[REVIEW] a lesson in smallness by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

Aptos, California: The National Poetry Review Press, 2015
ISBN 978-1-935716-37-2

 

REVIEW BY ANNIK MACASKILL

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a lesson in smallness is the first book by poet Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award in 2012. Divided into three sections, this début collection follows its speaker through travel, loss, family, friendship, and marriage in a non-linear trajectory. Rearranged, the poems would provide a clear lyric narrative tracing the speaker’s life from childhood to her own experience of motherhood, but the use of flashbacks brings to the forefront the workings of memory and anticipation throughout a person’s life.

Slaughter’s book opens with a two-part poem, “Migration,” in which the speaker addresses her lover. This piece evokes a period of transition from youth to adulthood, where fantasy and passion are met with reality:

You wear a suit to work, trading in
the worn Carhartts for Jos. A. Bank;
I put on a cardigan and teach.
On occasion, yes, even lipstick.
Tell me again that we’ll live in a cabin.
Make me a necklace of sea glass. (p. 13, ll. 11-16)

 

If there is a present to be spoken of in this collection, it’s this newfound maturity that the speaker and her lover try on like an item of clothing. Many of the poems evoke a bourgeois existence whose veneer masks a certain despair, much like the everyday malaise suggested in Louise Glück’sDescending Figure. Slaughter’s voice is somewhat more frank than Glück’s, and less abstract, as in “The Barefoot Contessa is Glad She Never Had Children,” which exposes the banality of a neighborhood barbecue:

[…] To make others

feel exceptional – this her gift – these
tipsy neighbors with pastel sweaters

around their necks. And her husband,
pausing now over one final glass. (p. 27, ll. 9-13)

The tension found in everyday domestic life is not the only theme Slaughter’s collection shares with Descending Figure. It is hard not to think of Glück’s “The Drowned Children” when reading “His Eyes on the Sparrow,” a poem about a neighbor child drowned in the pool. Here, though, Slaughter’s speaker reveals she was a child herself at the time, and it is her experience of fearful awe that comes into focus:

I worried
about his teeth.

Mine, I kept
in a ballerina music box

with a ring and pictures
of my cat. (p. 30, ll. 1-6)

 

Slaughter brings attention to such possessions – the ballerina box in this poem, the pastel sweaters at the neighborhood party, and elsewhere, the hand-knit afghans worn by infants in a hospital’s NICU (p. 34, ll. 12), a Bic pen and Pantene shampoo (p. 84, ll. 6 and 10)—that provide an immediate sense of the realness to the book’s characters, a process that suggests Roland Barthes’ theory on l’effet de réel (the effect of reality). In this way, Slaughter paints a tangible world for her reader, one that is developed seamlessly across the book’s sections.

“His Eyes on the Sparrow” is only the first in a series of pieces scattered throughout the collection that evoke the death of children in the speaker’s life. These tragedies provide a clear manifestation of the speaker’s anxieties, a reason for her trepidation before the prospect of engaging with the world. Providing a sharp contrast with the more realistic portraits of everyday life are the dreamy, almost fanciful poems that explore these same anxieties. The laconic three-line poem “Painting the Nursery” reveals the fear of soon-to-be parents:

Will we fall like a comet?

Orbit forever in a horsetail

Of sleep, dust and fire? (p. 33, ll. 1-3)

Throughout the book, the speaker oscillates between a more direct, plain-spoken diction and this whimsical, figurative use of language, sometimes combining the two in one piece, but often keeping them separate. These differences in tone provide variety to an otherwise consistent collection, where the speaker is entirely conscious of repeating patterns in her life. Describing a hospital scene in “Expert Advice,” for example, she notes simply, “I’ve seen this before” (p. 69, l.7), referring to previous experiences with sickness and death.

Yet the life depicted in this collection is not entirely one of despair; the speaker also finds humor in other everyday moments. “The Book of Mormon” explores an awkward meeting with a missionary, the poet punctuating the comic elements of this encounter with an uncharacteristic, singsong use of internal rhymes and half-rhymes:

His knapsack of gold light
unzips, flooding the room

with earnestness.

The old moon-clock ticks.

On the count, this boy of maybe
seventeen shifts

zits and pamphlets. (p. 71, ll. 1-7)

In other poems, the speaker expresses a genuine, almost simple affection for her lover. Pieces like “Herculaneum” and “Galileo” recall their travels together in Italy, while “When I Arrive Home from the Airport” represents a not-unromantic domestic ordinariness. “Seahorse,” which is perhaps one of the most skillfully crafted pieces in the book, explores the idea of coupling in a slow, almost meditative way, unravelling from the first image of a single seahorse to the picture of its mate, culminating finally in the creation of their family:

It’s gorgeous how you make

your little clan, the zygotes slipped
inside the pouch, his, as if

they were a passed note
or a kiss. Say that’s us. (p. 22, ll. 2-6)

It is a testament to the author’s skill that she can write a modern love poem that is moving yet not maudlin, in the same way that she can depict personal tragedies again and again without undermining the speaker’s emotions or rendering them as overwrought. The lesson in smallness that is inherent in Slaughter’s work lies in this attention to the ordinary moments that make up a life, the small but grand details, characters, and emotions that can change a person irrevocably.

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Annick MacAskill lives and writes in Toronto. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, The Fiddlehead, Lemon Hound, Arc, and CV2, among others. Other work has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Writes Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016).