Inflorescence review from Pleiades

Inflorescence

by Sarah Hannah

Pleiades, A Journal of New Writing

Volume 28, number 2

Sarah Hannah, Inflorescence. Tupelo Press, 2007.

Review by Joan Houlihan

Weaned on close reading and the ideal of every poem for itself—the text as text, shot up into space and then recovered later with no connection to either its creator or time of creation—and having admonished many students to detach a poem from “what actually happened,” I was surprised to find myself quickly provoked out of this reading mode and into one that I have assiduously avoided, one that takes into account the life of the creator (in this case, the death) while reading Sarah Hannah’s Inflorescence. There is hardly a way to read this book outside the context of the author’s suicide right now and, as with Plath, it seems that Hannah’s poetic legacy is, if not forever tied to it (Hart Crane’s poetry took decades to escape his leap from the boat), at least for a long time will be read in the context of her willed death. However, the surprise was that rather than finding the context reductive and therefore harmful to the text (as in connecting the dots between life event and poem event, or in looking for “evidence” of a suicidal turn of mind), I found that admitting the actual into the reading further opened the text, allowed the poems to flow freely back and forth between the worlds of the actual and the imaginary.

To further an overall grasp of the sensibility at work, I read Inflorescence through without too much critical attention to individual poems and lines (though I noticed some unevenness), first from front to back, then from back to front, and by doing so, found a flow among and between the poems that evoked a definite sense, not of torment or despair nor of a desire to harm, but, surprisingly, the exact opposite: a reverence for life, for the here-and-now, especially as evidenced in nature, and a persistent belief in an afterlife. There is a spirituality at work here, feeling the presence of the dead in life, and an unannounced, but definite conviction that nothing really dies. This sense of reincarnation in the natural world gives another context to someone violently and painfully leaving the world, one of someone drawn to the world as part of something larger, to a felt presence of the speaker’s beloved mother in nature, a kind of benign haunting.

The poems are sometimes open form and conversational, even witty, sometimes tight and embedded into themselves, but all have a different feel from, say, Ariel, where the poems are all very nearly deformed from their violent concision and sense of underlying torment and rage.

The first poem (“The Garden as She Left It”) and the last poem (“The Hutch”) mirror the recurring imagery of being left, abandoned, stuck in a place of loss, and the resultant drive to fly from that state. Reading them side by side is synecdoche for the book as a whole. Here is the first poem’s opening:

Locked, strung
With pollen, stirred by bees.

and the last line in the book:

Felling, the outraged exodus of birds.

A world is evoked in a few words—locked, strung, stirred, outraged—and they are emblematic of the emotional landscape throughout. The last couplet in “The Garden As She Left It,” shows the “dim figure of the woman, / the recent flutter of the hands” and we “see” the departed mother (the air around the broom she left in the garden “furious”—a wonderful doubleness there, the image of dust having recently been stirred up by the broom, making the departure always a recent event in memory, coupled with the narrator’s own “fury” at being left).

The poems centering on the mother’s illness (Section III, Home Hospice) are among the most unforgettable. Hannah puts us directly into that place of vigilance, studying death as a force to be reckoned with, in ways I’ve never seen done before in a poem. Here is the opening of “Indian Pipe” (Monotropa uniflora)”:

            You rattle in the bed, and I think of that flower
            Countless crowded voices seeking egress
            Through a single waxy byway.

            What’s that awful noise? you ask.
            Technically, it goes by three nouns;
            “Rales, crackles, crepitation.” Nurse and booklet

            Promised it would be this way, like
            The sound of someone sucking on the final
            Dregs of soda through a straw.

That sound of the death rattle (and note the brilliance of that first line, how she uses the word “rattle”) cannot be better described. (Countless crowded voices seeking egress / Through a single waxy byway ! The sound of someone sucking on the final / Dregs of soda through a straw!), yet Hannah goes on from there to, incredibly, have the narrator make a joke about it:

…But when you

            Ask, I swear it’s the bookshelf creaking
            From humidity; to woodpeckers out of synch;
            Three geese choking on crab grass;

            Four red-faced men a-coughing
            From the bleachers at Fenway; five cups of coffee
            Brewing in the percolator. …

Hannah has this ability in many poems to travel from shock to sorrow to wit then back again, without missing a beat. Her command of diction and timing is impressive throughout.

The last section (Section IV, Inflorescence) builds the case for life going on after death through objects, through locations, through nature, and the last three poems (“County of Last Residence”, “Greenbrier (Smilax rotundifolia)”, and “The Hutch”) are a culmination of the drive for the narrator toward reunion with the beloved mother. They are among the most accomplished, and powerful, in the book. In “County of Last Residence” the author plainly, and with assertive lines, makes her case:

Here I was foolishly fixing you in one house
When you dwelled in a variety: the London burbs, Chicago,

Battle Creek, Catalpa, Sugar Maple, Furze,
I was fixing you in roses when you could be found

            In swamp grass; I was seeking you in herring gull
            When you very well might have been cormorant or finch,
                        Mimud polyglottos

Trailing me up and down the street beside your bedroom
Where you died, alighting fence to fence behind me…

Inflorescence. The title could not be more apt, or poignant—the nascence and power of what is to be, what will mature, all the brightness and joy of the promise—it is all here. These poems contain everything a poet—and reader—could wish for—the sensibility, even sixth-sense, of a poetic imagination equipped with the language and craft necessary to bring that imagination to brilliant fruition. The book is filled with poems that force you awake to life, poems that break your heart and poems that arouse an abiding love of the world and its beauty. Inflorescence, dedicated to Sarah Hannah’s mother, is a stunning and unforgettable tribute to her and, as it turns out, a memorial to Sarah Hannah herself.