The Lady Victory, by Jane Vincent Taylor, 80 pp. Turning Point,
2012. $18.00
Commentators
on contemporary poetry often contrapose narrative and lyric, attempting to
trace trends in which one approach may be said to dominate over the other. One
could, to be sure, see a certain reassertion of narrative in the new formalism
and “expansive” poetry of the eighties and nineties, just as one could argue
that the renewed interest in French surrealism via John Ashbery’s influence has lead poets away from narrative in
the past decade. Whether this trend away from narrative results in a more
“pure” form of the lyric, is, however, a matter of opinion. But perhaps the point is moot, for Jane
Vincent Taylor’s The lady Victory –
like Eliot’s Prufrock or Yeats’ poems
from Irish legend – makes nonsense of the distinction between lyrical and
narrative approaches to poetry.
In
The Lady Victory, Taylor recounts the
experiences of young women who are hidden away at the Our Lady of Victory, a home
for unwed mothers. She tells also of the emotional life of the nuns who serve
there. The narrative is fragmentary and elusive, and the reader’s inability to
grasp fully these lives renders the poetry all the more poignant, as if we are
privy only to the images and impressions that, by virtue of their emotional
force, remain long after the particular framework of individual lives on which
they hung is gone. The effect is somewhat like reading Sappho’s fragments or
Spenser’s unfinished book of the Faerie
Queene: one is struck by the simultaneity of absence and presence. This impression is strengthened by the way
each poem seems to stand alone and yet resonates powerfully with the other
poems around it. For instance, “Friday Nights on the Road” conveys the young
women’s frustration with their confinement by describing the way they would
dream of automobile rides while cruising up and down the hallway in
wheelchairs, “popping wheelies down the hall / on our little trip to nowhere.”
The image is engaging and emotionally effective, but it is amplified by the
very next poem, “A Votive Light,” in which an actual automobile trip is
described as the narrator is taken to the hospital to give birth. The wheelies
of the previous poem are echoed in the way the “station wagon hits all / the 23rd
street pot holes.” Taylor masterfully creates overtones and echoes that keep
the reader emotionally engaged.
The
best poem of the book’s first section is certainly “A Kind of Food,” in which
Taylor’s elusive narrator informs us that “Banana is the food of charities /
always on the table in plastic bowls / day old, week old, blackened.” She goes
on to vividly describe “the dried up stems curled like nuns’ / arthritic
fingers, eternal crooks.” The image is so effective not just because it is
exceedingly clear but also because it carries so much of the young narrator’s
feelings about her benefactors/captors. As the poem progresses we see these
feelings turn inward:
we
will know each other
when
we meet in the real world
someday
– the post office, supermarket,
cleaners
– by the lingering odor
oozing
under our skin, old oily shame.
To work so much emotional impact,
so much emotional complexity, out of a banana is surely the feat of a very
gifted poet.
Even
more affecting are the epistolary poems which make up the second section of the
book, poems written in the voice of a nun placed in charge of the infants in
the nursery. These letters to one of the children formerly in her care are
tender and vivid, an exquisite evocation of love and longing. They are poems
about our desire to belong to someone, but, in a powerful reversal, it is the
nun’s desire to belong to the child that is so moving in these poems. She
writes
You
were a meteor falling into a cold furnace, your
mother’s
sobs receding hour by hour, your new
ghost
ancestors a huddle of dutiful nuns.
It
fell to us to finally break the crusty cord. That
moment
you were freed, untethered, floating with
the
other beautiful sad babies bedded down in the
infant
nursery. Except that you weren’t sad. We
were
never sad, were we little falling star?
The suggestion of separation in the
image of the broken cord is powerfully, because desperately, contradicted by
the we urgently repeated in the last
two lines. We see also, in the sister’s description of herself as a ghost, the
longing to be made solid by belonging to someone. This deep longing is
demonstrated also in the nun’s wild and tender variations in how she addresses
the child: “Dear little flame,” “Dear flower fist,” “Dear birthday candle,”
Dear little chirp,” “Little ear, dear angel drum,” “Dear little wind behind the
rain,” just to name a few. These letters are so sweetly sorrowful, I recommend
against reading them in public, as you are likely to embarrass yourself as I
did trying to cry inconspicuously while waiting for my daughter’s swimming
lesson to end.
The
book ends with a third section of three brief and lovely lyrics. These final
three poems find a common grace in the human voice, in our ability to sing our
sorrows:
I
would make some everlasting blues
from
the sound my baby must have made
to
her new mother when she saw her, saved
from
the orphanage, the pity of those nuns’
soft-singing
world.
A
song for nuns. A song
for
the long sobriety.
Contemporary poets rarely get this mixture
of sadness and sweetness so right, so close to the tone of Feste’s final song
in Twelfth Night or the final stanza
of Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Angus.” As the book ends, the narrator – perhaps
many years later, perhaps seeking spiritual rest in a convent retreat—listens
“to the sisters singing alleluia into silence.” The line sums up well the experience
of reading this book, its play between song and silence, its affirmation of
life even when the living is difficult. The
Lady Victory is fine poetry because it is well-executed but also because it
is well-felt. Regardless of the facts, the emotions ring true. Isn’t that at
least one of the things we look for in good poetry?
