The Darkened Temple
by Mari L'Esperance
Bison Books, 2008
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Darkened-Temple,673946.aspx
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1847-5
I approach every new poetry book (whether new to the world or just new to me) with great hopefulness and excitement. Hoping to be swept away into a world of both magic and danger, where the poet holds nothing back, creating beauty out of ugliness, and finding ugliness in beauty. Being in control, but also breaking down. Engaging with the edge - his/her edge and the edge of the poems, and maybe even going over that edge, whether by accident or on purpose. Wielding words with such glittering precision and brutality that there is no escape for the poet or the reader.
The Darkened Temple has a built-in, incredible edge. L'Esperance's mother disappeared without a trace and the middle third of the poems in this book focus on that disappearance, and the poet's attempt to deal with the loss and the not knowing. Overall, it's a beautiful book. The language, the images, the lines; the poems on the page have elegance and grace and simplicity.
An example from "Two Maples"
and labor and then it is done. The drive and
the giving over after-like the last of spring's
blossoms that have flared and guttered,
bruised petals of our disappointments drifting
down to disappear forever into the earth.
So seemingly effortless, such a lasting image and quiet authority. This echoes throughout the book. The best poems are those that are rooted in the concrete, those about the natural world, that mirror the mysterious processes of nature-loss and rebirth and loss again. These poems are rich and dark, full of a respectful witnessing of nature, rather than a desperate longing to understand:
From "Nocturne"
our house. Some nights, even
in the day, it rises up on air, then recedes
into the earth. It comes and goes
like this, but is always there, concealed
in the waving grass.
There is music in these lines, they flow and break intuitively, with subtle internal rhymes, assonance, and consonance - field/behind, rises/recdes, air/there, recedes/concealed.
From "The Shoes"
twigs, loose stones, footprints,
the singular indentations a space makes in soft earth.
Something waits in the dark hillside, rain and the night
falling.
This poet knows how to word with sound and syntax!
It's clear that she turns to this world, to these processes as she tries to understand what happened to her mother and how to navigate the mystery of an incredible loss, one without any markers—no information, no body, no last message, no goodbye, and vague memories of her mother on top of that.
And, it follows, who she is because of this disappearance. What, of herself, has also disappeared? What remains? What should be rebuilt and what left in ruins?
In the beginning of the book L'Esperance writes her way carefully into her history, starting with other disappearances she's read about, her brother's illness, then into her childhood and memories of her mother,
from "The Dollmaker":
I sat at the kitchen table, your small daughter,
while you fashioned their brilliant robes
out of colored rice paper
and those losses she, or her mother, witnessed as a child-of sight, of honor, of home, of country.
When we reach the second section, it appears there are two books of poems here. The poems about the poet's mother, and then the rest (first and third sections), behind which the mother's absence (and therefore presence) is felt but not usually stated outright. It is the latter that is the more successful and emotionally compelling for the reader. Perhaps because the poet is more comfortable with the implicit 'not knowing' and uncertainty that comes with being human in general, than the not knowing about her mother.
The thirty or so pages that comprise the middle section of the book are dedicated to poems dealing with the mother's disappearance and the daughter-poet's quest for answers and to make peace with the absence and loss. Here the poet attempts to express the vagueness, numbness, fear and paralysis of the experience, and seems to get trapped in her own cycle of these emotions and inaction, without transitioning in any direction - backwards or forwards.
Images of transition do appear—rooms, doorways, windows, rivers, gates, and the poet stands at them but never enters or crosses over. Over and over, the poems are a lamenting of not being able to move, of not knowing, of circling, and the poet knows this:
And all day I am alone with her, trying
to write her from memory and failing,
trying again, and failing-as if writing her
could explain the past, make her real,
shaper her into something actual.
Where one or two poems along these lines are enough, the poet has many. One poem in particular, "Where the Body Might Be, the Mind follows—" is all a reader could want on the subject, and perhaps should have stood alone:
It refused to have anything to do with her.
Nothing could persuade it. Like the mother
who refused to be found, disappearing
the way she did, without a trace—
This poem is the best of the section. It covers all the possible bases of memory, feeling, questioning, fear, and does so with fragmentation, broken lines, italicized sections, chunks of text. The whole process, the uncertainty, the circling, the not knowing is contained perfectly in this one poem, which is messy both in feeling and on the page, exactly what's needed.
In contrast, though, the rest of the poems in the section, are carefully controlled, in couplets mostly (in general, couplets are often used to convey balance and ease—both false and true), the language almost too exquisite, too beautiful, as in this one, where the poet tries to connect with the reality of her mother's dead body:
from "To Her Body":
Loneliness. The child's
cry, unanswered. Of
want and despair.
Of salt. Blood–blood
on silk, on lacquer.
Of dusk. Irises. Fog
in the cedars. Of fog.
Fog and absence.
Of absence.
This is gorgeous stuff. The rhythm is fantastic. The words pound down on the reader relentlessly, but don't crush us, the way we would wish them to. The words are too poetic to crush you: stone, despair, salt, blood, silk, dusk, irises, fog, cedars, absence. The poet does not allow the reality of the body to materialize, or the anger and ugliness that must be there to come forth in this or the other poems in this section; they are so controlled and lovely. Under other circumstances, this wouldn't be a problem, but we are talking about the disappearance of one's mother, so something more visceral feels called for, a more exposed struggle with pain and raw grief and desperation. Not obvious or overdone, but I was waiting for a breakdown—large or small—that never came, so the section that should have been the most chaotic and edgy, comes across safe.
I know it's easy for me to say. I've never dealt with such a shattering experience, and so have not tried to write poems about it. The poet should be considered successful for even getting something so polished on paper. It's that polish that is holding them back, though, for this reader.
Overall, L'Esperance's lyricism is stunning. Her sense of line and image, perfection. The lover of poetry and the poet alike will appreciate the skill and talent evident in The Darkened Temple.—Christine Stewart