Jo McDougall, DIRT, Autumn House, 2003
In Dirt, Jo McDougall confronts personal tragedy with a stunning, extraordinary poignancy. She lost a young daughter to cancer. Her son suffered a debilitating stroke. McDougall takes up these horrific things, turns them softly in her hands, bids them rise into other, better things.
What rises, out of numbing pain, out of denial, out of Christian rage, is a clarity that allows her to speak to those dark moments without spitting in God's eye, without cursing that awful darkness.
In Telling Time, she connects with what remains, and grows larger: "My son and I walk away/ from his sister's day-old grave./ Our backs to the sun,/ the forward pitch of our shadows/ tells us the time./ By sweetest accident/ he inclines/ his shadow, touching mine."
Metaphor releases, in eight short lines, a lunacy we need in order to stay sane at what can only be a parent's worst moment. You cannot close the lid on your child's casket and say that that's what it really is -- not if you want to be stable any day after.
That necessary numbness renews, in An Old Woman Recalls a Sea Change: "When I was six, she said,/ every day was summer./ When I was seven, she said,/ I stood at my mother's new-dug grave./ That night/ I made supper for my father./ I swept each room./ I waited for him to speak." Some silences crush more than our hearing.
One of the constant strengths in Jo McDougall's poetry is an abiding sense of place. "My father's fields lie empty," she writes, in Going Back. "My mother's crape myrtles have died in their sleep./ Daring the abandoned steps,/ I enter the farmhouse/ and my old room." One perfect verb creates a cold, haunting visual.
Yet, out of unspeakable grief, a moment to savor. "...You look up from leafing a magazine," McDougall writes, in Ties, "and say something woven out of our years together,/ something only the two of us/ would find amusing./ I think of this moment/ as an incredible moth./ I want to keep it." The moments Jo McDougall finds to savor describe perfect love (Threads), perfect wit (Love Story), perfect fear (In Passing).
Poetry is about compression. It's about true words reaching critical mass in small, private spaces. McDougall finds just such a truth in The Breakup: "It's likely that the cause of it/ wasn't any one thing,/ certainly not anything/ either of them would believe./ Just the wearing away, water constantly reminding stone."
And too, poetry is an all-terrain, off-road vehicle, and Jo McDougall forsakes the paved, expected, easy road. She moves with deft hand and penetrating eye through anger in lonely motel rooms, through the piercing, antiseptic smell of doctors' offices and hospital corridors, through the sonic boom of a chemo drip.
Most of us pretend we can imagine the empty, stark terror that comes with a doctor's sad news. "Think of a man in Holland/ the moment he sees a first break in the dike./ Think of Anne Frank at the moment she recognizes/ the sound on the stair." The four line poem How to Imagine How It Will Be When the Doctor Comes Out To Say is a complete volume, one that places a perfect metaphor in the line of sight we use to gain understanding of worlds not our own.
Yet for all its portraiture of loss, DIRT is a book about release, about pursuit, about the subtlety of hope. Tempting the Muse is classic McDougall: "Tilt your head provocatively,/ round your vowels,/ make a place for him/ in the cleavage of your breasts./ Hope for the best./ What you'll get is anybody's guess.// Once, I pulled out all the stops/ and a pickpocket wandered in,/ reeking of booze and need;/ and once, Death,/ who apologized for getting the wrong house/ and went on his way--/ but not before his eyes,/ red as a red snapper's,/ undid every button of my dress."
Such subtle gems lurk throughout Jo McDougall's work, sometimes in or between the lines, sometimes just overhead, as in The Order of Things: "I tell a grandchild young enough/ to care about it/ how I discovered a chipmunk one afternoon/ in a nearby field./ It was so well camouflaged, I said,/ that I almost didn't see it./ What made you see it?/ It moved./ Why did it move?/ To find something to eat./ Then I told him about the hawk."
In a lesser writer's hands, the notion that one can have a grip--a focus, on detachment, would seem wholly contradictory. In The Night Clerk at L. L. Bean, Jo McDougall creates in that very notion a paradox that reveals an understanding of nothing less than the here and there of metaphysics.
McDougall closes this wonderful collection, her fourth, with an image of white doves that emerge from a banal look at two circus performers sharing a cigarette before they go on. That the poet can go toward such a light is at once her gift, and our reward. DIRT is raw, polished, harsh and kind. The opposite of true is hollow -- these poems are solid to their collective core. Jo McDougall has published four books of poetry. A fifth will be published by Autumn House Press in the spring of 2004. Her recent awards include a Reader's Digest/DeWitt Wallace Writing award, Arkansas' Porter Prize, a Fellowship in Poetry from the Arkansas Arts Council, and four fellowships to the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Little Rock.
M. J. Melneck teaches and writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from his home in Nebraska.
