“ Within these pages, we find ourselves in the presence of a modern day Circe, a many- faceted, singer of deeply nuanced songs. She is not afraid of turning taboos inside out, whether it’s phone sex (Trout), her own youthful pretensions (Great Poet), or post-menopausal crushes (It Can’t Happen). The element of confession is woven into the lyric narratives; images and startling comparisons turn into and against each other, often coupling the everyday with the epic—“Dear Orpheus, listen;/Euridice sings too. She knows more/about dark sweet earth,/how to plant deep and sure--/more than the strumming boys do.” (Heartland, Revisited)
We consider the puzzle of poems bound by their own rules as Kallet experiments with flexible nonce forms, pantoums, and free-verse narratives tweaked with edgy, outspoken observation--“Jews don’t do mummies. Who has time?” in “Cat Mummy” for instance. Original characterizations and painfully accurate revelations abound. Scorpions are likened to Rockettes, and about her mob-connected father, she says, “A shame he never got the chance to vote.” Sometimes the twist that makes a subject new is experimental, as in the poem “Where Identity Doesn’t Rest.” A meditation on memory, the poem’s aesthetic tension of traditional narrative moves against a stylistic innovation that recalls Brenda Hillman.
The book’s three sections entwine geography with history, the global with the personal. Contradictions cohere in a space where lessons surface in dreams (Circe, Did You?), loss does not mean giving up or giving in (Out of Silence, for Sister Wendy), and melancholy is cast in unexpected images (Jealous). Intellectual scope, both deep and broad, a command of craft, and ease with both colloquial and formal utterance mark the work.
Kallet embraces all flesh and blood experience. No subject is off-limits, and humor often thwarts the reader’s expectations, in the best possible way. In “No Sale,” the poet brings together blues, love, and religion when she asks, “How would a Jewish girl/sell her soul to the devil?/Reformed don't believe/In Beezlebubba” and goes on recap the tale of Robert Johnson, selling his soul “at the crossroads/for a lifetime of hot-lick guitar./Shot by a jealous husband/at the roadhouse, he died on his knees/they say, drunk, barking like a dog./ When she ends the poem with a segue into the personal-- “Odd, for a nice Jewish girl/to fall on her knees./Years though, that's how/it was. Me shot down,/baying at the moon/for a lick of you”, we feel the empathetic tug that is a hallmark of good poetry.
She may banter in opening poems such as “No Makeup” --
I'll have to rely on poetry,
won't I?
And how, at fifty, I love
nakedness
in my face and lines,
and in your hands, dear reader.
---but pulls in to an elegiac tone in poems on the Holocaust in the third section. Kallet, a Lindsay Young Professor of English at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, draws from her deep well of literary and historical knowledge for these stricken poems. Under the poignant heading Breathing Daughters, this sequence singles out one survivor from the author’s family, Hedwig Schwartz, who, though “Nearly blind./you bore witness.” In this work, researched with fragments of letters, historical records, and other documents, the living must speak for the dead, as the past with its fragmented voices bodies forth Hart Crane's lines: "It is blood to remember; it is fire/to stammer back."
There is no stammering in this book, but plenty of blood, and an unquenchable fire that make Circe, After Hours an exceptional, many-layered book.
”
cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009.
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