Rising by Farrah Field

Four Way Books, 2009

Reviewed by Dan Magers

With the rise of the literary memoir in major publishing houses, it is worth remembering that through the second half of the 20th century until very recently, the memoir was the province of verse. Farrah Field’s Rising has a pervasive energy to get down an account, avoiding the narrative-suspicious modes of Language Poetry and other narrative-resistant forms, while at the same time, digesting the devices of these schools to create poems that lean dynamically against each other. Narrative in contemporary poetry, generally, has to be able to dance more quickly through points of view, voice, and time, as well as through description and reflection. Since the memoir has taken over the first-person singular, the Frostian, "I did something, I learned a lesson” mode comes across as sort of stodgy to all except those who love parables. Instead of an amiable stroll in which we can vaguely see what is ahead of us, Field's poems pack a chapter of details into a handful of incisive lines that sweeps the reader to conclusions one is often not prepared for.

Field has the journalist’s eye and ear for detail and the novelist’s sense of tactile invention. The locations and acquired dialects are primarily (but not entirely) southern:

Snakes hang like fingers in branches,

claw through humidity, then S away.

The flashiest metaphor is the final one, a perfect merging of the visual aspect of the metaphor (the “S” you see on the page) with the imaginative (the snake “S’ing” in the scene). But note also the individual snakes hanging together in the air, making a hand through its climate. The two lines concisely evoke the atmosphere of “In Lecompte Bayou,” exceeding only by a syllable an evocative haiku unto itself.

Many Southern tropes are here: wrestling with Christian faith (“I replaced the fear of the Lord I was given // and I am endless.”); the laid back country life (“Sonny laughs at a termite-devoured / saloon’s sign that fell thirty years ago.”); pious grandeur in the face of tragedy (“We suffer violent learning that terrible things are great things.”); and the crossroads of sin and nascent sexuality:

Two teenagers

steal away into a garage. Parishioners are singing

and clapping. The pile breathes a steady popping…

I heard Chet heaving behind me when I said,

No, baby, use two fingers.

Many writers would be happy with these meditations on growing up in the South and just collect a book of them—as if the South were the main character the speaker was having an (albeit uneasy) relationship with. Instead, in Rising, the most dramatic relationships are between family members (“Did she call me / a nigger lover or did her husband who killed her.”).

The crux of the book is the death of the poet’s sister, Heather. Her absence (and presence) pervades the entire book. Shifting viewpoints and tone give the poems dealing directly with Heather a volatility that is at times disturbing and heartbreaking. A line from “Learning How to Walk” reverberates through many of these poems: “Silence is either a product of concentration or anger.” For all the book’s use of folksy colloquialism, these are the poems that give Rising its cathartic power. In “Rioting Alone,” a binge of helpless rage, there is no shift of viewpoint, just a sustained interrogation of “you” that’s clearly “I,” beginning with the searing and disdainful address, “Little fucking warrior.”

This volatility is also present in “In Opelousas,” where Field uses stream-of-conscious as we drift from a domestic violence rally (“Only so much is let out / of a face and I read in folk Someone killed your someone too.”) to her sister’s fifteenth birthday, where “Grandmother dressed us / in withered gowns and petticoats as we looked through / trunks of Confederate uniforms, deeds to the farm, pictures of Otis, / an illustrated Bible listing births and deaths.” Heather’s death is the first that’s “not heart attack or stroke.”

The poem moves into the heart of two separate actions, charged moments (“She threw some things in back, said Now, go now, / her baby asleep in her lap.”), the final one the funeral:

Candle wax

spills on my hand and I want it to scar. After kissing her casket good-bye,

I cried so hard I forgot who I was. Someone touched my arm. What’s an arm.

The lines of rage and fury (“I want it to scar”) reach a pitch that breaks from the account into the very center of the experience (“What’s an arm.”)

All of these feelings, sometimes contradictory, appear in “Febricity,” about the speaker overhearing her teenage sister sneaking a boy into her family’s house. The first line sets it immediately as a memory, as it morbidly buzzes against the definition of the title: “Miss Hot is already embalmed.” Field recounts it happening and wonders what thoughts passed through her sister’s head (“Did she clear her throat / when she closed the dingy curtains?”). The tone of voice amazingly passes through so many emotions in 116 words, from amusement (“Some beings force others / into poor adventures.”), into deadpan (“They know how to play piano”), into a feinted rhetorical question:

Would I want a night

like that—a lie, an oops,

then another.

We have to pass through a hyphenated line to see that the end of the sentence isn’t exactly a question—turning instead into a statement phrased in the seldom-used construction of “I wish,” giving the line a tinge of adolescent yearning. For as mocking as she is, she’s looking up to her sister, and realizing this is something she may not have gumption to do. As if sensing this, she who is recording states meekly, “How lucky she has a younger sister.”

Field has a novelistic sense of poem placement, and novels should have resolutions. The last third of the book is concerned with the liberation of creating an identity outside of one’s family (a central part of becoming an adult) as well as outside her formative years (“Watch me settle in, you say, // but the folk know you don’t come / from here, no matter your Daddy did.”). These poems are primarily concerned with finding romantic love. Someone I know once remarked, “You become an adult only after you have been in love.” This statement should not be held up to too much scrutiny, but in Rising it is something of a rite of passage (as it is in a lot of literature). Some of the most relaxed and playful poems involve this lover, as in “You Lordship Spirals” (“Don’t think / I didn’t do enough for you when you meet / an eyes-in-bangs singer.”) or “You Eat Like a Pig and Someone Should Tell You” (“Since when was chewing an open thing.”).

And yet, even in these poems, there continues to be a sense that this new man can never understand the same history as those the speaker grew up with (“I know what you did before that collar came on,” she says about a childhood friend in “Father John”). This comes across as purifying, but also gives the speaker the quality of being haunted, walking around with secret knowledge, which makes up the interiority of a life.

At the beach, you run into better friends

and I stare at two sisters holding hands in the water.