Customer Reviews

Bone Pagoda (New Series #16) (The New Series)

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Bone Pagoda by Susan Tichy has swiftly become one of my favorite volumes of contemporary poetry. The book is intense and unrelenting in its purpose, which I believe, in part, is to explore the absurdity of war, the inexplicableness of loss, and language's place and function in those worlds.

More specifically, the fragmented and lyrical reportage in Bone Pagoda works to expose and negotiate a number of dichotomies, such as poetry and war ("Rocks, I said, rhyme, I said"), words and knowledge ("And if the true is good then/And if the true is good then"), and what language can and cannot accomplish ("A kind of scholastic hobby where/Words could reassemble//Whole bodies apart from them"). These poems also discuss how to see and how to say, or how seeing or saying is often impossible. They discuss this subject in form and content, as in "mutter mutter toil and stutter," and "Between a thought and an idea is/A grammar is a gun no//Begin again."

The intimate and elegiac recede and resurface throughout the book as well, for example "Love who never hurted any I/Was there for the taking" and "Mindfulness/of what is sudden meant//A voice I can't remember." This type of language is intertwined with the language and imagery of destruction and violence, as in "Forcibly eliminating/Entire populations an own voice" and "in a city with half its street crossed out." Collage and word play are prevalent in the poems too, to illustrate "So uncaptured/Said we found it//Death without dying/Part without parting//Referent scattered in you some/Rhyme some body found/founds." The use of these forms and strategies help to complicate and reinforce the book's various tensions.

I highly recommend this book. Every subsequent reading reveals something new and relevant to the real world, present and past.

The poetics of the book resists closure and resists representing the Vietnam war in brackets, as a done thing. Interrogations of language, memories encounters with artifacts of war, incorporated voices--from J. Edgar Hoover to Daniel Berrigan and George Oppen--are densely layered over one another in Tichy's couplets. At times these elements become indistinct from one another, forming a highly volatile, complex present:

He said:

`The burning of paper instead of children'

Homemade napalm draft board lawn

That `some property has no right to exist'

Bundles of ash, the burned draft records

`Trundled into court like infant coffins'

And she:

`I was a peasant girl, I had never set foot'

In such head-on encounter

Fighting with what words contain

Or fighting in, as

`Whose daughter is that skinny girl'

A visceral dread haunted my reading of these poems. References to burning bodies and a rocket tearing a man in two are worked in throughout the book. Yet Bone Pagoda is not about bludgeoning us with the horrors of war, as some hardbitten, laconic war poetry can be. The poems enact their own resistance to this in several ways, the foremost, for me, being the sheer musicality of the tightly wound couplets:

Slave born in the master's house

Walked into a web

With a dead spider dead center

Penny under the door o

War no more o

The first line is repeated you

Honeycomb and mutter me

If you are not war what are you? say

Brass pages that do not turn

My internal fortress sounds like this

The way, among all the full and slant rhymes, stresses bunch then momentarily diffuse with a slackened line is tremendous.

Headlines from Iraq and Afghanistan report the number of wounded, the number killed. But what about the casualties that can't be counted--the years, the generations, of suffering in all its forms sown across the globe? Susan Tichy's Bone Pagoda bears witness to such casualties from a conflict of forty years ago, still present today: the Vietnam War. Written entirely in couplets that often disintegrate into single lines, the book travels between Washington, D.C. today and in the 1960s, Vietnam during the war and in a recent visit with the author's late husband Michael O'Hanlon, who was part of the River Assault Force in the Mekong Delta. The poems evoke what can't be seen or spoken--injuries of war that continue to burn, even through lives far distant, the way white phosphorous continues to burn, even inside the body of its victims. This is lamentation--not to carry away the grief as a spirit boat would--but to survive it. It is also, as with all lament, a protest--a cry of revolt against what is. In the age of the seemingly endless "War on Terror," Bone Pagoda serves as both witness and warning, opening up new "grounds for resistance."