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northSight
Lois Roma-Deeley
Singularity Press
ISBN Number: 0-9765711-2-9
Reviewer: Barbara Crooker
Step inside this battered pickup truck. Lois Roma-Deeley is sitting at the wheel, ready to take you on a ride through society’s underside, where you’ll encounter girls with tattoos, a woman with a blue dahlia in her hair, victims of rape, incest, abuse, drug addicts, the mentally ill, immigrants, day laborers, waitresses, customers at K-Mart, bikers, and prostitutes. These are hard poems, without the softening edge of consolation, but there is an unwavering honesty, a clarity of vision. We have much to learn on this journey, as we head north, throwing away the compass.
In the first poem, “Take the Road Out of Town," we get our instructions:
Turn off the radio. Make an X
on the map. Now forget
everything you think
you ever learned about love ….
The speaker continues:
You … want nothing but the blood inside your head to
stop pounding; the sweat
between your shoulders, on your hands to dry. You want to spit fire
at the boot heels touching the black tire of the red pick-up.
You want the sky to bleed and thunder.
We know we are in uncharted territory, that there are going to be difficult stories to hear, complicated lessons to learn.
Each section has an epigraph, lines from Lisel Mueller, Denise Levertov, Patricia Hampl, and Robinson Jeffers that frame and give shape to each part. A variety of voices is used, giving the effect of a chorus, a litany of grief. Some of the speakers, the one in “Throwing a Chair Through the Hospital Window," for example, clearly have some sort of mental illness, and the disturbed and distorted syntax used underscores this effect. “Apologizing for the Rain" is written in the chillingly accurate voice of a battered wife. It’s a prose-poem/experimental hybrid, particularly effective in its use of the virgule and white space, suggesting physical blows (line breaks/bone breaks):
I'm sorry The sky wouldn't listen to me /the bakery was closed
sorry I bumped into your shoulder/ stepped on both your shoes/
I'm sorry//thewind gets in your eyes/some voices like to screech //
sorry//really/so sorry I didn't think to cook you bacon / the lawn
is still unmowed And I inconsiderately was taken with an urge to let
it go sorry I use up all the air sorry I take up too much space
In the same section, we have “Voices From the Aftermath: New York City Requiem," which was written to be performed to the music of composer Christopher Scinto, “the day the towers fell," the seismic crack when history shifted. Later, in “Bougainvillaea and TV," Roma-Deeley writes a powerful indictment of our powerlessness:
I am a useless human being.
Tanks are rolling toward a city—
the name of which I remember only from my childhood—
Old stories told on an old phonograph.
The Thief of Baghdad?
Ali Baba? And the Forty Thieves
I have done nothing.
In terms of craft, Roma-Deeley always seems to be in control; throughout the book, there is a marriage of form and function. In “Abacus," the litany of details clicks in each line like wooden beads:
5 days before my 18th birthday. 29 days in that month.
80 people at the wedding; everyone very drunk.
12 rounds of Santa Lucia. 6 times the Irish jig.
4 of us at the head table. Tuxedoes bring pink prime rib.
Note the elegant use of half-rhyme, as well.
For most of the characters, there is a longing, for something to happen, for something to change:
… the vending machines lined up against the wall
speak to me with silver lips: certainty
exists inside these glass domes.
(“Midnight Shift")[at K-Mart]
… We came to believe
the faces flickering inside the box were family.
And, somewhere in the middle of each show, we started to hope:
this time there has to be
a better ending.
(“Getting on the Transcendental Train")
In the last poem of the collection, “How the Future Feels," the speaker says:
I’m talking to the sad girl sitting beside me.
....
Now the girl asks me how the future feels.
Is it like swimming at night in the ocean when there is no moon?
These are indeed words for our time, words to travel by. Throw away the charts, the road maps. Things are growing dark, and we can no longer count on faith, or the stars, to guide us. Still, there is hope at the end of the road. Yes, there is suffering, but these are survivors, and just as the monk in “This" “sees the blood on the stone / floor, a star burst he can copy, / something he can use" so does Lois Roma-Deeley, who takes these stories into her body, and makes art out of them.
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