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PARTISAN REVIEW
cie Brock-Broido's
A Hunger
and Marie Howe's
The Good Thief
Both poets,
like their female precursors, locate the otherworldly within the domestic
rather than at some exalted margin to which only poets are privy. The un–
canny, that sense of strangeness in familiar things and familiarity in strange
things, is their primary affect. For each, the self is divided, in the world but
not entirely of it, alternately exalted and terrified by its estrangement.
A Hunger
introduces a prodigious and ambitious talent. Lucie Brock–
Broido has chosen not to limit herself to the personal confession, anecdote or
scenic meditation which so dominated and limited poetry for a time. She is
interested in archaeology, evolution, incarnation, in medieval history and in
the latest news headline, while remaining close to the subjective and spiritual
center of the lyric. Her imagination reaches back to primordial being and
forward to millenia, in and out of the womb and grave and beyond these to
the "grand perhaps." It inhabits the most alien personae, particularly those of
historical children with marginal lives (Birdie Africa, survivor of the "MOVE"
fire in Philadelphia; child-king Edward VI; Jessica McClure, who was trapped
in a well for three days; June Gibbons of the criminal"elective mute" twins
made famous by journalist Marjorie Wallace). In another poet these appro–
priations might seem docu-melodrama. But Brock-Broido does not pretend to
speak for her characters, to represent them journalistically, or to offer moral
history lessons. The historical reality of these figures, empirical details of their
experience and even testimony, is important as evidence that boundaries
have been crossed, that unknown territories really have been felt within the
human soul and are not merely a product of rhetoric. By choosing to inhabit
largely inarticulate or mute characters she avoids the barriers of cliche which
language erects against strangeness. And she gains the opportunity to inter–
pret that strangeness in accord with her own uncompromising vision. That
vision is often concerned with gender-with the struggle of the immature mind
to absorb the powerful meanings of mother, father, female, male. But these
problems arise from the larger struggle of the soul to inhabit the social and
physical body. One feels that the vision of these poems, which demonstrate
the "mystic streak" throughout, is not gender-bound. The author is a
chameleon poet whose "autobiography" consists less of living than ofwatch–
ing, listening and "getting it down."
Among the concerns of
A Hunger
is that "magnum mysterium," the
future, the soul's journey and destiny imagined in terms of incarnation,
evolution, maturation, vocation, and especially travel. The opening poem
(from which my title is taken) introduces us immediately to the linguistic
nerve, tough music, imagistic density and imaginative reach of this poet. The
poem speaks as the disembodied voice of an Emily Dickinson or a Charlotte
Bronte, threatening return:
