~DANIEL PINKERTON~
ELAINE
SEXTON: SLEUTH
With a restraint often lacking in first
books,
Sexton allows
her imagery to carry the weight of such difficult
emotional themes
as the death of a parent or the loss of religious
conviction.
In other more lighthearted pieces . . . moments of levity
in Sleuth
add a welcome dimension to the book and indicate
a generosity absent
from the work of more self-indulgent poets.
A day at the beach captured on Super 8
film, a statue of the Virgin Mary: in Elaine Sexton's work, images
swirl and accumulate to evoke an entire world in the span of a few
short strokes. The real pleasure of these images, though, lies in the
meaning Sexton ascribes to them. "I know [my father] by what he
collected / and read," the speaker contends in "Sleuth."
He lives in
Kodachrome film,
home movies, in
his cufflinks, fountain pens,
in the stuffed
sea turtle that swims in dust
in the basement.
For the poet, objects serve as conjurers of the past, triggers for
memories. By repeating certain images throughout the book, Sexton
demonstrates how memories circle back to weigh on our
consciences. However, the poet also acknowledges that in drawing
from one's recollections, fact often merges with fiction, whether
voluntarily or not. Sexton suggests that the true value of such
artifacts — the cufflinks, the fountain pens, the stuffed sea turtle —
comes from their permanence and immutability in the face of human loss.
With a restraint often lacking in first books,
Sexton allows her imagery to carry the weight of such difficult
emotional themes as the death of a parent or the loss of religious
conviction. In
other more lighthearted pieces, spread throughout
the collection, the poet depicts New York City life å la Frank
O'Hara. (One poem, "Lunch Hour," clearly serves as homage.)
The moments of levity in Sleuth
add a welcome dimension to the book and indicate a generosity absent
from the work of more self-indulgent poets.
Readers will also appreciate Sexton's
attentiveness to the link between form and content. In a solemn
poem, for instance, the lines turn clipped: "She is a summons, / a
siren. A chill in the night. Air" ("A Tongue on the Road"). Here
Sexton manipulates the reader's passage through the poem by shortening
the length of successive phrases to create a final sensation of
weightlessness. In "Sewing, a Sonnet," the poet again uses form to
great advantage. The precise meter of the sonnet mimics the
careful way in which the speaker threads a needle, an act which calls
to mind memories of her mother: "Her free arm held me on her lap. / I
wedged myself between her / and her unnamed unhappiness . . . ."
Poignantly the speaker recalls an opportunity, sewing, used to breach
the distance that exists between mother and daughter.
Each piece in Sleuth works in concert with the
others to form an overarching narrative. The opening section deals
primarily with the speaker's childhood: her experiences with
Catholicism and her difficult relationship with her mother. This
opening song of innocence gives way to one of experience for the
speaker, initiated by her father's death, in part two. The third
and final section traces the speaker's current life in New York City,
far removed from the shorelines, moldy basements, and Catholic school
classrooms of her youth. While intriguing, these later poems
occasionally lack the urgency of those in previous sections. The
past, after all, serves as obsession and investigatory site for
Sexton. In "Thanksgiving" she writes: "We set the table with
you — memory. The knife, / the fork, the main course we
consume — is you." The poet recounts memories with such
aching precision in Sleuth
that readers will undoubtedly savor the resulting feast.
Sexton, Elaine. Sleuth.
Kalamazoo, Michigan: New Issues Press, 2003.
ISBN: 1-930974-29-9, $14.
© by Daniel Pinkerton
