Is Laredo nurturing poets? She Took off Her Wings & Shoes.

By Sue Bishop.

Utah State University Press.
2003. 91 pages.

 

By Sean Chadwell

 

(Caveat: Sue Bishop is a professional colleague and a friend of mine. However, if I hadn't loved this book, I would have squirreled my way out of writing a review by claiming I didn't have time, my keyboard was broken, my dog needed a bath, etc.)

For a town with so few bookstores, Laredo has more than its fair share of poetry: for years, Raquel Valle-Senties has been hosting readings at her downtown Cafe del Barrio; Jesse Herrera has been honing the wonderfully declamatory delivery of his provocative work; Randy Koch has published a collection of sonnets.

And Sue Bishop, who moved to Laredo in 1999, has been working on this collection, which last summer won a prestigious international award -- the May Swenson Poetry Award -- which included hardcover publication.

This is a big deal, and it wasn't just luck, either.

She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes, a new approach to an old lady (lady luck, that is), is a stunning series of juxtapositions (of language, especially, but also of style, voice, space, time, and person) and overlapping perspectives, carefully arranged in three sections: "Do Not Drive Into Smoke," "As Good There as Here to Burn," and "She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes."

Despite its initial appearance, what distinguishes this collection is its organic unity -- there are threads here, particularly of voice and theme, that make this book a corpus, that run through the whole like blood vessels.

As a result, part of the pleasure in reading (and then re-reading) She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes is the gradual revelation and realization of this unity -- even as each poem resonates independently.

In the collection's first part, "Elegant Shrimp in Champagne Sauce" weaves recipe language with two voice strains: one of these is a present tense description of a "twenty-first-/century apartment;" the other, written in the second person, is a series of memories about transience and domestic insecurity:

 

[ . . . ] The landlady came to talk to you about the

back rent. I stayed in the bedroom like you told me to. You and

she had coffee and talked quietly. The sheriff came a

month later. [ . . . ]

 

Of course, this poem is provocative and engaging by itself -- the initial juxtaposition of the voices exposes the awesome triteness of the recipe; the fact that that text is in boldface heightens this effect. The point here, however, isn't merely to highlight the rhetorical silliness of recipes; Bishop's other voices in the poem draw out the recipe's unstated claims. That is, the recipe implies a secure, stable, bourgeois audience, while the other voices suggest the complexity of the very idea of stability. The one excerpted above remembers being displaced from homes; the other, the present-tense rumination, is also about home spaces -- but here, the speaker seems to be living somewhere temporarily, house-sitting, perhaps.

Even as this poem works independently of the whole (and my comments about it don't even come close to exploring its range), it contributes to the fabric of the collection. In the book's third part, which is a single long poem -- again, full of juxtapositions of voices, styles, fonts -- Bishop writes, "The landlady kept coming by the apartment, asking to speak to my mother. My / mother told me to wait in the bedroom. They talked abut paying the rent and drank / coffee my mother served."

This is, of course, another recollection of the scene in "Elegant Shrimp," but the voice has shifted away the second person. Importantly, it wasn't necessarily clear who the "You" was in the early poem, but the later poem both clarifies this and encourages us to understand the ways in which these poems are organically connected.

There are several other examples of perspectives from "Do Not Drive Into Smoke" taking on additional dimensions in "She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes." But the book's middle section, "As Good There as Here to Burn," explores, among other things, voice itself; here, Bishop's poems speak in the voices of artists and writers, often drawing on their own words to do so (Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, for example, and Christina Rossetti) -- in some ways, perhaps, these poems are commentaries on the constructed, multi-faceted nature of voice in the other two parts of the book. This section's poems also connect thematically to the book's central meditation on fortune (and reversals thereof) -- and not coincidentally the role of fortune in the lives of expressive, creative women.

This is a deep, resonant, and rewarding collection; the gradual unfolding of its take on luck becomes, by the book's final lines, thrilling, as the stacked-up imagery of the previous 70 pages -- bats, Rome, ruins, gynecological procedure, houses, cacti -- spill over into a kind of juxtapositional grand-finale. Fortune-cookie text is combined with and eventually becomes personal text; personal text becomes universal, the stuff of luck in everyday life.

If you don't believe poetry can be resonant and thrilling, this is the book to change your mind. If you think poetry needs to look or sound highly structured, this book will make you think again. In fact, regardless of what you think about poetry, this book will make you think again. And again.

 

(Sean Chadwell is a professor of English at Texas A&M International University .)