Review: Susan Yuzna's Pale Bird, Spouting Fire

       
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Susan Yuzna, Pale Bird, Spouting Fire, University of Akron Press, 2000
Available in both hardback and paper at Amazon.com

Susan Yuzna, author of Her Slender Dress, which won the Akron Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, had the awesome task of succeeding her first book with a new collection of poems, Pale Bird, Spouting Fire. When you’ve hit it big with an extraordinary first book—the heat is on—as far as “expectation” is concerned.  No doubt about it, Her Slender Dress earned the prestigious Norma Farber First Book Award.  So how do you follow that act as they say in the biz?  Although Pale Bird, Spouting Fire could be viewed as a continuation of Yuzna’s first—it is uniquely different from Her Slender Dress and just as fascinating on its own merits.

Yuzna’s poems remind me of Billie Holiday’s improvisational moods of passion and grief.   The cover of Pale Bird, Spouting Fire, which depicts a dove hovering through an open window above a winding stairway, and beyond the window, a stark sky of winter trees, characterizes this poet’s sensibilities.   Metaphorically speaking, stairways can go both up and down; like Billie Holiday, Yuzna has taken the high and hard road.  She’s experienced turbulent and frustrating love affairs, suffered periods of depression, drug addiction, but in spite of all this—or perhaps because of it—she’s developed a deeply compassionate and humorous style, coupled with a wit for irony. 

Yuzna is not your typical, armchair philosopher-poet.  She’s not a detached observer of life.  Experience has been the giver of epiphanies; hardships have forced her to see reality as it is, not as it ought to be in the abstract.  She is both defiant and reflective, blasting forbidden lines. She's a rebel at heart, a bad girl, holding her own.  In fact, if I had to think of a theme song for Yuzna, it would be Jagger’s Sympathy for the Devil or Nietzsche’s declaration to live dangerously! But don’t be deceived by her defiance.  My guess is that she’s just the kind of person who would give you the last shirt off her back if you needed it.

If Yuzna identifies with Blake, I would argue that Los, the spiritual revolutionist, whose son Orc is outward revolution, symbolizes her rebellious attitude.  In “The Way the Body” Yuzna reflects on her childhood Catholic schooling.  “In Catholic school, we were all obsessed / with the body, not the soul.”   For Yuzna, the body is the passion of life.  It is the Kingdom of Heaven, but it is also the source of Hell.  Tell me if it isn’t true for all of us! 

The Way the Body

I

In Catholic school, we were all obsessed
with the body, not the soul. This question

repeated endlessly: At the Second
Coming, when we get our bodies back, what

age will we be? It would make each nun, each
year, turn purple in the face, grind her teeth.

At your best age, in the prime of your life.
It seemed fair enough. If you had to grow

old, and creep up the steps as those folks at
Mass did, at least, when you returned, you could

run again, play ball with the best of them.
But I always suspected the nuns lied.

…

“But I always suspected the nuns lied.”  As Nietzsche put it, “I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed—as the greatest and most impious lie…” Christianity denies the Will to Power, the Will to Passion, the Sacred Body.  To deny its being is to deny an essential part of the soul.  In these lines, Yuzna is simply observing the rite of trading in the aging body for a youthful one.  It’s what Nietzsche meant by turning our direction to the make-believe Other – instead of celebrating this life, this reality, the world of becoming.   For Yuzna, worshiping the soul at the expense of bodily pleasures, at the expense of experience, is an act of blaspheme.

II

I suppose that's why; in my dream of death,
the men are in their twenties, the women

middle-aged. I was walking down a long,
white hall. The door of a room stood ajar.

I opened it very slowly, trying
hard to be quiet, the way I was taught.

The room was filled with music, like nothing
I'd heard before—slow and easy, joyous—  

like liquid gold, like honey slipping off
the edge. It came from the horns being played

by men sitting cross-legged on a large,
white bed. And the women, much larger

in body but black, also, stood behind,
swaying as they hummed along with the song.

One turned, smiled at me, and said, Where you been, girl?
We done thought you gone. The white flower

pinned to her hair, the voice—it was Billie,
and she was landlady of this place.

Hers was the voice behind the beat, playing
around with it, and hers was the voice

in perfect control of itself, at last.

III

The way the body will follow the mind:
I am being carried on a white stretcher

down the long, narrow hallway of my new
apartment building, while my body goes

into shock from a massive loss of blood.
Hemorrhaging from my womb, I am growing

fainter by the minute, but my mind is
terribly lucid, in spite of it—This

is the dream. I must be going to die.
I am pleasantly disintegrating.

But the sound of my son, weeping, pulls me
back to the needful world—I am afraid.

The way the bodies of strangers will fit
into what is missing: the man comforts

my son: Don’t worry. Your mom’s gonna be
okay.  Ever been in an ambulance

before?  You can sit up front with me.
and you can even turn the siren on.

The way the bodies of strangers come close,
lean over us, whisper, sing—whatever it is

we so desperately need.

I love this dream segment in Part II.  Yuzna also identifies with the down & out—those who’ve been oppressed and abused in our society.   “Liquid gold” is a wonderful way of describing Holiday’s voice and “horns being played.”  This is more than just down-home southern comfort.  It is a spiritual dream of finding wholeness, integrity, peace.  Holiday is the “landlady of this place.”  And “at last,” she can sing without the burdens of injustice and inequality weighing her down.   “Hers was the voice behind the beat, playing / around with it, and hers was the voice / in perfect control of itself, at last.”   I also find the vision of hearing her voice “behind the beat” intriguing.  It’s open to various levels of interpretation.  The “beat” as in “turf,” “heart,” “body,” “world,” but primarily, Holiday’s voice is an all-embracing presence that is mystical and inviting, which goes beyond the temporary beat of daily life.

In Part III, Yuzna describes what must have been a painful experience of “hemorrhaging from the womb.”   The body “goes into shock” and she feels as if she is dying, but her son pulls her back to the “needful world.”    Blake wrote, “Contrarieties are equally True.”  The body has its limitations.  Matter has its limitations.  When the body breaks down, we are forced to feel our way out of fear of the unknown.  In some way, we are all looking for that “soulful dream,” that perfect state of “balance” or “reconciliation.”    And just as Yuzna returned to her son, sensing his need, the man’s act of kindness is a gesture of reconciliation, of giving back to the “needful world.”

The theme of reconciliation is evident in her opening poem, “The Cage”.  The poet would like her father to finally acknowledge her now that he is part of the “spirit world”.  What he could not seem to do in his physical lifetime—may be possible under the full moon.    With the death of her father comes the birth of her son.  The full moon is an image of life making its full circle.  And, of course, being released from the cage of burdensome troubles, seeking freedom, are also recurring themes in Yuzna’s work.

The Cage

My father was named for St. Francis of Assisi,
a man so pure he could speak with the animals.

But my father heard only the noise people make.

I have come back
to the arms that held me in the old days.

To the Big Horn Mountains, where there are
sheep at my window, deer on the path.

And a moon so full, the mountains seem to
lap against the sky—a moon so full—

ooh, ooh, ooh, what a little moonlight can do
to you—

A moon so full, the cage is visible.

Quietly, the animal spirits laugh.

My father is also here, cradled by the moon.

Can he see me now? Can he hear me at last?

The animal spirits announce an arabesque.

So it is written.

In the lexicon of coyote, eagle, bear, egret, bison,
it is written. Ye who have ears, let him hear.

Tomorrow, my son will be born.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Autumn in Ohio, Thinking of James and Another”. 

I have flown
to this small Ohio town
to offer my poems to strangers,
to release them
as if they were pale birds
spouting fire, tiny dragon-birds, as if they would rise
into the tall October sky
at the very same moment
a golden shower of leaves
hits the pavement, and sticks.  The extraordinary
coincidence of love
is like this. 

….

Yuzna likens her poems to “pale birds spouting fire, tiny dragon-birds”.   The imagery in this stanza is almost Eastern in its tone and simplicity.   The experience of reading poetry, of leaving an impression on her listeners—is almost like falling in love in the sense that the poet is giving something that is uniquely her own to those who've come to appreciate her work.  

In poems like “The Telephonist,” perhaps a take off the word, “hypnotist,” Yuzna tells her story of having worked as a switchboard operater during her college years.  Her frustration turns into anger and then humor:

…I was much too tired
to give a shit when the businessmen yelled

about lines down in Manila again,
as if I could stop those typhoons, as if

I could make the old crones in Manila
love us, which they didn’t or be somewhat

helpful…



…I grew so tired
of phones ringing for eight hours straight.

I wanted to pull my hair out, one thin
strand at a time.  It was a newly

invented circle of hell, and if you
had been there, you just might understand

why that infamous hippie girl rose up,
out of her chair, yanked the earphones off, and climbed

onto a counter running the length of the room
beneath our long, black switchboard, then, crawling

from station to station, pulled each cord
from its black tunnel, breaking one connection

after another, like a series of
coitus interruptus all down the board, ...

As Dorianne Laux put it, “Susan Yuzna’s poems have attitude, they refuse to look away from the exigencies of contemporary womanhood…Her voice is honest, direct, passionate, forged by the need to break into utterance.   Poems like “Golden Gate,” “The Telephonist,” and “Her Name Was Becky” are among the finely wrought poems here, her delicate tracery of image joined to a fiery vision, like Blake’s, of savage intensity.”   Ditto!

—Jacqueline Marcus, Editor of ForPoetry.com

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