Early intimations of immortality: the poetry of Sheryl St. Germain

Literary Review, Fall, 1993 by Burton Raffel

We evaluate and classify poets differently from the way we evaluate and classify writers of fiction. That may seem obvious, but it has not always been how things were done. In our time, and not simply in our own country but all across the world, it is now almost universally true. "Does he/she have a book?" is our virtually invariable query, on hearing an unfamiliar poet's name. Marketplace realities make it superfluous to ask the same thing about prose writers: of course they have books, and if they don't, who cares about them? Fiction writers are supposed to have books, and - even today, with the novel dead or dying, and Hollywood and television cocks of the roost - they do. But in our world, at least, poets are supposed to struggle. And oh they do, they do.

Not that poets don't put out books. But the large New York trade publishers (the real publishers) print less and less poetry virtually every year; more and more poets are well into their careers (and in some sad cases are done with them) before, if ever, they publish a book with a "real," a "major" publisher. And almost no publisher of any size or persuasion really sells poetry, though some careful and canny souls somehow manage not to lose their shirts putting it into print. "Poetry, " as a fiction agent of mine once told me years ago, "is a futility." In dollars and cents terms, which is overwhelmingly how trade publishers for the most part think they have to think, my agent was right: if poetry is not a textbook case of economic futility, I do not know what is.

These are neither theories nor complaints: they are, for poets, a large component of the singularly stark facts of modern life. Sheryl St. Germain, one of the strongest poets now writing in this country, and - remarkably - one of the most profoundly female (I do not say "feminist," but female, and I will explain myself in a moment) has just put out her third book, Making Bread at Midnight. It is 100 pages of superb poetry, well printed, on good paper, attractively bound, and not extravagantly priced ($9.95). But where will you find copies on sale? Worse, where will you find a review? (This one, such as it is, will be appearing a very long time after the book. Will it still be available, by the time you read these words?) The publisher, previously unknown to me, is Slough Press (Box 1385, Austin, Texas 78767). I have a copy because I wangled one from the poet. But how will you get one? Because you should: the very first poem in the book, "Always Wear Clean Underwear, You Never Know When You Might Get in a Car Accident," concludes:

. . . and besides, if I did get in a car accident I would want them to find me dead as I was alive, the wind rushing up my legs under my skirt, everything open and frank as the highway, not smothered and sad by underwear. I would want them to find me bare-assed and bleeding, spread out on the street

I do not think I have ever encountered a poet less self-consciously or more powerfully female. St. Germain does not try to intellectualize or abstract her gender; neither does she try to escape from it. I am that I am, as Someone once said: she accepts herself with a fullness, with an intensity, and with a gloriously swaggering melodiousness that are, I think, new to poetry in our language. I can think of no other woman poet in any language, in fact, who (a) accepts herself so profoundly and (b) takes precisely this hard-edged approach to how she finds herself. The only poet who even comes to mind, for sheer strength and impact, is Anna Akhmatova, but Akhmatova's stances, and her voice, are very very different: "He loved three things in the world, / Vespers singing, white peacocks, / And maps of America, rubbed worn. / He didn't like children crying, / Or tea with raspberry jam, / Or hysterical women. / . . . And I was his wife" (trans. B. Raffel and A. Burago). St. Germain is more likely to say, in the title poem of this new book:

I gather the tangible ingredients, flour, salt, oil. I measure them carefully in my measuring cup, mix, beat and knead, according to the directions, peer into the oven. The bread rises like a voice: bake the children, the family, eat them, eat them.

Perhaps less obviously distinctive (though I have not quoted the entire poem, the first line of which is "Tonight darkness is thick as chloroform"), this is every bit as seductive, as dominant as the first poem quoted from. And I say "dominant" most deliberately: St. Germain does not write for, but at, the reader, and she wields the weapons of her craft with ferocious skill. Consider: the persona, "dumb," "stumble[s] to the kitchen," out of a dark, inevitably irrational miasma "of voices . . . that will not speak or name" themselves. Then follow the 9 lines which conclude the poem, those I have quoted, above - apparently bland lines, but in fact measured out every bit as carefully as those "tangible ingredients." "Tangible," for one thing, is not a word that opens itself to the reader all at once. But neither is it a word we can fully accept, on any sort of superficial terms; it suggests too much unstated but by no means unknown meaning, meaning which, unless we turn away from the poem and turn ourselves off, must in the end be faced, must be known and re-known. That which "will not speak" is not "tangible." But as this poet understands with intense clarity, it is just as real, just as potent. The profoundly deft "measure them . . . in my measuring cup" manages to convey exactly the right tone of "dumb" -ness, and exactly the right premonitions of still other irrational things to come. So too "mix, beat and knead" proceeds beautifully out of "flour, salt, oil": not only the fact but the rhythm of the triple reiteration echoes with a hollow "darkness [as] thick as chloroform." There is just the right shade of passive resignation in "according to the directions," and just the right evocations of witches and gingerbread ovens and terrified children in "peer into the oven." And then, suddenly, though the "thicket of voices . . . that will not speak," the "tangible ingredients," duly heated, do speak: "The bread rises like a voice." (St. Germain has a masterfully unobtrusive, un-arty way of being totally artful and sweeping all the ingredients of her poem into a seamless, integrated whole. She does it over and over.) And what the rising bread "says," in the poem's final lines, is every bit as terrifying, and yet every bit as natural and inevitable, as anything that "darkness . . .thick as chloroform" could either threaten - or do. I spoke, just a moment ago, of the "inevitably irrational miasma" which the poem conjures up (again, conjures at us, not for us): it is precisely the absolute unavoidability of the irrational which most of us either deny or try to protest against. St. Germain neither denies nor protests. She has no time to waste on such ultimately futile gestures. She is hunting bigger, darker, fiercer game.