Helen
Losse’s book Better with Friends (Rank Stranger
Press, 2009, $14.00) echoes like a tough southern country gospel
song, the burden of suffering and the longing for joy and peace are
balanced with images and music of nature, the rhythms of the working
class poor, and the loneliness of a woman trying to change what is
wrong in the world.
The
pride of social justice is the backbone of many of these poems, and
so often the company of social change is loss, disappointment, the
falling down and getting up of those who fight the good fight. Or try
to. Loss and elegy are common themes and modes of expression in
Friends, as common as the railroads, fogs and flowers that
pepper the landscape of these poems. Elegy, according to Larry Levis,
is the American form of poetry and Friends opens with
the fumbling grief and frustration of an elderly relative who falls
closer and closer to the bottom in the middle of the holiday season.
Throughout the painful hospital stays, the woman’s fits and starts,
winter’s bare trees and gray skies echo the loss and the anger that
comes with “want to scream” and “knowing that the
past is never “just the past”—/knowing things she does not
know…” and the poet prays and lingers in the corridors of the
sick, the weak lights of the hospital filtering through her eyes.
“What I want is a miracle,” she says.
But miracles do not wink in the winter nights.
Despite
the title, the voices of these poems speak from solitude, for example
wishing her neighbor’s house, and the woman who lives there didn’t
exist. “I hate that house, and sometimes, when it/disappears in the
fog, pretend it isn’t there./ I sit in my chair and look into the
yard./ I imagine I belong.” This disconnect, this sense of un-
belonging drives the elegiac tone of the book.
Losse’s
images circle and cycle and return to things lost, forgotten, broken
down and
“hiding
in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.” Consider “In the
Garden” where the angel waits, inert “as she reaches
outward/toward an unreachable lamppost—/where joe-pye weeds line
the garden wall….” Like dying relatives Losse’s subjects have
seen finer days and the angel is no different, “A part of her hair
has eroded away. A part of her/right hand is broken….”
Those
that are one whisper closer to death or far beyond death’s whisper
linger underneath the southern foliage and the hope of sunny beach
day. This slow death adds a sweet southern fragrance to the poems in
Friends, and reminds me of the sweet scent of
honeysuckle that grows rank in the high summer, and the poems in
Friends are full of these moments where beauty lingers in the
face of loss and pain.
And
Losse’s territory stretches beyond the south, towards the west, to
the breathy Atlantic whose white noise in “Point of
Departure” belies:
The bones of kings,
who last saw Ghana as they
sailed away, crossing the vast and silver water—
then probed by small, mean fish—
are preserved now by salt and have settled,
several fathoms deep on the ocean floor,
where the whole world is as black as it was
in the hold of the slaver’s ship.
After
all there is naked horror in the world, not just in the rural south
where the backwoods are blasted with poverty, as if someone had
pointed a shotgun at the kudzu overgrown shacks and let loose. The
subject of “The Triple Evils in No Particular Order” where
dreams are “divorced” and the world must be “shut” to keep
“the people safe” explore the cruelty of being poor, of being a
victim of war, of being human in a world where man is destructive to
everything, especially himself.
And
as Losse shows us stark landscapes, she also reaches for hope even if
it’s in the death of Martin Luther King, or making a home in her
garden, or the rhythms of fried gospel hand-clapping shouts in the
bluesy “Church, when they had no Pianos.”
Losse’s
spiritual vein runs deep, but she is no preacher. Her view of God in
the world is as complicated as it is heart felt, for God “isn’t
home” in “The Other Side of the River” and is absent in
the presence of death as he is present in the beauty and awe of a
flower reaching towards the spring sun, or watermelon vines that
appear to be void of life.
Friends’
poems confront the world as is it is, the “vomit” and the “lonely
voice,” a world that Losse looks into the eye and sings to, rails
against, and cries out to for justice, for light, for the peace and
harmony of a family meal, even as she “embraces those shadows” of
what was and what have long departed from the earth, as she “walks
into and sets free.”
In
the end, Better with Friends, reminds the reader that
of the simple truth of friendship, how a touch, or a word given to
the dead or poor or unwanted can make things better, if only for a
little while.
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