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In This Dream Everything Remains Inside
Gilda Morina Syverson
Main Street Rag Publishing
ISBN Number: 1-930907-59-1
Reviewer: Henry Berne
Dreams and memories interweave in this collection of well-wrought and emotionally moving poems.
With the honesty of one who needs to tell the story of her life-defining experience, the author writes about being a childless woman in a large Italian-American family in which children are the pride of each generation.
In a poem entitled "Gualtieri Sicamino, Messina, Sicily, August 1988," Syverson establishes the bridge between old and new, tasting for us the tradition of the family:
we stroll through narrow byways,
stop for coffee at Colosi's cafe,
head for the cemetery, uncover
tombstones of great-grandparents
hidden among vines, where I pick
ripe figs, peel away thick green skin,
press my teeth into the purple.
Syverson's poetic gift is evident in the way she uses objects to create meaning: the old cemetery comes alive as the poet uncovers tombstones hidden among vines, discovers ripe figs, and presses her teeth into the purple fruit. It's about life, one might say, and the continuation of life. And, it is just this continuation that is denied her, as she explains in a powerful short poem, called "What Remains":
It's about the body, not the head,
the need to feel something
growing inside, where memories live
in muscles that have yearned
for years to conceive and give birth.
I missed out on the pain,
the pushing.
I told my sister once, it's a survival game,
only the strong remain,
and whatever I am made of
cannot continue the species.
It's about the body, not the head: it's about essence, about the chain of life: from mother to daughter, who becomes mother to daughter, and so on and on. It's about identity: about being a link in this chain of life. It's about the body, not the head. It's about fulfillment, and it's about sadness, and about power. It's about basic obligation. It's about love.
And it's about religion, going back to the ancient goddess traditions in which the female power to produce life was venerated as akin to the power of the earth to do the same. The goddess figures were the keepers of the chain of life, this archetype of mother reaching back into pre-history. It is not surprising, then, that the poet writes of lighting candles to the Virgin Mary on All Souls Day, as described in the poem "One All Souls Day" when the sermon was:
on souls caught in purgatory,
those never baptized trapped in limbo.
They waited for the others to leave, stood together,
walked the side aisle to the statue of Mary.
From a bucket of sand, she lifted a long wooden match,
placed it in a flame. Her husband's hand
steadied hers. They lit one candle, then another.
Years later, she told him, she named them
that day. John Palmer after his grandfather,
Mary Jo after her mother and dead aunt.
Two souls in limbo never baptized, never born.
The image of unborn souls existing in purgatory opens the wound in yet another way, assigning one more level of suffering in a spiritual sense. There is courage in this revelation of a very private experience, which is at the same time the experience of many women now and throughout history. In "Woman after Woman," the poet writes:
Odd, the way people with similar experiences
end up talking. I meet woman after woman
who tell me about miscarriages,
hormone treatments, laser surgeries,
adoption services. I try to escape
the loss, but the loss keeps returning,
as each woman opens up
about her infertility.
And now, about dreams. There are many images from dreams, and some of them tell stories in the language of the unconscious, from which dreams arise. An example comes from the poem "Ancestors":
During those years
trying to conceive,
I'd climb into bed,
restless from thoughts
of never giving birth...
I'd see faces
of departed female ancestors—
Each woman took her turn
hovering close by
like mother owls
returning to nurture
their young.
All gather, glide
across space. I awake
and they vanish
leaving shadows.
And from "Upon Awakening, I Find My Family":
I never told them about a dream
I had years earlier. Two little boys,
blonde curly hair like my husband's,
so close in age they could've been twins.
I believed then it was a sign. Time passed
and those two little boys never came,
through me, anyway.
And from "In Search of My Own Mother":
A della Francesca luminescence
streams through the open door
of this dream. The kitchen back
at my parents', the same light
that first day we moved in
forty years earlier. Only
my mother is missing.
I send them in search of Mother,
down Plymouth towards James Street.
In the distance, they form a circle,
light radiates from their center.
A reflection of my face appears.
A taller female figure rises.
Here, powerfully, the search for The Mother arises within, this image of self and icon, this connection with life, this need. The body speaks through imagery, translated through the process of dreaming and described and recalled in this poem. There is a kind of alchemy here as well as a kind of forgiveness. Syverson describes with great poetic eloquence the magnitude of her pain but at the same time does not descend into whining. This book is a powerful expression of depth, a moving experience for the reader presented in elegantly carved poems.
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