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A Review of Annie Finch's Eve
(The Bloomsbury Review, Spring 1998 ) By C.L. Rawlins
Though noted as a scholar, Finch is a poet in her bones, and Eve is the most delightful and original poetry I've run across in years. Starting with nine ancestral goddesses, she composes for each a section-opening poem that reflects not only the content but the style of the original; for instance, "Inanna" adopts from Sumerian hymns a four-beat accentual line, divided into two parts." And this is how that sounds: A young goddess, full of love, fresh with the touch of a husband, From its mythic starting point, each section diverges in startling ways. For instance, following "Inanna" is a poem about fishing in San Francisco Bay that, in a way altogether stranger than Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," becomes an encounter with the very depths of inspiration. For instead of a fish, what surfaces is a "mermother": Then I almost fell, as she charged high, and fanned ("The Last Mermother") The measure of this is that it strikes the reader not as idle folkloric invention, but as risky. For Finch uses myth and archetype in a present way, to illuminate life. And she lifts the customary barriers we use to hold myth and life apart, so that they mix in telling ways.
Her other books are The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (University of Michigan, 1993) and A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Story Line, 1994), with the forthcoming After New Formalism (Story Line, 1998). I haven't read her scholarly prose, but the excellence of her poetry commends it. Besides a considerable knowledge of myth and poetic forms, Finch has a knowing way with sound. What she proves here is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, the equivalent of a whalebone corset, but is instead a bio-acoustic key to memory and emotion, which existed prior to the written word. And it still works. Like this: Inside my Eden I can find no snake. ("No Snake") English, unlike Italian or Spanish, is poor in end-rhyme, tending to figures like alliteration and stress. This makes rhyme a considerable challenge, one that most poets duly strain to meet. And even in Pope or Keats one finds those lines that sacrifice all to conclude with -ight. But Finch strains not at all, taking to formal verse as her namesake bird takes to air. The very formal demands that create awkwardness in run-of-the-mill poets can create in the work of the best a wild and unpredictable brilliance. And rather than strain, Finch veers. Not just lines, but whole poems make hair-trigger shifts, like swallows at dark, that blur the senses. These are not calculated, but they are almost always right. One of the great gifts of this book is the way she manages to couple verbal wit with insight, so closely that they can't be analyzed apart. RUNNING IN CHURCH Then, you were a hot-thinking, thin-lidded tinderbox. Again and again in this book, I found myself shocked with pleasure as image, idea, and sound spun out in a perfect braid. And Finch manages not in just a few poems, but throughout. Manages, hell. She ties it up in nine colors of ribbon and then dances on the tabletop. Throughout the book there are phrases that ring and images that haunt: "Gray nature, make a dusk of me,/ and let me keep my ties." I love that. Finch refreshes both the art of poetry and that of clear thinking. Eve is a stunning, serious achievement, and also great fun. So I'll recommend it in the highest, with bells, whistles, fireworks, and only one cautionary note. Once you start reading, it's hard to stop. So--remember to breathe.
Copyright©2006 Annie Finch |
Eve, Annie Finch's first book of poems, is cataloged thus: 1. Goddesses-Poetry. 2. Family-Poetry. 3. Women-Poetry. And while that may be accurate, it also makes the book sound like a deadly tome, which it isn't. In fact, nothing could be farther from theoretical choke-and-garble than this.