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Luminosity
Barbara Hendryson
Finishing Line Press
25 pages
ISBN number: 1-932755-07-1
Reviewer: Terri Brown-Davidson
Barbara Hendryson’s graphically gorgeous chapbook, Luminosity, is a fine example of how craft in poetry can serve a surface simplicity and--in the process--result in beautiful and tender work. These poems, which explore, mainly, the pleasures and terrors of both childhood and family, are constructed out of fragments which contain, in their truncated lines, increasing glimpses of a psychological complexity. In this respect, though the chapbook is only twenty-five pages long, it feels much longer, more dense, and has the interesting and impressive movement of a novel outlined in vivid fragments that make eminent psychological sense.
Each poem is masterfully rendered and contains the sort of poetic ambiguities that lend themselves to exploration. Is childhood, for all of us, a halcyon time? Hendryson seems to pose this as a question in quite a few poems, including "Pictures," the first piece in Luminosity:
Those pastel days of thirties Hollywood.
My mother and father in front of their bungalow.
He in his khakis and rolled up shirt sleeves.
Pipe pinched in his teeth as he held me up.
My mother’s Kodak trained on the two of us.
Her arms scrawny as our palm tree in its demise.
Scent of tobacco, click of the camera’s eye.
The dark that comes later has no voice in this poem.
The poor tree of my father’s stunted conscience.
The shuttered vision of my mother’s joyless eyes.
What remains: the scent of tobacco, the camera’s eye.
Even though this poem is rendered in language simple enough for a grocery list, the mood it evokes, the rich and almost devastating contradictions implied through the images of unity and separation between husband and wife, the husband posing with his daughter for the camera, the wife manipulating the shot, seem to portend--in their simplicity and artfulness--the tragedy of their marriage’s dissolution.
And this is, indeed, masterful writing. Unlike many chapbooks or even full-length collections, where I might read one poem and then feel tempted to skim through the rest, Luminosity drew me in with the power evoked through its complexity and narrative thrust, qualities anchored by superior craft, as is evidenced in the repetition of the phrase, "the camera’s eye" (a wonderful choice on Hendryson’s part).
The language, too, is subtly rich, but in ways that tend not to announce themselves: the hints of assonance in "scrawny" and "palm," the modulating "i" and "e" sounds in "Pipe pinched in his teeth as he held me up."
From this lovely first poem, the chapbook goes on to explore a stripping away of the innocence implied in the narrator’s otherwise outwardly innocent childhood. Images of kidnapped children, of dead or mutilated children, creep like lengthening shadows into the text as the reality of the world "out there" begins to cast its darkness over the narrator’s experience in her suburban, San Francisco world of the forties and fifties--the father portrayed here as neglectful, possibly abusive--and as the narrator observes patterns in her relationship played out again with a man who later ends up leaving her. As the narrator grows up, her experience of marriage, especially, becomes cynical, an attitude reflected in the powerful poem "The Swans":
Always, in my mind, I see this in black and white:
A film noir, or a page from an old Vogue.
So, light is there, but only vaguely, consisting of that
which
gathers toward morning, a slim moon.
The kitchen, shrouded in its cleanliness, contains them
and the small table at which they sit:
My mother, clothed in her white wrapper, leans
toward my father, opposite her.
He is newly uniformed.
His recursive smile, the deep angles of his face,
Gather in a jack-light.
Light, also, contains their hands:
White nesting birds, alert and synchronous.
Likewise, at the exit door, the wings of their bodies
beat together,
This the last time I will see them this way,
mated for life.
As the chapbook progresses, Hendryson delves into an exquisitely nuanced darkness that is heightened by the narrator’s relationship with her father and the various strands of his coldness--and neglect--that she explores in layers, peeling the onion of their relationship not in a Sharon Olds-type way (that would quickly expose her father’s malevolence for shock value, perhaps) but in a slow, emotional striptease that reminds me very much of the guarded and careful ways in which many of us begin to fathom "the other"-- even when that "other" is a member of our own family.
The atmosphere of an earlier San Francisco is beautifully sustained in such poems as "1942," "Playland," and "The Hills Above San Francisco"; the poetry is also novelistic in the sense that it evokes not only an actual geographical area but also a place for the narrator’s imaginative roamings. And some of the poems, such as "Playland," are genuinely suffused with a happy-go-lucky girlish charm, with the sense of childhood seized, clung to, savored.
But, even in the midst of such relative unknowing, the shadows threaten to reveal themselves, as in this poem, "Playground," which is one of the shortest in the chapbook but also among the most memorable:
The children, the playground, the stark noon sun.
Oh the sounds they make, the high pitched joy.
Bright primary colors of the climbing towers.
The otherwise happy mothers brooding on the benches.
They imagine the streaking trajectory of the raptor.
Like dead night that comes with its long arm.
How it slices the air like a raven’s black wing.
The clutched child shining in its dark beak.
Hendryson’s poetry strikes me as courageous at times, thrilling and incredibly honest. Though readers may not be familiar with her work yet, her reputation--as evidenced by the often-stunning work in this chapbook--deserves to grow, and her poetry belongs in every serious reader’s collection.
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