Cate Marvin. Fragment of the Head of a Queen. Sarabande, 2007.

Review by Joshua Butts

You’ve heard the one about the second album, the one cut in a hurry that can’t compete with the virgin fire. Well, no worries of the second-rate, of the hurried tumble of cables and mics, of the squealing middle child born-too-soon—Cate Marvin’s second book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen builds sure-footedly on her first collection, World’s Tallest Disaster, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry in 2000. The speaker of the poem, “Stopping for Gas Near Cheat Lake” is present and doing work in these poems. A speaker that is assured, as Marvin writes in an essay about first-person poetry, that the poems “will not be understood as autobiography.” These are poems of interpersonal interrogation, profitable derangement of the senses, and mucky but deliberate lyrics. This reader—and Marvin is prone to weigh in on the roles of author and reader—has no problem granting such an assurance, in particular, when the poems are as compelling as “Gaslight,” that opens:

He asked to split a ream of paper

so I foolishly handed him the whole

sheaf, reminding him I’d be wanting

its other half back. Now I’m typing

on the ink-soaked ends of old papers,

squinting my eyes so as not to see

through their skins, read backwards

yesterday’s or last month’s intentions.

And after a delightfully-attenuated exposition of this scenario, the speaker concludes:

When I knock at his door to ask back

for my calculator, his look knocks me

down, his door slams me out. When my

tailbone hits the floor and I cry out, he

applauds me for being such a fine actress!

Let us see how he takes my absence. I am

packing up my desk. And I’ll let him keep

the scissors. He’ll find them in his back.

Marvin writes in her essay: “The speaker of my poems couldn’t live in my world: she wouldn’t wake up for work, she’d tell her neighbors to shut up, she’d be arrested for public indecency, she’d no doubt be locked up eventually.” Marvin’s poems exist because of such license to free her speakers, as she says, from the “real” but not (still in her words) from the “true.” This method (and style) links her with Sylvia Plath, whose poem “Lady Lazarus” concludes: “Out of ash / I rise with my red hair / And eat men like air.” (Plath’s Colossus is perhaps echoed by Marvin’s own title: Fragment of the Head of the Queen.) One might also think of John Berryman’s Henry that is “not the poet, not me,” but a character that can extend the poet’s own project to fantastic, scissor-stabbing ends. Marvin’s anxieties, expressed in her essay (you can find it online, folks) exposes the healthy self-consciousness one must inevitably feel when the poems are composed with the windows open and with trap doors set to spring in the plainest of floors.

But enough of this grumbling over the inappropriateness of reading “autobiographically”—for Marvin or for the rest of us—rather, let us move into this world, a world where one is urged, as in the title of the opening poem, to “Love the Contagion” and to

Quest the contagion, funnel much muck

through your hands upraised and cupped,

pour river-brack down your throat, pick

your scabs with loving glee. Love your

master of pestilence, conqueror of white

clothes: mud prints, paw prints, germs

not even the physician knows. Eat through

a muskrat’s lair, divine the grub’s slumber

This is a poetry that indeed indulges in “muck” (as in the later ars poetica “Muckraker”) and yet the form and movement of the poem is elegant, controlled and still also organic. Such so, that excerpting these lines has been difficult, as each quatrain moves into the next and the enjambment within stanzas, as in “conqueror of white / clothes,” is powerful and deliberate. The word “clothes” is unexpected—one inevitably (given the mood of “pestilence”) expects “lice.” But the surprise of “clothes” allows Marvin to set up a new path, or sequence, to spoil the “white”: “mud prints, paw prints, germs.” Marvin’s mode in this poem is to include a lightness—as in “white / clothes” or a promising phrase like “love your”—but to bring one immediately back to the dark, to the “river-brack,” to teach and delight in a world of muck.

…and gore, as in “Landscape with Hungry Girls”:

There’s blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds

raw and rain’s course streams a million umbilical

cords down windows and walls. Everything gnaws,

and the pink polish on their girl-nails chips, flakes

off as they continue to dig through towering heaps

of refuse. It’s a story, as usual. As usual, a phone

dead silence. Or the phone: a lobster to the ear.

Tendrils? Spooky skies? Yes. Henry Darger? Perhaps. Internal rhyme? Surrealist equation of “lobster” and “phone”? Certainly.

All this, funneling to a feminist statement?

Girls resigned to being girls. The softer faces they

find in the mirrors. The limp shake, a hand placed,

a flower wilting moist on the man’s palm. Or hard

handshakes deemed “aggressive”: snakes, O, girls.

Yes. But a brand of feminism in line with Louise Glück? Marvin’s work has a heavy stink of “Mock Orange,” and she, like Glück, doesn’t resist the “old boy” school of Eliot and Yeats as influences. Marvin’s brand of feminism is more the internal attack, the localized gesture of romantic negotiations. Say, Robert Creeley’s For Love turned on its head and filmed on the set of Frankenstein.

But all this is complicated, of course, by the book’s dedication to “boys and their mothers.” This dedication announces Marvin’s peculiar (and admirable?) technique. As a former “boy” with a current “mother,” my feathers are perhaps ruffled. But this is assuredly the point. Read the book, men and women, sons and daughters—I’ll pass the question to you—but one can’t help but feel that this dedication is the first trick to avoid being pinned down—the self-awareness of the poet and the speaker—the kind of speaker that can say, as Marvin does in “Muckraker”: “Reader, don’t mistake me for someone who gives a shit, / or your bride. I have no loyalty and I have no pride.” Such bravura is indicated more subtly in the dedication. This poet makes use of such a moment —typically employed to pay homage to the Queen (ol’ boy Spenser), or the lover (oh! that Dark lady)—in order to announce a thematic intention.

Many of the poems arrive from a situational examination, wherein unnamed parties—often female to male—negotiate their circumstances:

It punches like liquor to the gut. And it is enough.

How you swerve into the parking lot. And I only want

to get you drunk enough. I want your stare like a shot.

The Lamplighter’s open till 2. That’s late enough.

[“She Wishes Her Beloved Were Dead”]

And this is inevitably the risk Marvin works against—how to judge the horrible and the everyday—in terms of human relationships. And though a poem can start with a placated contemporary storefront—as in “Flowers, Always,” where the flowers are never there, where the hypocrisy of the suburban market eats at itself and the heretofore affirmed notions of love bow to Marvin’s newest versions, where “my face would flower / for you daily, so that when we / die, roses might petal / themselves out our throats”—Marvin’s speakers at least make beauty of such revenge.

The best poems of the book, though, may be those that arrive with few characters, those that organize around an inhuman, or abstract core, as in the “Alibi Poem” that provides a meditation about an alibi that “checks out” and offers its own excuses. This alibi is said to be “fast-forwarding a glacier,” “memorizing lighthouses,” “taste-testing toothpaste,” “sleeping on the ferry, rolling its own cigarettes, reviling its childhood,” “waking up to its version of Hemingway.” A poem like “Alibi” shows Marvin’s working an inventiveness perhaps not at the level of Marianne Moore, but certainly in her spirit. The poem supreme—and similar in technique—is “Cloud Elegy” that opens (get ready):

The world felt bad. Every leaf looked

like it needed a cigarette. Gutters took

cups strewn at their lips, turn them

upright to offer tiny pleas for change.

This is a poem that can say, with the poet’s tongue in your mouth to tongue the accent:

All lungéd things grew asthmatic

and with civic vision reports that:

The clouds became patients and allowed

their numb griefs to occlude our skyline.

Streets suddenly looked so tame, so placid

outside the bleary windows. And with just

a pill, millions of pills, the world didn’t

mind how awfully anxious and American

things had gotten.

The poet doesn’t take the back door, doesn’t write the Prozac-poem. She assumes—forces, in fact—that it’s true. And this America is unquestionably medicated, intoxicated, and drugged with Robotussin or booze or NyQuil. If this book were a symphony the opiates would have their own choir:

I’ll know of the wine-dyed lips his mouth has

lipped.

[“Pan”]

And for all the sensual mishap, romantic squabble, psychic conundrum, and concepts on the run, the inevitable sleep—toxic, medicinal, or terminal—one can perhaps find a sense of hope in Marvin’s world. That is, if one has time to get this pill down the throat.

One thing assured: John Webster, Sylvia Plath can rest easy. Their work is being carried on in the afterlife—somewhere on Staten Island.