BOOKS
In thrice 10,000 seasons, I will come back to this world
In a white cotton dress. Kingdom ofAfter My Own Heart.
Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves. When I come home,
Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic chimes
Will move in wind. A covy of alley cats will swarm on the side
Porch
&
perch there, portents with quickened heartbeats
You will feel against your ankles as you pass through.
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This way of being inside and outside experience may account for
Brock-Broido's interest in characters whose fate has been chronicled or dis–
torted by the media. These poems reclaim the soul-unformed, tragic, violent,
anxious though it may be-from media-hype, from what Dickinson called
"auction," what Plath called "the peanut crunching crowd." In this Brock–
Broido is at once postmodern (making her poems from the fragments of a
culture lost
in
celluloid and
kitsch)
and classical (insistent on the meaningfulness
of the category "soul" ).
Brock-Broido reminds us repeatedly that hers is a "mid-Western" and
"anorexic" soul. The sense of a center or interior she associates, often, with
places of origin and with the past. But the poems remind us that we cannot
live there, that we belong to history and biology. The Plath-inspired "Jessica,
from the Well" imagines the child's semi-entombment as a grotesque return
to a fetal condition. The poet involves us in the physical details of this en–
trapment as a metaphor of interiority. She explores a presocial, even prehu–
man loneliness, at first relished: "I slipped down / the shaft like the small
mythic creature / I have always known I ought to be." But such an anorexic
dream gives way to the fact of the body, of growth and vitality, and of
community. Ambivalent as she is about "the Sweethearts and Insomniacs"
who address her above the well, she joins them, accepting their imperative to
sing, but dignifying the song to something more than mimicry. She is born
from the well "a Jessica," still a recalcitrant soul, but part of the human world.
Anorexia has been called the female disease, and in "Jessica" and some other
poems the alienation from the body may be connected to gender, but for
Brock-Broido gender is only a condition of vision, not a determinant or goal
of vision. If mysticism has historically appealed more to women than to men,
she does not define it as an inherently female state.
Brock-Broido is a gothic metaphysician who confronts the perils ofthe
imagination, the demonic aspect of the spirit that can destroy the self and
others. The terrible story of the "elective mute" June Gibbons unfolds in
