MARY RUEFLE. Little White Shadow. Wave Books.
$12
reviewed by CYNTHIA ARRIEU
KING
I can attest to the
fact that you can read “A Little White Shadow” while driving down the highway.
Naturally, a person should stick to one page at a time, with a patch of vista
whizzing by to help the emotion and juxtaposition sink in. I’ve read this short
book of verse several times over the summer, and the words seem to have re-magnitized themselves and gained a certain cold blue and
fire hot charge, constantly sparking against one another, each time, whether or
not I’m driving 65 m.p.h. And yet, the strange obscured collisions of the
original text and Mary Ruefle’s erasure version of
it, never completely dissolve to allow the new poems to feel, well, like new
poems. And Ruefle maximizes this ghost of the old
text to produce a new work that feels like a distilled collage.
Erasures are
tongue-in-cheek plays of an obscured tradition. In 1889, someone with the
initials E.M.M. published a small book “for the Benefit of a Summer Home for
Working Girls” called “A Little White Shadow”. Poet Mary Ruefle
took white out to about ninety-five percent of the original piece. The
resulting emotion in this book slips past the mind like sugar through fingers.
It’s as if one is dealing only with the ghost of a narrative – a sensation
supported by the literal depiction of whited out or whited over text and an intact resultant text, the chosen
words forming a new entity. These remnants, carefully chosen, and the rest of
the words literally obliterated with white-out in this full color text, feel
like decompositions of what a spirit has felt, and currently feels.
Main character
seemingly dead or devastated, the reader can glide on moments of pure and
abstractly drawn loneliness and hidden passion such as the opening page offers:
One in ruins
struck
notes whose sounds
spent
a winter here (3)
When I say abstract, I mean that the hard
nouns of this “one”’s life have to be imagined, and
its continuous experience over time is, necessarily, displaced, as “sounds”
spending anything suggests. One can’t help thinking of Dickinson, not
necessarily because of the poem’s cadences, but because the narrative one
pieces together in one’s mind seems to involve a spirit or spirits that smoulder and crackle but can quickly move out of sight.
Rabbit-like, the emotions bound across the page, and feel like wreckage in the
guise of phantoms:
Seven
centuries of
sobbing
gathered
in the
twilight
and
had their
pages
wandered, through (8)
I like the way the words bounce from line
to line to form their own organic, tea leaf fortunes on the page. Often these
“dead” have punctuation from the original text still attached like appendages
from a past life, and to get the best sense of their new textual life, the
reader both has to see the commas and periods, and ignore them. This gives the
“dead” and other characters the air of regret, helplessness, and humanity.
Transformation
being the central theme of ghosts, little white ones, and this book’s openings,
Ruefle allows surrealism to wield a hand in the
emergent and partly accidental style of the work. Ovid would be happy with the
transformation of an open piano into a large vase or vessel for cuttings:
It
Was my duty to keep
The piano
filled with roses. (10)
This gives the page a feeling of an
arranged painting or collage as much as one feels on seeing a box by Joseph
Cornell. And the fierce power of the imagery holds up the white stripe fields
that obliterate most of the book. Another example: Ruefle
changes a cloud to a white koi
The flapping white
dresses
of the fish.
Rising
sharply against the sky. (17)
These altered
states through metaphor mean that the characters that wander through the
white-bombed pages might do something unexpected as well. Emerging and
disappearing, becoming and decelerating, burning off, all the muffled passions
normally ascribed to a ghost come beautifully to the fore through disjunctures. There’s a phantom’s optimism – usually an
acceptance of her own state – appears in lines like:
“It’s always
Pale, and
Deformed
but very interesting. (22)
More than once the
brilliant fire changes quickly to quiet and sobriety, and back to the passion
of a heart. By page twenty-three, the reader comes across a small image of
a chair affixed to the corner of the page. The reader doesn’t know if it has
been put there by the character, or if it’s a chair from her past, but mostly
it comes across as a sticker put there to mark memories. A letter serves as
another appliqué, and the final collage piece comes at the end when a similarly
colored corrective is pasted after “End” so that the original “END” reads “on
end” afterwards. Ruefle’s edits and additions
underscore the eternal, empty, and purgatorial aspect of the book.
The book raises
beautiful imagery in the reader’s mind, and questions about what belongs to
time and tradition, and what belongs to chance. If we are only writing and
reading along the course of history, its seams and remnants are prominent and
dissonant given their current edit. But the beautiful color reproductions of
the pages of this book, and the stark magic of Ruefle’s
unerased words, give the reader a feeling of reading
a small treasure. The work is surprising,
tantalizingly a portrait of a sickly girl that turns into tinseled pictures,
into aphorisms, depending what was available. With imagery that burns a lot of
oxygen, with sweetness, and preciousness revealed, the reader can find some the
text has self awareness, and that actual strife runs beneath the whimsy in
“fevers” that shouldn’t break out, in “birds and flowers” that say, like Keat’s Nightingale, nothing “practical about human
relationships”(31). The balance between the two is strangely mercurial: never
still, and dangerous.