Customer Reviews

Devil's Child (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)

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Most of the time, most people don't think of poetry as the proper/normal vehicle for subjects like torture or monstrous child abuse, but one of the lessons of the last hundred years has been that poetry is not only a valid, but necessary medium in which to discuss and process catastrophic human behavior. Madness, evil, degradation, and desperation all require acts of courage, mercy, healing, strength, and redemption. The poetry in this book enacts both the evil done to a particular child and the remarkable journey she makes toward redeeming her own life. Out of this very extreme and painful narrative, Jackson makes poetry that is graceful, frightening, courteous to both its subject and its audience, and deeply honorable. This kind of writing operates at the far reaches of what we can bear to hear and offers the highest hopes we can have both for poetry and for our own redemption.

In her most ambitious and challenging work to date, Fleda Brown Jackson brings her trademark compassion and sublime lyrical gifts to bear on the subject of evil and its manifestations in the lives of three characters whose voices alternate--with the clarity of characterization one finds in the operas of Mozart--throughout the narrative. The central character, Barbara, has been raised by Satan worshippers, and her story is riveting indeed. But what is most remarkable here is Jackson's skill in balancing a macabre parade of gruesome, horrific images with the intelligence and reflective economy for which she is best known. With such a subject, the potential for melodrama looms large; Jackson avoids this with subtlety and poignancy, continually readjusting the focus of her probing psychoanalytic lens, roving elegantly from reference to reference (Picasso leads to Melville, which leads to The Fly, which leads to a host of Biblical sources) until a swirling carousel of these images rises up around us, and we find ourselves dizzily spinning amongst disparate evocations of our darkest and most profound fears. As always with Jackson's work, it is the enchanting lyricism of the poetry itself which resonates first and last: "Every night I opened my heart to God as quietly as a fern," says Barbara. The childlike simplicity of this voice (what is aptly described as "a fascinating subliterate command" by W. D. Snodgrass in his Foreword) bears striking contrast to the other voices in the narrative, and the cyclic alteration from voice to voice is exhilarating.

The Devil's Child is not a pleasant sequence to read, by any means. It contains some of the most revolting images any of us is likely to read, and in doing so casts an unwavering light into the corners of our humanity we are most afraid to explore. It is also the work of one of our most skilled, inspired, and innately musical poets at her best, and it cannot be ignored.

This poem is powerful - the words, the images, the conflict between the physical and the spiritual, between good and evil. With her art, Jackson has transformed a woman's experience into poetry which stirs the deepest recesses of the human psyche.

It had good title, and it drew me in. However, the book was hard to keep up with. All in all, it was boring and dull.