Sherry Chandler

Susan Firer

In The Lives of the Saints and Everything (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1993), Susan Firer writes long, somewhat imagistic poems that mix quips and horror in a sort of associational flow of ideas. She seems to understand that, while life may be ripping your heart to shreds, it’s still possible to laugh at its absurdities. Take, for example,

The Mongolian Contortionist with Pigeons

was breath taking, a flesh knot. There were
many fine Czechoslovakian skaters
that Olympic year. Each ended her act,
like a hyphen or parenthesis, lying
on the ice in dramatic, bad American music.
We watched the Olympian skaters Triple Axel
in heaven while L. A. burned a nervous breakdown.
…
And you my
eye-rhyme, twin trick, sister fast
forwarded to death, dropped your skin body
inconsequentially as junk mail into
the planetary mailslot ragbag. You
left a note: The dog needs a walk & 2
Emily Dickinson poems, peppered with granite
lips. The shepherd, Saint Cuthbert,
from his field, watched angels carry
the bishop, Saint Aiden, in a globe of fire
to heaven. The men who rolled you out of
your house in a Holy Communion white body
bag wore seethrough shower caps & rubber
gloves. The medical examiner was pregnant,
the priest fat…

I give you a no doubt illegally long excerpt here both because I found it one of her most accessible and because the poem is typical of the way Firer works: the heart-stopping lines:

eye-rhyme, twin trick, sister fast

the planetary mailslot ragbag. You

the cryptic (for me anyway) metaphors:

Emily Dickinson poems, peppered with granite

and the constant reference to the lives of the saints.

It took me a while to get an inkling of what is going on in these poems, and in part it is because the collection is so thoroughly Catholic and I am so thoroughly Southern Baptist. But the intelligence is a contradictory thing, and it was mostly the lives of the saints found in Part II of this collection that spoke to me. In those poems, I found a mixture of reverence and irreverence, doubt and seeking, that was sort of like abstinence, saints, and rock ‘n roll.

Doo Wop anyway.

Take “An Amateur’s Guide to Invocations, Emblems, Patrons, Patronesses, & Prayer,” a seven-page poem in six parts with titles such as “A Saint Nervous Breakdown,” “A Diet of Saints,” “A Weather of Saints: a Panhandle Hook of Saints.” Take the section called “A Boarding House of Saints,” these lines:

“Pray without ceasing” said that old misogynist St. Paul
and I confetti jog the saints’ names through my bare soul.
Do Pow Wow, do Yom Kippur, do Bodi Day, Ta Chin, Shambala,
Christmas. St. Gregory the Enlightener suffered
12 torments. I’m on my way. I have to learn not to hang
mine out like wash, instead let them silently notch
my bones. To the pirate poet St. Godric,
after he walked barefoot across Europe
with his mother, the Virgin
Mary brought the Motown sound
and words of prayer.

Or the final poem, “I, the Excommunicate,” these lines:

I am driving the God car. I have put out
my God traps. I am putting out feeder lines
to God: prayer flags, prayer wheels, artichokes,
prayer beads, prayer birds, prayer songs, (do wha
ditty ditty dum ditty yea), prayer words.

The Lives of the Saints and Everything won the 1993 Cleveland State University Poetry Center prize and the 1993 Posner Poetry Award for best book of poetry published by a Wisconsin writer in that year.

The Heart’s Dragnet

…

My dead mother using my daughter’s voice
asks: “How, even now, can you
afford your life of poems?”
And in my own sanest moments I answer
them both back: “In this always
spinning fast disappearing
world, how can I not?”

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Memorizing poems

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