~JAMES FINN COTTER~
THE ODYSSEY
OF LAURENCE LIEBERMAN: FLIGHT
FROM THE MOTHER STONE
In his refusal to be
other than
who he is in his poetry, Lieberman creates
a deceptively
straightforward,
average-guy, American-Innocent-Abroad type
of persona that again
bears study
and watching. It ain't so simple,
and neither is he.
He has
an artist's cunning, crafty and designing.
Like
Odysseus,
Laurence Lieberman is a cunning traveler. His poems appear
straightforward
enough in their meandering story-telling lines and flowing stanza
forms,
and as modern poems go, they are easy to read. He travels to
familiar
places like Japan and the Caribbean, and his verse takes the shape of a
modern odyssey that involves his wife and children, usually accompanied
by a trustworthy guide. It's familiar territory: we've been there
and done that. Americans are intrepid sightseers; no matter what
remote part of the world you want to visit, there's a group-tour
trooping
up ahead of you.
And
there's Lieberman
with his Nikon and hiking boots tramping up the mountainside or riding
in a hired 
taxi
down to the shore. He has his notebook too, and he's jotting down
whatever scenery or plant or animal strikes his attention. The
persona
of his poetry is a "visitor" and "outsider," two words he uses to
describe
himself in the final poem of his latest collection, Flight from the
Mother Stone, his twelfth book of poems. Don't look for
farfetched
meanings, obscure passages or obtuse imagery here: we are on familiar
ground,
Dominica, St. Maarten, Aruba, the islands of the Antilles and the West
Indies where club Mediterranean has already put up hotels.
Only
thing is,
you won't find Lieberman there. He is off bushwhacking in the
backwoods,
crawling into a cave, or getting lost in the dark on some dead-end
road.
He has gulped the waters and winds of so many Carib islands, his friend
Franz, Bonaire's Minister of Culture, tells him, that no one may be
more
alive "to the best life of this region" ("Diving into the
Stone").
That's about as close as the poet gets to revealing his
credentials.
More often than not, he plays the part of an honest, acute observer who
records what he sees and hears of that exotic tropical world, its
flora,
fauna and people. In his desire to set down his experiences he
has
been often compared to Whitman with his open lines and all-encompassing
vision, and rightly so, but in his almost total lack of ego he is the
absolute
opposite of old Walt. Like Odysseus, he takes the name "Nobody."
Lieberman
is
rarely the central protagonist of his poems: he's always off on the
sidelines,
taking it all in and getting it straight. What he sees and hears,
what happens to him is more of a concern than who he is or where his
ultimate
destiny lies. The priests and nuns he meets along the way, with
their
sincere convictions and sure answers about eternal salvation, are
treated
with respect but kept at a safe distance. In "Four Sisters" he
gives
a priest and two nuns a copy of his collection, God's Measurements
(a neatly ironic title in the circumstances), but he does not accept
their
invitation to Sunday High Mass. He knows, however, that their
lives
and the lives of those that follow them will be spent in Carriacou long
after he is gone from the island. In his refusal to be other than
who he is in his poetry, Lieberman creates a deceptively
straightforward,
average-guy, American-Innocent-Abroad type of persona that again bears
study and watching. It ain't so simple, and neither is he.
He has an artist's cunning, crafty and designing.
Let's
return
to the poetic form. The stanzas repeat the same format, unique to
each poem. Some poems have two different stanza shapes that again
are repeated. Lines are indented in an unpredictable fashion, but
with the same regularity for each verse. Words race along lines
that
mimic the narrative or descriptive pattern and receive unusual emphasis
by their placement. It's a complex design but makes sense: free
verse
with its own highly constricted rules, like those of Marianne Moore but
having a wholly different result ÷ instead of density we get
open-ended
expansion and movement. One might only illustrate it by quoting
complete
poems, something reviewers can do for short pieces but not for the long
ones that Lieberman writes. This habit of length makes it hard
for
his work to be anthologized, especially in today's highly competitive
poetry
market. Lieberman goes his own way: you go the whole route or
you're
not in the race with him. It's his odyssey as it unfolds in book
after book.
In "The
Tilesmith's
Hill Fresco" from Eros at the World Kite Pageant: Poems 1979-1982,
Lieberman writes of "A mathematics that endures / (oh, steadfast
cosmos!),
/ and survives ÷ like inner light ÷." Like the
metaphysical poets,
he is fascinated by shapes on the page, and he uses as his subjects
Japanese
craftsmen, Caribbean artists, buiders and storytellers to create the
symmetry
of his art. Poems take the shape of double helixes, mosaics,
schools
of fish, kites or geese in flight to lead the reader from surface
patterns
to inner light. Like the children in "The Grave Rubbings," also
from Eros,
he traces "story-pictures of local sights" in the stone of
poetry.
Tombstone art becomes living language in imagery and sound. In a
measured conversational beat, his voice conducts us in imitation of
folk
music, jazz, and classical quartets to hear what he sees, to get inside
his skin and feel and touch this paradise that is also Eden after the
fall.
From his
first
book of poems, The Unblinding (1968), with its description of
"The
Porcupine Puffer Fish," Lieberman has been fond of animals. In
his
latest collection, he includes a Guyana bestiary of Watras (Capybara or
water rats), boa constrictors, jaguars, turtles, possum, and giant
eagles
called Harpies. In "Wolf of the Skies," he describes these
frightening
birds that pluck up monkeys and even human toddlers. "She's
dubbed
/ the Flying Wolf / by Amerindian tribes of Guyana's interior."
Yet
even here is beauty in motion: "Cruising at high altitudes that test
the
limits / of human sight, she swoops, diving so fast we glimpse / a
wing-folded
/ slender point-beaked blur." Flora also gets its due in "Fern
Heaven,"
"To Merge with Trees," "Cactus Love," and "The Divi-Divi Trees,
Forsaken."
People
matter
most in Lieberman's poetry. In the first poem of Flight,
in
"A Gift for Grandad Jacob," we meet an expatriated German, Klaus, an
elderly
restaurant owner, with his 20-year-old native girlfriend
Christobel.
Together with the local Dominican constable, they set out to visit
Jacob,
Christobel's grandfather, in jail, only to encounter bureaucracy and
hostility:
"We're viewed / as mere jail chaff ourselves, and I can feel / my
citizen
status falling away like yesterday's deodorant." The dramatic
tension
is spiked with humor and detachment while each person is transformed by
the poet's touch of compassion. Like many of the poems, it's a
love
story involving all the characters and embracing the reader as we
hurtle
in a four-wheel-drive Pathfinder over s-curving roadways to the jail
and
find ourselves in its teeming courtyard: "down the backalley /
sidepath,
shortcut to the uphill / wheelrut-gouged / zigzagging narrow two lane
to
prison." We are glad to meet Jacob finally and give him the sack
of fruit we know he will never be able to eat. Chico, the next
person
we encounter, in "Work Chants of the Diamond Miner," equally involves
us
in his squalid life as an abused miner, freed at last by malaria, beset
by his love fantasies and his dream of a mermaid, and his survival as
"the
one loyal guardian of God's creatures / in the miner's camp."
Other
strange
personages met along our route are Jolene and Eunice, elderly poachers
who steal turtle eggs at great risk to themselves; Cecil and Jake, old
friends who argue over eating possum; Nolly, a modern Johnny Appleseed
who plants trees wherever he can; Grande Dame Viola, a Haitian voodoo
priestess
who bites off a chicken head and tears out a goat's heart; teen-age
Tony
Hodge, a surgeon's assistant who has mastered the art of administering
ether; Julio Maduro, who lives and sleeps with cacti; ten-year-old Max,
who pilots his father's mailboat; Ben Golden, a fellow poet and Jew on
an island honeymoon with his youthful third wife; and Eiffel Francis, a
107-year-old augurer, "the oldest Carib Matriarch," who speaks only
French
Creole and regales the author with her tales. Myths and legends
of
lost maidens unfold along our travels, like the stories of the
sea-nymph
Appolonia and of Alicia, a girl abducted by the Spirit of the Boiling
Lake.
A shaman or seer waits as guide and talespinner to lighten and enliven
the journey as stories within stories weave and interweave in the
poet's
odyssey.
Above
all, there
is our Odysseus, Lieberman himself: from first to last he leads us to
places
we shall never visit and to experiences we can share with no one
else.
Significantly, the climactic poem of the collection, "Diving into the
Stone,"
does not provide the title of the book; only the first section of the
sequence
does: "Flight from the Mother Stone." Escorted by his friend
Franz,
the author plans to climb the "mystic King Rock of the land," an
isolated
T-shaped, heart-like Bonaire monolith perforated with caves and
crevices.
Lieberman manages to climb and scramble to the top, but he cannot let
himself
go: he fights off the "impulse to dive into the gorge." Franz
consoles
him after he recovers back on the ground, full of anger at his own
cowardice
and fear: "You're not ready / to cross over ÷ pray give yourself
/ more
time. Take heart." Instead, Lieberman tells the story of
another
traveler, Mortimer, a lawyer from British Columbia who, that very week
with Franz as guide, had leaped into the abyss and returned a new man,
bending down to kiss the holy ground. He quit the lawcourt and
became
a High Master of the Mystic Order of the Rosicrucians.
Of
course, there's
something bathetic, even comic, about the denoument. We can
hardly
imagine this role to be the goal of the poet's lifelong outer and inner
odyssey. He is still in flight from the Mother Stone even as he
flings
himself into her arms:
I mustn't lose heart,
Franz comforts me. Many others from foreign lands, like myself,
despite failed tries
to squirm and slither through the magic tunnels, grooves,
and passageways of the birth stone, have solved
the riddle of the maze÷and embraced, finally, their second
bursting
alive...
It's a wild donkey, of
all things,
that must come across our path, to be tamed and accepted, like Yeats'
beast
slouching toward Bethlehem, before we can be born again. If
Mortimer
can do it, Lieberman implies, there's hope for the rest of us
mortals.
Odysseus is Nobody and Everybody.
Lieberman, Laurence. Flight
from
the Mother Stone. Fayetteville, Arkansas: The University of
Arkansas
Press, 2000. ISBN: 1-557-728585-3 $20.00
© by James Finn
Cotter
