Memory Passing Into Light
Eleanor Swanson's new collection of poems, "Memory's Rooms" (2013) explores the relationship between memory and imagination and the ways in which they illuminate one another. Swanson has published both poetry and fiction and has received a Fiction Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. She teaches literature and leads poetry workshops at Regis University, Colorado.
In her poems, Swanson is a storyteller. Most of the 40 poems in this collection tell a brief narrative, usually based on the poet's own experience. The writing tends to be understated, frequently conversational, and full of details of observation. Along the way, Swanson's poetry transforms the story into something beyond the seemingly commonplace. Although many of the poems reflect sad themes, the death of a relative, or a lost love, they are shown in a new light through imagination.
The poems are set in a variety of places. A poem titled "On the Mee Kok River, Thailand" shows how Swanson combines the every day with the transcendental. The "finite and infinite" exist together in the same events. Visions of Buddhism and Hinduism seen from the river mingle with the cries of poor begging children on the dock. Swanson writes:
"Behind me you're invisible.
silent as a bodhisattva in meditation,
yet your hands on my shoulders seem
to tell me you're thinking of a paradox--
how the finite and infinite can exist
at once in the same universe."
In another poem set in the East, "A Posture of Supplication", Swenson expresses a sense of wonder about how "beauty and death, the celestial and the earthly/can be contained in one landscape", as she reflects on the terror wrought by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Although most of Swanson's poems are simple in structure, one, "Miami Beach, Moonrise" uses the difficult form of a sestina. Each of the lines in the poem ends with the words "light, body, water, sand, beach, ocean" in various sequences. These words express many of the themes of Swanson's poetry. The rhythm of the poem captures the rolling of the waves at a Miami beach. The poet reflects on a long ago evening spent at the beach with her brother who died at the age of 20, "light/years from this night, but only minutes from this beach." As the poet revisits the beach, she recalls her brother and their visit together, "memory passing into light". This is a beautifully integrated poem in which the form, rhythm, and theme coalesce.
The poem "The Limits of Imagination" opens the collection and aptly sets the tone of what follows. The poet recalls an experience when she was invited to a fifth grade class to read her stories to the children. Before the reading, the class was engaged in drawing, and the teacher chided a young girl for her way of drawing a horse. "Some imaginations need limits", the teacher sagely observes. Swanson takes her time describing the unfortunate girl and her drawing in detail. Upon the end of the art period, the narrator finds herself unable to read as she had planned while focusing instead on the girl and the horse. She extemporizes a story for the class:
"I take a breath, not knowing how I'll end,
then start a story of a girl who draws
a horse every day, practicing the wings.
They are the hardest."
"Kissing", another poem I enjoyed, tells of teenage lovers who kiss in their blue convertible holding up traffic at a busy intersection. Other, older couples in their cars watch the scene and remember when they might themselves have kissed, "so long, so deliciously,/that the world stopped/just for them". A poem called "Man Waves at Train" suggests how a man leading an apparently humdrum life gets inspired by a passing freight to drive over the mountains where "it would be just dark/enough to see all those stars--/burning and burning." The poem, "Au Pair, Girl" reflects on the suicide of Sylvia Plath told from the perspective of the young woman who found Plath's body. The poem "Dobrina,Sarajevo" tells the story of lovers and their commitment to one another from opposite ends of the Bosnian-Serb conflict. This poems is one of a small number near the end of the book that explore political as well as personal themes.
"Memory's Rooms" is an eloquent book about the power of imagination to bring meaning to and to help cope with experience.
Robin Friedman