Floating Bridge Press, 2010
27 pages, $12
ISBN 978-1-930446-22-9
by Elizabeth Austen
as part of Sightline, in The Quartet Series
Toadlily Press, 2010
75 pages, $15
ISBN 978-0-9766405-5-4
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk
I was immediately attracted to The Girl Who Goes Alone, by Elizabeth Austen, both by its bold title and by her brief bio on the back cover. We connect! We both worked in the theatre; we both do poetry on the radio, at local NPR affiliates. But she “wears a size 6 ½ hiking boot,” and my hiking boots are disintegrating. It’s been a long time since I walked a portion of the Appalachian Trail. Elizabeth Austen walked alone for six months in the Andes! Wow!
That fierce independence is barely held in by these 27 pages of lively, inquisitive, heartfelt, boundary-breaking, punctuation-busting poems. Connections continued as I read the poems closely. We’ve both written Eve poems that insist “It Didn’t Happen That Way,” though Austen grabbed that wonderful title. We both have a fascination with Virginia Woolf and the rocks that weighed her down. We both grapple with our spirituality.
“Don’t assume I believe in you / just because I’m talking to you,” she says in “Vestigial God,” a poem that is bold and self-deprecating at once. “Actually, I’m between gods at the moment—” she continues in this smart and hilarious poem, interspersed with asterisks like mini-snores—“saving my breath for someone who’s not too rude to do his own PR.” (I wonder if Elizabeth ever performed in Jesus Christ Superstar, or Godspell!) She can’t believe in God’s tacky, loudmouthed spokespeople these days, but she lets him off the hook with, “I’ve been known to fall asleep at the wheel myself.” And then clinches it with marvelous self-knowledge: “I ask God to speak. I keep talking. What do I expect?”
Now let me pause to mention Where Currents Meet, a shorter set of poems by Austen contained with three other chapbooks by other poets in Sightline, a book in The Quartet Series of Toadlily Press. That’s an interesting project, a way to get the work of multiple poets into the hands of readers, but, for now, I’ll only discuss Austen. I find it fascinating that two of her poems appear in both books, one rather dramatically revised.
Her Eve poem, “It Didn’t Happen That Way,” opens The Girl Who Goes Alone. I love how it starts mid-sentence (unless the title is considered the beginning of the sentence), blaming the apple instead of Eve:
Unless the apple itself, longing
to be known, can be blamed
for the light bent
across its skin
for the midday heat
transforming sugar to scent.
Unless the apple itself, longing
to be known, can be blamed
for the light bent
across its skin
for the midday heat
transforming sugar to scent.
Now I would have put a comma after “skin,” but not Elizabeth Austen! She lets the line break do the work, and she rails against “the dogma of the period” in “On Punctuation” just as much as she rails against religious dogma in other poems in this book! I much prefer this version of the Eve poem. She doesn’t need the two introductory stanzas in the version that appears in the Sightline book. In The Girl Who Goes Alone, we start in medias res, in the middle of the action, and keep going with that kind of energy all the way to the end, when she promises in “More, One More,” the last poem, “to praise this world / by hauling what I can / into the next.” And she warns,
Darling, sweet pants
don't stand
too close
at the end.
Darling, sweet pants
don't stand
too close
at the end.
This makes me laugh even as I anticipate her lover’s wrenching grief. Who could bear to lose such a woman? Or is she speaking to a young daughter, a toddler at the water’s edge? Then who could bear to lose such a mother?
And now back to Where Currents Meet, which is full of water poems, and the poet’s “need…to travel naked into an evening ocean,” and then back to “More, One More”:
I’m sure to try
to pull along
some cone or frond
grain of sand
in my swimsuit
pistachio stuck in my teeth—
to pull along
some cone or frond
grain of sand
in my swimsuit
pistachio stuck in my teeth—
Got to love that pistachio! Got to love those rolling tides and waves, swimsuit or no swimsuit! Where Currents Meet begins with an earnest, achingly lovely, questing poem, called “The Permanent Fragility of Meaning,” that asks, “Why persist…?” It seems to equate poetry and prayer, something else to which I connect, and ends with conviction: “I rise up and begin again.”
It’s amazing that both these books were published in 2010, but one has a vigorous and rollicking tone, as if the poet has solved something in choosing to go alone. Good for her. I’m eager to see where she goes next.
I imagine she’s resurrected something of the fierce toddler in herself, the girl in the other poem that appears in both books, “Her, at Two,” a little girl not afraid to take and eat!
Is this how we all
began, thrilled to hold the meat
in our tiny fists, sure
the feast was laid for us
alone?
began, thrilled to hold the meat
in our tiny fists, sure
the feast was laid for us
alone?
Even if it wasn’t, it was. I hope The Girl Who Goes Alone is
That girl -
who reaches and takes, erupts
in glee as she shakes her fistful
of bone and meat.
who reaches and takes, erupts
in glee as she shakes her fistful
of bone and meat.
