SJane

The fact the poems spring from the murder of the poet’s sister made it extra interesting, since, like many, I am a voyeur of other people’s pain. And the poems are painful, but also delicately built, so there’s space to breathe. As an onlooker, I’m distant enough. (NOTE: I really don't know if it's the poet's or "the speaker's" sister who was killed, by I'm guessing both.)

As a disclaimer, let me say that I weary of poems about “girls” (often young women), innocent or otherwise, who are victims of murder or rape or lurid thoughts in fields, or farms, or schoolyards, and/or found dead with their lipstick smeared or their Catholic schoolgirl skirt all mussed up. It’s all so gothic, and poetry/fiction is saturated with these images. This, however, wasn’t fantasized, but a cycle of poems in which the poet/speaker tries to work out her grief.

In general the story is this: a (18-year old) girl calls her father to pick her up at the train station. He comes and does not find her. She is later found dead in the weeds of the train yard. But it turns out the father is a suspect.

Because of that unresolved suspicion, the poems for me are above all ambiguous. I figured I was too thick to puzzle it out, and read the poems a number of times. And when I decided that the father did do it, I got to the third to last poem, which opens it up again:

Mystery Ending with a Girl in a Field

You’ve heard it before – but listen:

I brought you into this world,
I can take you out of it.

I know what you’re thinking.

Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.
Nothing’s resolved. But what does it matter?

I could snap these petals off all day,
mouthing he loves me, he loves me not.

Many of the poems include the word “mystery” in the title or poem. Regarding the question “what does it matter?,” it matters almost everything. The poet is obviously tortured by the question, which is why she spends days pulling off those petals, he did it, he did not do it. There is a lot left out, like what would be the father’s motive? He was a religious man, so where was the girl coming back from, what time was it? If we knew she’d pissed him off with “bad” behaviour, it would have been clearer.

This collection works as a whole; the poems play off each other, and personally I felt some of them would be uncomfortable alone. Yet the acknowledgements at the end show that –aside from a big chunk published as a Black Warrior Review chapbook- many of them were published singly in different journals, so that shows how much I know.

All in all I found this well-done and worthwhile.