|
We get to know a lot about Nancy Boutilier ("rhyming...with
chandelier," as she puts it) over the course of On the Eighth Day
Adam Slept Alone. We accompany her on adventures in a swamp near her
childhood home in Northborough, Massachusetts; we meet her gruffly
protective older brother; we get the vicarious thrill of erotic intimation;
we see her "standing on the sideline" coaching basketball and teaching
English at San Francisco's Union High School. In fact, the family genealogy
"One Branch" takes us all the way back to her great-great-grandmother.
Boutilier's first book of poems, According to Her Contours, was
nominated for a Lamba Literary Award in 1992; her work yokes elements of
traditional rhyme and meter together with the technical innovations of
Language poetry in a form that can be more or less effective, but that never
obscures the complex emotions found in this personal verse.
Divided into ten section of (mostly) ten poems each, Eighth Day
covers a lot of ground. Section titles include "Loyalty", "Doubt",
"Knowledge" and "Belief", and Boutilier turns her attention toward big
themes in poems about nature, love and God. But that's not the whole of
the story, as sports, ex-lovers, Neo-Nazis and the death of Matthew Shepard
are just as likely to capture her roving interest. Technique sometimes gets
the better of her, as in the associative jumble "The Idea of a Body", but
Boutilier's love of how words sound is applied in equal measure to poems
that describe her life in shimmering detail. The beauty of the Bay Area
described in "Why I Love Mornings" -- "I stand above the city / as the slow
light / holds steadfast / a dull glow in the face of fog. / The sun is up / and day
begins to settle / subtle and persevering / above the sparkling bay." -- provides
a backdrop for a collection that ranges widely, applying the natural lessons
of geology, chemistry and physics to the mechanics of the human heart.
Most of the book's best work addresses the personal, although as in proof of
the maxim "the personal is political", Boutilier doesn't hide her emotions
or fierce intelligence in even the most public of the poems here. "Stirred
Awake" requires only thirteen lines to imply a whole world of longing and
connection:
"Every morning
I am stirred
sometimes at 4 AM
sometimes at 5 or 5:30
and I am sure
that it is you
waking
me
it is you rising
from your side
of the bed
on your side
of the continent."
The ice age metaphors of "Continental Drift" describe lingering effects from
the intimate touch of a "glacial tongue", that leaves "raw
traces / ...scratched warmly on my every acre"; "You got one foot inside my
cerebrum," declares "Pre-Occupied", in which the narrator's head is
(literally) taken over by thoughts of another. Boutilier critiques the
conformity-producing stresses of modern culture, especially as they are
applied to women, in "Stolen Flames" ("Let her string herself up / in a
bikini / ravished and unraveling / wafer thin and frail / ...the only meal / a fully
digested lie"), invoking both mythical and Biblical imagery to describe a
"grave" of body image-induced "self-loathing" that women unwittingly dig for
themselves. Avoiding self-righteousness, even the more explicitly
issue-oriented poems find a common ground of shared emotion with the reader.
The poems that meander over the page in an apparent attempt to simulate the
randomness of the world as our senses apprehend it ("The Poet Explains the
Symmetry of the Universe to the Physicist" or "Prospects", for instance) are
less successful than most of Boutilier's linear work. Eighth Day's
biggest failing is unfortunately found throughout the book, but is also
fairly minor. Boutilier has a tendency to throw a rhyme scheme into a poem
seemingly at random; off and slant rhymes, both embedded and at line breaks,
appear and disappear at whim and serve to disrupt the flow of many poems.
The effect is often jarring, sometimes just annoying, but cries out for a
tighter editing hand. These instances are ubiquitous, except in Boutilier's
most accomplished pieces, but even the poems that suffer from them usually
overcome the distraction through a strong grasp of subject. Our physical
and emotional journey through the world concerns these poems most, and on
that path Nancy Boutilier proves an empathetic, observant fellow traveler.
-- Ryan Tranquilla edits Splendid's Bookshelf department.
· · · · · · ·
About the Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
"Since the mid-60s, a single small press in California has made a profitable
and growing business -- without advertising, without relying on grants,
without leverage, and without press coverage -- by publishing precisely what
it wants. And what it wants to publish is the original, the
counter-cultural, the avant-garde, and the overlooked. Black Sparrow Press
was launched in 1966 by a Southern California businessman, John Martin, to
publish the work of the then little-known (though highly respected) poet
Charles Bukowski. It has continued over the past 30 plus years -- growing
steadily -- to publish American poetry and fiction that, whether one cares
for it or not, can only be described as determinedly noncommercial. And from
this mix has risen some of the finest avant-garde and experimental work of
the 20th century." -- Neil Gordon, Boston Review
|
