Elisa Biagini’s poetry is sensual, erotic even, and domestic. I do not mean to imply that her poems are tamed, domesticated, for they are often wild things of eye and ear, but many of the poems are rooted in familiar words and worlds of home, family, food, and the body. But these are not poems of a desperate housewife cliche, rather these are poems that use the mundane to strike poetic ground. Chelsea Editions offers up a new collection of her work, translated by Diana Thow, Sarah Strickney, and Eugene Ostahevsky, entitled The Guest in the Wood, $20. The collection combines two of Biagini’s works 2004’s The Guest, and 2007’s Into the Wood, and the selections from these two collections show off Biagini’s attention for detail, her snapshots of the body, rooted in the language of food, home, and the senses.
Biagini’s poems appear, at first, to be delicate short creations, the kind of small poems that focus on image through an economy of language, but Biagini works like a great composer, her images repeat and couple, and form chords if you will, that play as Biagini directs her breath and language. Eggs become not only food, but a symbol of promise, fragility, hollowness. Simple “yellow cooking oil” becomes the sickened eyes of dying relatives that require care and emotional energy. The Guest in the Wood’s motifs are well suited for each other, like a seasoned quartet. She has a fondness for broken things, as well as how the spirit, or consciousness, is often estranged to the body; we are strangers in our skin, finding comfort in food, companionship, and even death.
What I loved about The Guest in the Wood was the coziness of the poems. Much of the poems are untitled, and the reader jumps into the language without expectations, without the benefit of a framing title. Consider the poem that begins “Senseless,/ like ironing sheets/and towels, just/to be able to say that/the iron’s steam is/your sweat.” It is clear we dealing with intimacy, probably a lover, whose body is recalled via chore, the same sheets that were no doubt soiled by the absent lover who left a “finger/in the cake for my sake,/for me, when you know/I only like bread.” There’s contention here, the stress is highlighted by the short lines, the quick brief rhyme, and the poem ends with the image of an oven, “the heat of breath.” Biagini’s choice of imagery is universal, simple, domestic, but they are combined in a way that strikes an aching, elegiac tone. This isn’t a happy relationship, by any means, and a wet damp hot one at that. Humidity has rarely captured unrest as it does here. In “housewife afterlife” the speaker gleefully sends off the role, the cause of the housewife to the afterlife with “cup, plate, utensils/too, needle and thread if you like, with/soap as if you were camping,/with two pairs of socks, for/the drafts....” Whether it is poet herself shucking the role, or just the speaker in the poem, the compartmentalized life of a housewife is just that, a part of the whole, perhaps the broken part of the whole, broken because it is unwanted, incomplete. In the short poem “the unloved dead shiver and have eyes of musk” the speaker seethes “to make things spic/and span I’ll/eat you,/I’ll make you disappear/like the black line/in the bathtub.” I recognize this emotion, identify with it, not as a spurned lover, or a housewife, but as partner in my own domestic responsibilities. Sometimes mundane chores can be a transformative, freeing experience, and other times the chores become a focal point for emotion, perhaps not for the dead whom the speaker is cleaning up after, but certainly for another person in the household. How many times have we in the middle of chore swore at our wives or husbands, wondering “how did I get stuck with this detail?” Either way Biagini shows us that the anger and bitterness of our failures is inside us. As much as we hope blame exists in our chores, and our roles, and in our outside world, the problem lies within.
The motif of the failing body, or perhaps the fallible body, and its disconnection or connection between the spirit is explored throughout the collection. Whether the speaker recalls “a voice that skins my ear...your peeled hands/are tapestries” or someone who “descend into sleep/like a diver,” Biagini shows us frailty, offers up our skin and bones as evidence of a life, “the body,/last place/i can hide,” and of the spirit within that is bound to the past as it longs for the “milk to come.”
There is a good bit of dreaminess or surreal imagery in Biagini. Not the high fantasy magical realism can create, but more of the kitchen sink variety where the mundane is turned inside out or juxtaposed with another image to create a David Lynchian creepiness. This is most evident in the final section of the collection, “Gretel, or About Getting Lost” where the Grimm fairy tale is recast with the tropes of Biagini’s poetry. Her economy of language, her willingness to become lost within her own imagery evokes a creepy psychosexual landscape where the losses are not only life-threatening, but spirit crushing. The heroine here is seeking human connection “i thumb the thread/from house to/house/from body/to body,” but human-ness, being of the body, fails her, “a map chewed and/spat out:the trail,/on the throat...(grass turns into body--/hair, and that, to grass.../roots sitting in the dark to hold/fast the bonehouse).” Or at least fails her for a time, for the longer Gretel is lost, the more comfortable she is about being lost, and the more in tune with her present she becomes. Gretel survives by “eating/my way out of here,” her tongue “an axe,” the “earth is up to/the heart...” In these poems to be lost is the journey. To be turned inside out by hunger, ache, loneliness, and fear is to begin again, a wild woman with “nerves/wrapped around/the forks of hair.”
The Guest in the Wood is provocative and haunting, sensual in surprising ways. Together with the translating team has crafted a remarkable look at what it means to be a body, to be a collection of nerves lost in the big bad wood.
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