“Like rain in a lost shoe”

The heart of Lesley Wheeler’s chapbook Scholarship Girl (Finishing Line, 2007) is a double crown of sonnets entitled “The Calderstones.”

According to Wikipedia, the Calderstones are six neolithic sandstone boulders that are thought to be the remains of a dolmen or megalithic tomb. The stones now stand in Calderstones Park, a 94-acre public park in Liverpool. The park was once a private estate that changed hands several times before it was purchased by the Liverpool Corporation in 1902. In the 19th century, the stone were thought to be part of a Druid’s circle, In 1825, a lead shot manufacturer named James Need Walker bought the estate. He moved the stones and made them part of the gateway to the estate. In 1954, they were placed inside a greenhouse to protect them from weathering.

The double crown, 14 sonnets linked last line to first, circles around these stones that should not be in a circle, “Six sandstone megaliths slouch in a ruddy ring,” the first line of the first sonnet and the last line of the last.

Wheeler uses these stones as am emblem for 1950s Liverpool, the world where her mother grew up, a world where

Merseyside is all mistakes and circles.
Its rumpled parks are cut from manor-lands sold
to a chain of merchants. The slave-trade triangle—

and its Calderstones

. . . Just look at the things:
they yearn to loom awesomely, but cows
have chafed their shabby hides on them, cascades
of soot have discolored them, and resting men
have traced their bootsoles there with worn-down blades.

Wheeler’s tale of the stones is a bit different from that told in Wikipedia:

. . . They lost their first site so lanes
could be widened. The mound itself was scooped
up as fertilizer. Liverpool shrugs and shrines
topple—are built again as a hobbyist’s quirk.
It was a mistake to arrange them in a circle.

It is difficult for those of us who grew up in the United States with tales of 1950s prosperity — even if Pat Nixon did wear a plain cloth coat — to understand the deprivation in England in the years after World War II. This is the world Wheeler seeks to bring alive to us, and to herself, a daughter whose “memories of her memories / are too reduced.” She is, as she explains in “Poem Without a Landscape.” a poet without a country, not of Virginia, not of New Jersey, but not of Liverpool either.

. . . The land is not my mother.
It minds its own business, and welcome to it.

And so she creates for us the world of her mother, the world of the “Scholarship Girl, 1953″

The scholarship girl paces to school
along broken sidewalks.
No one has cleaned the war up yet.

. . .

Caesar’s speeches will deflate
her one hot puff at a time
til she fits in anybody’s pocket:
the starchy white one of the Sister
who docs her bus fare
in fine for laddered stockings,
or mine, or even yours. Listen
for her nails scratching
against the fabric.

I love those lines for a chapbook, meant to be a book that could fit in a pocket. And so the scholarship girl is reduced to chapbook size. And yet she is larger than pocket-sized in these poems.

The Calderstone sonnets are rhymed and metered, but they don’t exactly do the job of a traditional sonnet. They don’t serve argument, a problem and a resolution, but rather are recruited to serve narrative. They bring us a world where “summer is hungry and long,” a world of “two ounces of sugar, / the cup of orange juice on Fridays at the school,” where “the trembling crone who managed Calder High / did not want the scholarship girls.” They bring us the rag and bone man, the greengrocer with his blackmarket potatoes, the homeless petty-thieving aunt who is nevertheless a great source of comic stories and cream buns.

It is a world lost to Wheeler and yet it still lives in her, as she tells us in the final poem “Born, We Didden Know We Was”

. . . It’s gone
for everybody and I was never
there with my spiral pad or

a microphone, the resonance
just caught in me like rain
in a lost shoe, like grit in a pot
boiled often, rarely cleaned.

. . . But
I know something, a stain
that your rags cannot wipe

off the paper: this place-and-time
was noisy once, and has a sound
still. No elegies here.

The poems from Scholarship Girl will be incorporated into Lesley Wheeler’s collection, Heterotopia, selected by David Wojahn for the 2009 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and to be out in the spring.

Possibly related posts:

All my people

“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

What is redeemed by life?

Lisa Williams

Rain

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