word, and the hints start to grow that this is no ordinary collection about childhood. Rather, we are going to peer into the unpredictable, the sad, maybe even the dangerous. It is not just that a child is not yet an adult, but that Petra—and all children—are apart from adults, essentially unknowable.
Two poems later, Petra’s apartness challenges the reader in the first line of “Visiting Petra”:
Petra doesn’t like you. I can tell
by the shrug, one shoulder raised . . .
. . . Petra
has developed moods that tug her
facial muscles into portraits a hand itches
to slap loose, and for now, Petra doesn’t
like you. . . .
And now we are in more complicated territory—the underlying conflict, the barely concealed hostility. Who has power here, the child or the adult?
The narrator/mother reveals herself caught between doubt and love, between, perhaps, admiration and something darker—envy and anger. Who is this girl, this daughter, this being in the world? “I swear you are here,” she convinces herself, “as real as wood or berries,” but challenges the reader and herself, “What do you really know about Petra?”
As the book goes on, Petra becomes more than a child. Is she the narrator’s alter ego, a self she could have been, some spirit posing as a child? In the later poems, the narrator’s envy of this “relentless” girl, who seems to have such control of her world, seeps through:
It’s hard not to be jealous, to want
to refuse her, to crush Petra just
a tiny bit. It would be discipline,
wouldn’t it?
The book is full of questions, drawing the reader into the conspiracy, to admit, yes, yes, it isn’t fair: “Who should be that/ lucky, that loved by the elements, that tranquil/and sure?” Petra is independent and unpredictable. She might do anything she wants. What she does could be interpreted as what any child might do—couldn’t it?
This book is haunting and haunted. The poems are written with a sure hand, the images right, the word choice sharp, the line breaks masterful, as in this passage: “In another world, Petra’s a fat,/unlikable kid, nervous and snotty,/every syllable a whine.”
It is hard to stop quoting from this book. On every page there is a passage I want to share. “Petra’s Song” is truly a tour-de-force, but to quote only part of Petra’s terrifying nursery rhyme here would be to ruin it. So I’ll give you only one more taste to tantalize you to buy this disturbingly honest book and read it from cover to cover for yourself:
It’s best to leave her now, like this,
too far away to be certain, her giggle
like hysterical sparrows we swear
are trapped in an air-duct, the beating
wings haunting our walls, and nothing we do
will reach them. Nothing can let them out.
