Willy
Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary
Circumstances by Elizabeth Powell. Anhinga,
2016.
Reviewed by
Nancy Mitchell
Elizabeth
Powell’s compelling new volume of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or
Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, winner of the 2015 Robert
Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry and published by Anhinga Press, is the saga of one psyche’s circuitous, courageous evolution to wholeness
as it reclaims and integrates the fragments of its shattered self. Like a
classic epic, the book is
substantial; its 109 pages are divided into four distinct, yet integrated
parts, and the arc of each furthers the narrative arc of the collection, the
tension of which lies in “the tug of war between what you are and what you want
to be.” In lines barely held in check by semi-formal constraints of rhyme and
rhythm, the poems pellmell the reader through poems like “a toboggan threshing
me down a hill.” The wrangle of this struggle is underscored by erratically
shifting tones via inventive syntax and humorous, original
neologisms/verbalizations: “I lollygagged and sofatized as I proceeded with the
CNN-induced lobotomy dream of life,” and
The
world, violent full of sex,
the
movie’s zeitgeist, era
after era, a new Bond
double-o-sevening
in
(CARE PACKAGE, WITH RIDDLE AS
MISSIVE)
as well as with startling enjambments:
…This
poem is made of me and I it. It doesn’t worry
about
irony
or stance and only odd incidence and fact and doesn’t care
if
it tells the truth about what will happen to my face
or
behind my back….
Part One, the heftiest section, worthy to stand on its
own as a separate volume, serves as the Genesis, the creation story of the
collection, as it introduces the origin of the book’s structure along which
uncanny parallels to the speaker’s life
are plotted:
Around then, I read
my father’s 1960s Compass copy of Arthur Miller's
"Death
of a Salesman" and began to understand why his sister called
him Willy Loman. He had eaten the dream and it
made him sick...But
my
father’s sister never stopped with the Willy Loman talk, and so we
seemed
to be acting that play as our family drama.
(“AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I”)
From
a longstanding intimacy with
the American drama—“This entire book is in love with Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller, and has been in conversation with it for a good, long time,”
according to Powell’s notes—and subsequent internalization, a world is created
into which the title character is called forth from the a shadowy subterranean
of unconsciousness, or “my doppelgänger under the bed, snoring and talking and
laughing in her sleep,” to inhabit this world with full autonomy: “I read it
again and again, until the doppelgänger moved from under the bed to the top
bunk.”
Powell’s doppelgänger is an alchemic tour de force, deftly
echoing Plath: “and then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you,” claims a
poem also titled “Daddy.” Willy Loman’s daughter, paradoxically whole and black
hole, becomes the self into which other selves, shattered “the way the Rolling
Stones sing about” by seismic psychological pressures, are absorbed. Because
the doppelgänger can successfully assimilate undifferentiated cultural
identities—
Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger
sandwiches on white. I'm
matzo
ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley
don’t-worry-about-me
luncheon. I’m noodle
kugel and I’m turkey divan
casserole. I’m
Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m
the Episcojew, and
I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan
and a silence in
the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land
but I cannot be cremated. I am
passing and have passed, heard the
murmurs of lovely & also
... Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles.
—as well as the trauma of sexual
abuse—
…small
child who is taken into a room with
an ex-convict and made to drink peppermint
schnapps and lie on his
polyester
orange and yellow bed and black out until she walks from
the
room and is shown his medals of valor from a war she doesn't
understand. She didn’t
know peppermint that way until she came
to dislike the sunniest days. (“Sense
Memory: (Re)-Experiencing Time Travel”)
she
becomes the trustworthy, although admittedly imaginary confidant, sister in Pasternak’s “sister life,”
the ma souer
of the speaker. Both protective mediator and arbiter of memory, the
doppelgänger will become the the reliable narrator, even as she speaks as a
foil to other characters throughout the book, but only with the speaker’s
complicity or permission:
My
retinal flashes made no sense until I realized they were someone
else’s story trying to
live through me. That sweet doppleganger, brother-
sister, evil other, good girl! The
story kept banging at my red front door…
“Someone
else’s story” is also the speaker’s; by opening the “red front door” she
intuitively and courageously allows the necessary psychic split into a stronger
double who, acting as a “second,” descends into the hell of the past and faces
down the demons of abandonment and estrangement, before assimilating them and
returning whole to tell the whole story.
In the poem “LIVING TRUTHFULLY UNDER
IMAGINARY CIRCUMSTANCES,” the speaker speaks for “both of them” with, “We both want to be whole, so the
story can be told.” In my notes I’ve written, “Or maybe:
We want the story to be told so we can both be whole.” Elizabeth Powell’s stunning,
evocative Willy Loman’s
Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, is, like any
odyssey, to be read in parts, slowly, carefully, and reflectively, like a
psyche recovering the shattered parts of herself.