Portuguese American, Borges Accardi’s fourth collection broadly centres on the female experience of war atrocities, ethnic cleansing, rape, imprisonment and other instances of degradation inflicted by men on women. The book’s verve stems from its narrative angles, imagery and memorable lines that produce a beguiling reading experience. Suggestive poems insinuate themselves through unusual angles, associative interruptions and by avoiding the obvious, and so allow access to a wider perspective.
Female identities are marked and located by pain, rage, trouble and war. Poems explore the condition of female experience, concluding in the final poem that nuns require a leap of faith to believe that they are female. They travel historically and culturally from instructions on how to avoid being arrested in ‘How to Shake off the Políciade Segurança Pública Circa 1970’, to the wise woman, ‘a bride of dried veil blossoms’, who could ‘poison or heal’ to how a woman carries the ache of a man inside her and falls back on nurturing instincts at times of crisis. In the case of the hooker, ‘who looked like Lena Horner’ and ‘suffered herself as a gift to men, though, consolation is found in beer alone. Men also feature as victims, such as, the Vietnam veteran always close to trauma and unlocatable pain, or through their gaze, as in the film actor who ‘looks at his women as if they / were a platter at a banquet, or ice / at an oasis’. Mostly they are moody, possessive, man spreading, close to death or dying.
Her best poems evoke an elusive quality and suggest an invisible world, as in the growth of a tumour, the attraction of lures or the function of ritual. One of the most tender moments starts with the line: “Wanna buy some sleep?” where the poet-narrator’s brother ‘gathers up a cocoon of sleep’ and ‘zips it up tightly under my chin / almost as if he loved me.’ The ‘almost’ here echoes a fear of the Father and of male dominance that is set against silence and survival throughout the collection.
In the thick of the worst of war, ‘In Prague’ where:
A skull, embedded in a dirt wall seems, for a moment,
as white and round as bread. Jaws, on metal stands,
tagged with numbers, wait for a turn to be whole again.
Here, dates are rounded to the nearest hundred.
Tarsals, femurs, ulna, open-pored
bones like coral, legs bowed, dried marrow
dark as tunnels, joint like fists, teeth.
The poet-narrator wants to move to where memory is kinetic action, where language is recorded in the natural world and where atrocities are named:
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.
The battle of the sexes surfaces in ‘What The Water Gives Me’, based on a Frida Kahlo painting, where the painter-narrator reflects on her turbulent marriage to Diego Rivera. Here ‘Motion, not heart, undertakes every marriage’ and attracts mold, thus ages or fades, and ends somewhat hauntingly with Frida seeing children with ‘soft, miscarried faces.’
This thoughtful collection is a joy to read, evoking elusive states, and coming at the reader from all angles. It is thoroughly recommended.
David Caddy 2nd February 2017
Tears in the Fence 