A Floral Axis

I finished reading Sarah Hannah’s Inflorescence (Tupelo Press, 2007) back in the middle of June and have been trying to pull my thoughts together to review this excellent collection ever since. It isn’t that it’s a difficult book, really. But it’s a complex book, a book that is brave and exciting and exceptional.

I am not an exceptional reviewer. And the end of summer is not my most productive time of year.

And maybe, too, I put off thinking out my review because this is a collection of poetry about losing your mother, and I lost my mother this year. The loss may be one reason why the poems spoke to me so strongly. It may also be one reason why I put off thinking analytically about these poems. I found the reading of them absorbing and a comfort — though Hannah’s experience was nothing like my own — and I just want to have the experience for a while and not think about it.

I could let Martha Deed speak for me. She read the book in a single sitting:

Although the content of the poems is engaging, it was the sheer originality and diversity of form that kept me going. “What is she going to do next?” drove me from poem to poem, from section to section, until all-too-soon I reached the end.

Inflorescence is constructed in four sections: In Hospital, In the Old House, In Home Hospice, Inflorescence. It’s a story of a difficult mother-daughter relationship, in which the mother appears more fragile than her daughter, of nursing one’s mother through a dire diagnosis, her final illness and death — and all the while coming to terms with the past and present meaning of her own life. Oddly, there is not much sense of Future in this collection.

But this is no concrete autobiographical tale dressed up with linebreaks. The book is a genuine exploration of language in the service of a story.

I would describe Hannah’s language as Shakespearean in its mixing of language play with the high tragic mode, the kind of thing Joan Houlihan called Hannah’s ability

to travel from shock to sorrow to wit then back again, without missing a beat.

Think of the great tragic speeches in Shakespeare’s plays — Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth.

Nods to Shakespeare pervade this collection, an indication that this mode is a conscious part of Hannah’s craft. One poem is titled “MacBeth’s Problem,” others lift quotes from Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. In her notes, she references Gerard’s Herball of 1599:

a favorite reference book of Shakespeare’s, or so say the editors of the Arden editions

Shakespeare, of course, often used the “language of flowers,” especially in Hamlet, and the very title of Hannah’s collection refers, as the author tells us, to “the budding and unfolding of blossoms, FLOWERING.”

In the title poem, the daughter quiets her dying mother, who has been a painter of flowers, by reading lists of flower parts from Webster’s Dictionary

I flip through Webster’s Dictionary.
There are names for how they show themselves—
Patterns of arrangement.
Such things, I reckon, do not die. I read:
“Raceme, umbel, corymb, cyme.”

You quiet, close your eyes.

A collection of poems with such a title, such a title poem, cannot be about death without also being about resurrection. Nor does the collection’s epigraph indicate that the poems are about death alone. It comes from Empedocles:

There is no death in mortal things, and no end in ruinous death. There is only the mingling and interchange of parts, and it is this that we call “nature.”

So I disagree with Deeds that there is no future in the poems, though it is not an individual future. This is not a Christian resurrection of the body with an afterlife in heaven but a natural cycle of life and death.

Such death is not easy to face. In one of my favorite Shakespeare-referencing poems, death appears as “Azarel,” the angel of death or God’s helper, Death personified as lawyer, social worker, nurse,

Death the lover.
You loved him many years.
Willed your body over, will after will
To his dominion, like Juliet you called him
From your sill, Wherefore.
But just before the bell could ring
You always double-locked the door.
You teased him, courted and seduced him;
Whored him, married and divorced him;
Coaxed, cuckolded, and cozened him.

There is much rhyming and chiming in Hannah’s verse, though seldom in end rhymes as in this quoted passage, a strong sense of rhythm. The poems are very musical.

Hannah committed suicide not long after completing this collection and the book includes an obituary by her friend Rachel Wetzsteon. Both Deed and Houlihan mention that it is impossible to read the book except in the context of that suicide and the legacy of Plath and Sexton, Hart Crane. To turn again to Houlihan, who also read the book through like a single work:

There is hardly a way to read this book outside the context of the author’s suicide right now and, as with Plath, it seems that Hannah’s poetic legacy is, if not forever tied to it (Hart Crane’s poetry took decades to escape his leap from the boat), at least for a long time will be read in the context of her willed death. However, the surprise was that rather than finding the context reductive and therefore harmful to the text (as in connecting the dots between life event and poem event, or in looking for “evidence” of a suicidal turn of mind), I found that admitting the actual into the reading further opened the text, allowed the poems to flow freely back and forth between the worlds of the actual and the imaginary.

. . .There is a spirituality at work here, feeling the presence of the dead in life, and an unannounced, but definite conviction that nothing really dies. This sense of reincarnation in the natural world gives another context to someone violently and painfully leaving the world, one of someone drawn to the world as part of something larger, to a felt presence of the speaker’s beloved mother in nature, a kind of benign haunting.

. . .The book is filled with poems that force you awake to life, poems that break your heart and poems that arouse an abiding love of the world and its beauty. I

I know that I found reading Inflorescence a positive experience, one that helped me mourn, that showed me how to cry and to laugh at death, a comfort after the death of my own mother.

Possibly related posts:

Philip Levine

Katerina’s book of charms

A. E. Stallings

Embryos & Idiots

Old satisfactions

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