The New World by Suzanne Gardinier

University of Pittsburgh Press

1994

Suzanne Gardinier’s book-length poem, The New World, may be too young for recovery, now just ten years old. And it isn’t one of my favorite books or a would-be all-time classic (as this space may and should be reserved for), but it is a timely and important reminder of the dangers of greed and ego. This is a book about conquerors and the conquered. SG recreates voices of actual historical characters throughout the book. Readers are treated with first-hand perspectives on monumental conflicts that have, until now, been more easily relayed in third-person narrative. This concept of speaking with the mouths of others naturally distances SG’s own voice from the reader. She utilizes voices in some her poems, most consistently the ten poems entitled “Admirals” and “The Shattering”, that the reader can only safely assume to be cynical. In one of the poems titled “Admirals”, SG speaks with the mouth of Christopher Columbus. Columbus reports the ignorance and innocence of the culture he just encountered and then, upon seeing the opportunity that arises from this situation, claims “with fifty men we could subjugate them (natives)/and make them do whatever we want” (82).

She also takes liberty with the personage of polish scientist Stanislaw Ulam in one of the “Shattering” poems. She, through Ulam, recalls his younger days, capturing evidence for his senseless hunger for power, and how it has somehow enabled him to help create horrible WMD: “a boy once pushed me/and I pushed back…Blood/splattered my knuckles and the breast of his shirt/and grief and cold joy coursed up my legs” (40).

These personae poems develop two major themes within The New World: conquerors and the conquered—the aggressors and the victims of aggression. And this broad scope of characters is influenced by the desire to explore, relocate, or overpower. Even though SG’s voice does not surface in these personae poems, it is easy to identify with whom her sympathies lay. She depicts the conquerors she speaks for as power-hungry and selfish. She reproduced the voice of Adriaen Block, and explorer of New England for the Dutch in 1613, to be consistent with her portrayal: she speaks for him here, “Handsome profits could be expected…I shall bring you (Dutch merchants) back two more sons of chiefs” (108).

To carry out this dual between aggressors and victims, SG spends even more of her time speaking for the defenders of invasion, the “sons of chiefs” in Block’s case. In her poems, “To The Tribunal”, she bleeds her audience for their sympathy against American foreign policy in Panama, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Congo/Zaire, and Indonesia. In the one subtitled “Vietnam”, SG takes on the dispositions of enslaved Vietnamese during the senseless aggression of American soldiers. She reports, “For the first five days we were given no food/…One day/the Phoenix men and the Americans came/…Two days later the shackles/changed…when we tried to move/(they) bit our skin locking tighter and tighter” (42). Later in the book, in a sister poem subtitled “Indonesia”, she again reminds the reader of the tragedy of American aggression overseas. She speaks for an Indonesian victim here: “The people were made to dig/and (they) fell forward and their names were checked off/Suharto the American’s man/had lists of names they made for him” (121).

This split between the conquerors and the conquered is not developed solely by personae poems. Many of the poems do not seem to employ any particular voice at all. But these poems do continue to crusade for the persecuted by uncovering inconspicuous offenses. In her poems “In That Time” she teaches her audience, seemingly without bias, of the damaging results of war and the greedy assault by foreign forces. For these poems, in order to offer her reader a different point of view, she does not use personal pronouns. And they often deal with undisclosed battles, as if the specific battle and historical lesson do not matter—only the grim effects on human lives matter: “The wars produced/more dead than the Directors had dreamed/possible Bodies piled and stank/fouling water blocking the thoroughfares/slowing the flow of commerce forcing/the living with noses and mouths/covered” (38).

Her poems “At School”, “At Work”, and “Our American Way of Life”, which are connected by order of appearance in the book, do not utilize the personal pronoun either, and therefore aren’t an attempt by SG to speak for either conquerors or the conquered. These three sets of poems seem to be of the lightest in the bunch—the ones with the occasional dose of subtle humor and without the images of bloodshed, or at least the discussion of it. They make the book understandable, and tolerable, with their third person narrative of non-global situations. The situations presented do not involve the monumental individuals or conflicts. In “At School”, SG’s message of the horrors of domineering foreign policy is continued. Innocent characters, usually children, are being corrupted—they are learning that war is glorious and justified. Two friends are playing with pencils and one says, “Fire a couple of missles Destroy/a tiny country What a feeling No/I’m serious he insists as his friend/fidgets and giggles and flicks the pencil/into a spinning circle” (34-35). The “At Work” poems also deal with a lost innocence. They follow a foreign woman character through five different meaningless jobs in her new world, America. She was met with hardships and, in one of her jobs, she has to wear a “yellow-and-brown/paper hat fastened to her hair” (60). This character, because of her migration, is closely related to the “Our American Way of Life” poems which relay chapters in an outdated text for immigrants. The text is designed to teach immigrants about America to make them more dutiful and responsible citizens. But SG uses sarcasm here, displaying this learning technique as inadequate and sadly misinforming, which attributes to the mis-education of the aforementioned character in the “At Work” poems. The teacher of the outdated text wants the immigrants to admire the explorers and conquerors of America, a lesson that SG has rejected throughout her book. The poem reads, “She (the teacher) tells the class about Christopher/Columbus The teacher discusses what/he brought to America/She lists/the others who crossed his ocean sea/…The teacher reads…how the Pilgrims/and Indians celebrated the first/Thanksgiving” (59).

All of the poems share a similar style: long lines, and often repetitious. It is easy to identify the influence of Walt Whitman in many of the poems, particularly the “Leviathan” poems where a direct catalogue technique is consistently used. The influence is even more at home in “Migrations” where the phrase “To the west” (52) is what the poem builds on. It is not the machine gun repetition of the “Leviathan” poems. And Whitman’s influence becomes stronger in “Where Blind Sorrow Is Taught To See” because the cataloguing of “Before you” (98) is dedicated to a lover. SG also seems to give a nod to William Carlos Williams in “At School”. She recreates the theme and the locale of Williams’ Paterson. She concerns herself, like Williams, with the industry versus nature culture of Paterson, New Jersey: “the powerhouse and the waterfall/lie beside each other and speak” (113).

SG scope is broad, ranging between ancient wars and more contemporary ones, the production of the atom bomb, the civil rights movement, immigration, and ancient colonization, but she holds them tightly together somehow. All of these subjects deal with a need for home, and the quest to find a home. Place is important to every character in SG’s book, and the trials they are put through to achieve it are tremendous. “Where is our place Where may we rest they demanded carrying their intestines in their arms” (38).

ZS