[REVIEW] Only More So, by Millicent Borges Accardi

~ by Carlo Matos

 

Salmon Press, forthcoming 2014

105 pages, €12

 

Millicent Borges Accardi is a Portuguese-American poet and the author of Injuring Eternity (World Nouveau) and Woman on a Shaky Bridge (Finishing Line Press).  She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts, the California Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Foundation, and CantoMundo, among others.  In her second full-length collection of poems, Only More So, Accardi plays her themes like a jazz musician. A theme is introduced and then abandoned.  A new theme makes itself felt and then slowly, cautiously—like the great jazz improvisers that are littered throughout the text: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Wes Montgomery—the first theme reappears, altered but recognizable, trilling towards the next image or, like all good music, towards the anxiety of silence.  Poetry and music, it goes without saying, have a way of approaching silence without ever reaching it, like Zeno’s paradox where the math approaches zero without ever really getting there.  And yet, somehow, despite the numbers—despite the silence—we still arrive at the finish line a little shocked and surprised to be there.

Only More So is a collection of lyric poems about jazz and sex, gender and marriage, the Holocaust and silence—music, violence, war, rape, and silence again.  Accardi weaves jazz imagery throughout the text.  Sometimes jazz is the theme itself, sometimes it is a bridge to a new theme, other times it is an echo in the clarinet section that threatens to develop then fades.  For example, in “For John, For Coltrane,” Accardi describes how the music used Coltrane’s body, aged him,

“made trying
harder than a man ought to into just
silence, made it seem just
for the silence of it all.”

But Coltrane isn’t going to let the music have its way with him:

“he wanted to take it [the night]
home and wrap its arms
around his sound until it screamed.”

A similar thing happens in the poem, “Birdfood for Charlie Parker,” where we are trapped forever on the verge of the seventh note about to resolve itself:

“there’s nothin’ but the long
note the forever aching
scream of the seventh about to give
about to give about to give
about to give about to give”

However, in some poems, the situation is exactly reversed; sex is music.  In “The Way of Sleepwalkers,” a poem ostensibly about an affair, the marriage is described explicitly in musical terms:

“And, then, he delivers the disaltered
chord, the bridge, the lie: Precarious,
swaying, almost believable above
the existing melody of their marriage:
a controlled pulse in a veil of fog.”

The images blend and twist around one another: a marriage is a song, then it’s a body, and finally a boat blind in the sea listening for the fog horn.

Accardi’s summer in Prague seems to have left the Holocaust on her mind and where atrocity on this scale meets with jazz and with marriage is in its proximity to silence—those silences that are chosen, those that are forced, those that must be, and those that kill.  In the title poem, soldiers visit a woman’s house and watch her lasciviously.  The images of music and sex are here full of potential violence:

“It was like this: the woman’s hips swayed
like harmonicas when the men watched her fetch
water and run it into the basin, cracking
ice with her fingernails.”

In “Ciscenje Prostora,” the potential violence becomes actual violence and silence is invoked again:

“Then, silence.
Lost territories, rebels, food, clothing, shelter,
she thinks not of peace, but of surviving
the winter, of outlasting the enemy, of winning.”

The poem “In Prague” is as close to a pure definition of poetry we get, where memory is kinetic action, where language is recorded in the land itself, where the names of things tell us what they really are:

“Take me where memory makes my legs move.
Take me where moss holds language.
Take me where we have a name for the things we do.”

Finally, Accardi does a little exploring of her Portuguese heritage.  One poem in particular, “The Last Borges,” discusses the awesome power of assimilation to erase history, to insinuate distance between a parent and their hyphenated child, to usher in a gap as big as an ocean between two languages:

“But, the only Portuguese words
you ever gave me do not stand for love.
Que queres, que queres.
What do you want, what do you want.”

Accardi’s Portuguese-American identity, like so many things in this wonderful collection, is defined by its proximity to an enormous and all-too-present erasure. Her connection to her father—like the secrets of music, the vagaries of love, and the horrors of history—is cleaved to a language that resists its own transmission, leaving only a few arcane phrases to conjure with.

***

 

Carlo Matos has published five books: A School for Fishermen (BrickHouse), Counting Sheep Till Doomsday and Big Bad Asterisk* (BlazeVox), Ibsen’s Foreign Contagion (Academica), and The Secret Correspondence of Loon and Fiasco (forthcoming Mayapple). He has also published in many journals like Menacing Hedge, HTML Giant, Cleaver Magazine, and The Rumpus. He blogs at http://carlomatos.blogspot.com