Christal
Cooper
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** PLEASE TAKE NOTE: This is an analysis of Christal Rice Cooper’s interpretation of
Meteor Shower. The only interpretation from the poet herself will be noted in a quote. Thus far there are no quotes. Therefore this entire piece is an analysis based only on Christal Rice Cooper's interpretation of Meteor Shower.
Anne
Whitehouse’s Meteor Shower:
“Reflecting
the Dead Back to Life Through the Elegy”
On September 7, 2016 Dos Madres
Press Inc. (https://www.facebook.com/DosMadresPress) published
Anne Whitehouse’s fifth poetry collection Meteor Shower.
Meteor Shower illustration and book design is by
Elizabeth H Murphy who is represented by Illusion Studios (http://www.illusionstudios.net).
Whitehouse’s other poetry
collections are: The Refrain (Dos Madres
Press); One Sunday Morning (Finishing Line Press); Bear In Mind (Finishing
Line Press); Blessings And Cursers (Poetric Matrix Press); and the chapbook The Surveyor’s Hand (Compton
Press).
She’s also written a novel called Fall
Love (Xlibris).
Meteor Shower is broken up into six
parts: A Girl Who Fell In Love With An
Island (10 poems); The Eye That Cries (10 poems); Moving (10 poems); The Mask
(9 poems); Grout Pond (9 poems); and Life’s Continuous Chain (7 poems).
The poems contain the common thread of
reflection on One’s Self (“A Girl Who Fell In Love With An Island.”); Nature
(“At The Ocean”); Events (“The Eye That Cries”); Things (“Wedding Silver”); and
Memories (“Moving”).
What is most captivating about this
poetry collection is Whitehouse’s expert hand in writing the poetic form called
the elegy, a lamenting poem, couplet or song written in the memory of a
deceased person.
In “One Way Session in memory of Marc
Snyder” the speaker of the poem mourns the loss of her and her husband’s
marriage therapist.
You were our therapist
for 25 years-
to think I still believed
we had all the time
in the world!
She
attributes she and her husband’s therapist Marc with the ability to making
their marriage an honest marriage.
Only you had the ability
to turn our gazes inward
to reveal how we’d each
wronged the other.
Soon
she no longer mourns her therapist but celebrates the relationship that she and
her husband Steve share, and she gives credit of this relationship to her therapist,
which allows her and her husband the freedom to swim (from under the rock/ that had trapped me,).
where we find each other
and hold on.
By
the end of the poem therapist Marc Snyder lives on because their love
relationship lives on:
the two of us warm
and steady, for this time,
now and forever,
between the two immensities.
The poem “A Few Things I Learned From My
Mother-In-Law In memory of Martha Jane Linton Whitehouse” the speaker of the
poem pays tribute to a woman who taught her about the importance of space in
order to have healthy relationships.
I had not grown up in a family that respected boundaries,
and it was a relief to have a mother-in-law
who set such store by them.
The
next two stanzas the speaker of the poem shares some of the lessons
her mother-in-law taught her. It is in
the next to last stanza that she speaks directly to her mother-in-law:
Martha, mother-in-law, gin-drinker, I lift
my glass to you, bare-footed, braving the humidity
on the porch, armed with your frosty martini,
watching the surface of the canal stained pink
by a pastel sunset through dark palms,
blurred by the passage of underwater life.
The
final two lines, a couplet, not only remembers her mother-in-law but also
brings back to life the ancestors her mother-in-law told her about.
So that long-vanished ancestors will come to enlighten us,
You tell us the family stories that you have taken to heart.
I’d been thinking she was getting better.
I know now it was the opposite-
her spirit was readying for the infinite.
Yet, stripped of so much,
the house still enchanted us,
enfolded and protected us.
After
exploring the house’s kitchen , back yard, an d back yard swimming pool the
speaker of the poem venture into her father in law-s library and finds bookends
that were handmade by her father in-law:
and recognized my father-in-law’s handiwork
in the blocks of wood four inches square,
each fastened at right angles with two screws
to a square of aluminum.
Made with care, using material at hand,
the squares of wood sanded and stained,
and the squares of aluminum sanded, too,
so they would slide smoothly
between book and bookshelf.
The speaker of the poem’s husband reveals to her that her father-in-law made things to earn money during his poor grad days. In the last stanza, the bookends take on the persona of her father-in-law, his struggles, his ability to turn those struggles into beautiful art, and the great unknown of what those struggles were.
In so much of what he did,
My father-in-law exhibited a painful perfection
that was hard to live up to, hard to live with.
In their serenity and simplicity,
these beautiful objects he made
reveal nothing of his struggles.
The most compelling blockbuster of a poem
in this collection is the poem “Calligraphies” in the voice of famed artist Cai
Guo-Qiang (http://www.caiguoqiang.com) who is speaking in memory of his father,
calligrapher and painter Cai Ruiqin – making this poem both a persona and an
elegy poem at the same time.
Cai Guo-Qiang in Houston, Texas. October 2010
In the first stanza the young Cai
witnesses the making of art and the destruction of war right at his front door.
In the old days in China
my father collected calligraphy,
ancient scrolls, and rare books.
We lived in Quanzhou,
across the strait from Taiwan.
We could hear artillery batteries
firing into the mist at the island
that still resisted the mainland.
Cai remembers his father as an artist
whose artwork was synonymous with his father’s identity. There was no separation – his father inhaled
and exhaled his calligraphy, his art. The
next two stanzas describe this act of breathing art essential to his father’s
life, spirit and wellbeing.
My father’s calligraphy
was delicate and adept.
I used to stand at his shoulder,
careful to leave space
for his am to move freely,
as I watched him wet the ink
to the right consistency,
select his brush, and dip it
gently and carefully, soaking
the soft hairs of the badger,
and stroke its sides
against the jar, forming a point
like no other, soft, flexible, yielding.
With an intake of breath,
he raised his hand that held the brush,
hovering above the paper,
and slowly exhaled
until he was an empty receptacle,
and then, and only then,
he touched the tip of the brush
to the fine rice paper-
the strokes flowed, deft and sensitive,
forming the ancient shapes of the words.
Then
his father experiences his first of many deaths in the form of the Cultural
Revolution, when out of fear of imprisonment or loss of human life, his father
hides his book and scrolls in a hole in the family cellar. He then experiences more deaths:
but he was still afraid, and little by little,
he began to burn it, at night, in secret,
in the hidden depths of the house.
Burning of statues during the Cultural Revolution
The
speaker of the poem Cai remembers his father‘s severe depression and loss.
Afterwards he was not the same.
He lost himself in a strange self-exile
and left us all, his family behind,
finding perilous refuge
far away in the mountains
in a ruined Buddhist convent,
where an old crone of ninety,
the last remaining resident,
gave him sanctuary.
While
at the Buddhist convent he managed to find a piece of himself back, but only
momentarily.
There he would take sticks
and write calligraphy once more
in puddles on the ground
that would disappear
as soon as it was written,
In
the next stanza the speaker of the poem Cai brings his father and his father’s
art back to life by creating is own art:
I am his son and my calligraphy
is firework, my art gunpowder,
as evanescent as writing on water.
Can Guo-Qiang preparing a gunpowder drawing for the Arts China Gallery at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in October 2010
Evanescent
is a good word to describe these poems – except the poems don’t completely
disappear – they are like waves in the ocean – traveling from us and then
coming back to us, like a song.
In seconds the fog lifted –
one moment visible
and vanished the next
from a rise in temperature.
--excerpt, “Inspiration”
Middle: Up-close view of water particles forming fog
Right: Advection fog layer in San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge and skyline in the background
Or better yet like a meteor shower – the
poems reaching a part of us that is eternal, not able to be tangibly touched,
but able to be seen and felt – like the cosmic debris, echoing in our ears.
Who, if I
cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?
Every angel
is terrifying, he heard,
imagining that annihilating embrace
empowering the Duino Elegies.
--excerpt, “Inspiration”
