~EDWARD BYRNE~
STANDING STRAIGHT IN THE SPARKING STORM:
LYNNELL EDWARDS’ THE
HIGHWAYMAN’S WIFE
Edwards’ work continually demonstrates a
distinctive voice
revealing a
process of thought, inviting her readers to witness
the process and
sharing with the readers an individual view . . ..
With her second collection of poetry, The Highwayman’s Wife, Lynnell
Edwards continues to present work readers often find emphatic, even
uniquely forceful, frequently requiring an alert and attentive listener
who appreciates lyrical poetry posing a point of view that at times
educates and almost always entertains. In addition to her two books of
poetry, over the years Edwards regularly has written reviews for
various literary journals. During one of her reviews that appeared in
the Fall 2005 issue of Georgia Review,
Lynnell Edwards commented on a couple of collections of poetry
criticism, including a volume by Helen Vendler. In her remarks, Edwards
discussed and complimented how Vendler stresses the importance of voice
in a poet’s work, citing the examples of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
and William Butler Yeats. Edwards agrees with Vendler that an
individual writer’s distinguishing voice, even when modulated to suit a
persona as speaker, effectively reveals to readers the poet’s thinking
process and personal perspective, and it welcomes each reader into the
world of the poet or the poem’s persona.
While reading Lynnell Edwards’ poetry — both The Highwayman’s Wife and her
previous volume, The Farmer’s
Daughter (Red Hen Press, 2003) — I have repeatedly been pleased
to discover precisely the characteristic admired by Vendler to be
evident in so many poems. Edwards’ work continually demonstrates a
distinctive voice revealing a process of thought, inviting her readers
to witness the process and sharing with the readers an individual view
— sometimes representing the poet’s perception, other times shown
through the eyes
of a carefully chosen persona — on the subject matter under discussion
or delivering an emotional response evoked within the lines of poetry.
Indeed, The
Highwayman’s Wife offers a generous collection of poems also
demonstrating Edwards’ ability to adjust her voice when employing
traditional form, such as the sonnet, or when straying away from rigid
form toward the looser and more informal language contained within her
free verse pieces. Importantly, the poet appears confident and in
control no matter which tactic or type of poem she chooses as the way
to convey engaging content that continually enlightens. As one
might expect, the collection’s title poem may serve as an appropriate
point of reference. “The Highwayman’s Wife” exists as a sonnet with an
irregular rhyme scheme sitting within a section of eleven such sonnets.
The form supplies a sense of boundaries beyond which the speaker must
move through use of effective language that projects some compelling
subject matter to its readers, inviting personal involvement or
emotional interest.
“The Highwayman’s Wife” skillfully blends
descriptive passage with declarative statement (“Another moon past and
again the persistent rain. / She wants a child.”) to create a
persuasive
and authoritative voice that depicts its situation with a definitive
tone. While the wife remains home, distracted by sounds from her
neighbor’s children — “the shouts of their game, the debris of their
play / strewn across her sister’s lawn” — she endures a loneliness: her
husband roams far, “always away,” and when he does return, he’s simply
“whiskied and loose, / distracted, rambling about some deal.” The wife
wants children of her own, small ones she could “stack at night in
their little beds, / huddle them into her empty, empty arms, / and
carry them into her marvelous, flower-filled yard.”
In the opening poem (“Go”) of this sonnet sequence
about a figure of folklore, readers view the highwayman preparing once
more for another journey, hesitant as he awaits the best day for
travel: “Three days ago he’d packed his case, shined / his boots and
bit, but could not lift the latch.” The wife also can be seen
reluctantly readying for his absence: “when the night arrives, / wood
and larder stocked, wife resigned / and sighing by her lonesome stove .
. ..” However, this central series of sonnets in the volume also shows
Edwards’ poetry presenting a progressive sense of suspense and action,
as she vividly displays the highwayman’s method of operation when he
preys upon drunkards in the dark who “stagger from the lighted inn” or
rural family men who “travel to town, helpless, burdened / with a
foundered hog, a ragged goat.” The poet shares the following
instructions in “How It’s Done”:
A knifepoint and a level stare is
all you need.
Call it highway tax, or ferry
toll: your due receipt.
But for the wayward coach the
expert guile
is to ride along beside, affect a
lover’s smile,
offer help, safe passageway and
then assassinate
the driver.
Elsewhere in the series, Edwards allows readers an
opportunity to understand the uncertainties on this road: “Pistols,
derringers, daggers, ropes, no matter / what you pack you’re not
prepared. Disaster / happens quick from lack of feed as powder, / your
beast no more certain than the weather” (“Weapons, the Road”). An
ironic comment contained in “The Problem of Roommates” suggests that
even the thief can be vulnerable and must be cautious about others:
“while you rest, they steal, / smuggle small goods from your leather
pack.” Speaking in second person, the highwayman lends a word to the
wise as he reminds himself about occasions of distrust and deception,
those twisted conditions in the life he has chosen to pursue:
. . . Again, another night
you meant to trust a fellow
thief, and instead
of honor, found absence and
deception, cold regret,
portent clouds, a rush of
swallows, the story of your life.
Earlier in the collection, readers had been
introduced to the Highwayman when Edwards began the book with a prelude
titled “Sonnet for the Highwayman.” In that first glimpse at the
figure, he is depicted as the victim of another at a stop he considered
a “safe house, the happy way / station on the lonely road.” The female
speaker in this poem boasts: “I will rob you, lover. Cut your purse, /
pilfer the gold coins stitched inside your shirt / when I reach for a
kiss, ungirdle your bright sword / for my own device, whirl away into
the Highland night.” The poet discloses the wild and wily woman who
knows how to disarm and deceive even the thieves. She is one of the
“youngest daughters / taught to lie, steal, before they can read.”
Unlike the highwayman’s wife — who yearns for her man’s presence at
home, her husband’s attention, and a few children of her own — this
speaker reveals she does not desire “domestic lore”; instead, she has
been trained to trick men with falsehood:
. . . we are schooled in
deception, forgery,
as quick to sign our names as
another.
So abandon your treasure, your
precious bounty,
loose your horse to forage his
animal soul,
then on your knees, love. I have
already stolen your cloak.
Despite the book’s title, the prelude, and the
central location of this fine sequence of sonnets concerning a
highwayman, the collection contains other complex connections between
individual poems. In the book’s initial section, Edwards gives voice to
a group of female mythological personalities in a five-part series
titled “Suite for Wives.” The poet introduces readers to Medusa, Helen
of Troy, Juno, Penelope, and Cassandra; however, Edwards surprises
everyone
by representing revisions of these women with confident, compelling,
and contemporary language spoken in words that are sometimes profound
and sometimes profane, but that always seems both a re-vision and a
revitalization of the characters. Helen rants: “A thousand fucking
ships / to recover my sweet ass? / What fools. And that’s not / the
half of it. Listen, bitch: / I wanted out.” In another part of the
suite, a character indicates she can receive “reports, hear the news,
see / the e-mail distributions.” In “Trophy,” Cassandra is depicted as
just that, the trophy wife: “I am your morning glory, daylily, /
bikini-clad figurehead / wedged in the thrust / of a cigarette-sleek
bow.”
Lynnell Edwards includes some other series of linked
poems, though spread throughout the collection, and these pieces that
repeat subject matter (such as mixed drinks in the “Last Call” series)
or share a common inspiration (as in a group of poems sporting
epigraphs of excerpts from John Clare’s “The Shepherd’s Calendar”) act
almost the same way a refrain might in a musical composition, seemingly
returning readers to familiar territory, yet moving the fragmented
narrative forward a bit further with each poem in its particular series.
The twelve poems representing each of the months in
the series inspired by Clare’s “The Shepherd’s Calendar” extend
intermittently from the opening poem in part one of the book through to
the volume’s closing poem. The dozen works wonderfully recapture the
time of year referenced in each with a fresh and flowing language. In
her January offering, “Cold As,” Edwards displays her descriptive
ability:
. . . opaque winter: snow drift
balanced
on a mounded shrub; black bird
lofted in the low-vaulted sky;
maze
of bare branches, their map of
bloom
and struggle; axis of ice adhered
to the limestone pass, its cold
flow
halted in portent chunks;
still the day reveals nothing
distinct
from days past, no clue
to the new year, how it will
unfold
loosed from this cold morning,
cold
as a sunken stone, cold as blue
blazes.
By the final entry in this sequence, December’s
“Snow Day,” Edwards completes the series of monthly installments in her
seasonal tour with some of her richest and most rewarding lines.
Throughout the poem, the speaker repeats the words “lovely” (a term
perhaps so often overused in everyday language that a poet normally
would be wary to make it the crux of any work), as if to replenish its
meaning and direct readers’ attention not only to its denotative
definition of exquisitely beautiful, but also to the word’s root
meanings of pleasure and desire:
Lovely the snow as it floats from
the sky, and lovely
the bare trees pillowed in white;
lovely the martin
tracking across the playground
walk. And lovely
the shout of Snow! that startles the class from
its drill and practice, the
lovely disorder of books
and pencils, and upturned desks. Snow. The whispered
awe fogs the panes.
Another spread out group of brief poems is mostly
devoted to light-hearted looks at alcoholic mixed drinks and the
associations commonly or not so commonly accompanying each, as in “Last
Call: Mint Julep”:
Make it despite impossible odds,
trifecta of sugar, sweet mint,
bourban tipped over
ice,
sipped slow. The wait
for the rush and burn, that horse
no one suspected, that six
furlong finish,
your goddamn luck that will never
run out.
“Last Call: Old Fashioned” begins: “Make it in a
gallon pickle jar, / round and smooth as a fat man’s gut. / Use Pop’s
family recipe, passed / down from generation upon generation.” With
these short lyrics Edwards exhibits her ease with expressions of wit
and the greatly expanded range evident in this collection.
In fact, the playfulness Edwards frequently
brings to her poetry in this set of poems also extends to a number of
other pieces in the book, such as “Spelling Test,” in which the speaker
notes how language can provide entertainment to those of us fascinated
by the characteristics contributed by specific words and letters. As a
poet might perceive some lyrical connectivity of words, especially
through rhyme or near-rhyme, the speaker suggests: “Not the logic of
sense, but of sound / that brings together mountain and captain / in a list, or table with label.”
Later in the piece, as the metaphor of spelling
develops further, Edwards appears to acknowledge a few people (perhaps,
particularly among poets) may hold a focused view, one that
concentrates closely on those markings making up our vocabulary and
often opening up new possibilities for us: “Like the combination to a
lock, / the letters tumble onto the page.” Nevertheless, by the
final lines of the poem, the speaker seems to admit that for most folks
language merely substitutes for the tangible objects or interesting
activities its terms represent, those entertaining or extraordinarily
eye-catching elements of the world that might distract someone from the
words on a page, the preferred recreations one might pursue if not
forced indoors by the imposed discipline of study or a simple rain
delay: “Eyes ahead, / not drifting to the rain and the playground / and
the puddles under the swings, slowly filling.”
In “Driving Your Car” Edwards relates information to
her readers in an even more informal yet informative manner. Like the
speakers seen in previous poems, particularly a couple of the women
figures in the “Suite for Wives,” the narrative voice is assertive,
maybe aggressive, feeling free and taking control, determining
direction from the beginning lines of the poem:
I sit higher,
hands wider
gripping the bony wheel.
I am at liberty,
in charge, work
the gear shift hard
through acceleration . . .
The speaker slowly rearranges everything inside the
automobile to suit herself — “the seat’s recline, / the mirror’s view.”
She is even conscious of the influence her presence will have in the
future: “Leave my scent, / my skin, all evidence / of inhabitance / for
your distraction / or affection.” In fact, some of the poems in the
final section of the book involve the kind of influence those close to
one another, particularly family members, may exert. In “Children Will
Drive You” the parents choose “to give up drinking,” a deliberate
decision made while wondering what their boys must think of the
parents’ behavior.
However, after a while participating in domestic
occupations — playing board games, helping with homework, reading to
one another — the children become uncomfortable with the parents’ newly
discovered attention and their outward appearances of comfort or
contentment: “a couple of docents / in our own home, modest,
deferential, // startled by the bright kitchen, the wide stairs, / the
cool plain of our bed.” Before long, the boys apply their own influence
upon the parents by asking them if they wouldn’t want a drink:
“Offering to cork / and spill the oblation into squat goblets.”
Clearly, the adults’ conscious effort to behave with an over-attentive
manner in a way they believe
ought to be expected of parents proves to undermine their relationship
with the children, who recognize the growing absence of those
personalities — the parents’ authentic individual identities — that had
existed for so long and served all so well in the past.
The family poems usually show a sense of humor and
involve incidents with which many can identify. In “Children, Sex” a
speaker considers the life-long conflict between a couple’s attempts to
find time for intimacy and the demands of children, their own and
others. When they are young, the couple’s children wake early and knock
on their parents’ bedroom door, questioning: “What’s going on in there? We
scramble for robes / blankets, twist to the floor, stagger past / each
other.” Even later in life, interruptions by children are as easily
achieved as a mistimed phone call “late at night, / lights low, thick
quilts a tent in our bed.” Finally, the speaker confides to readers:
“Wrought things, offspring. Creaturely / hazards of our desire, our own
fond wish / to be immortal. Who knows their pirate souls, / the demands
in their confederate hearts.” The poem concludes with an emphatic and
entertaining line: “No more children.
Only us. Now. “
Perhaps this is the moment where one should note
Edwards manages to include a couple of intimate poems in this
collection as well
that demonstrate other opportunities and various aspects of a couple’s
love. For instance, in
“Aubade, November” the speaker reports waking to winter’s chill, “my
body’s husk, / achingly and clenched against the cold.” Yet, by the
close of the poem, she strikingly comments: “you wake too, / bent arm
wrapping / my waist, splayed hand / finding a knob of hip, / a furrow
of rib, / some aftermath to glean, // some not yet gathered
bloom.”
On the other hand, in another typically humorous
piece, “All I Know About Love” — apparently inspired by an episode of a
so-called reality show, Fear Factor,
in which women disrobe as they enter a box filled with reptiles to
retrieve gold coins from the bottom — the poet discloses concern about
the images of women in popular culture and warns her young boy about
the true reality he may face:
Son, a good woman will
not take off her pants
because you ask, will not
auction her shame
for shiny objects,
will not bite
the first sweet fruit
you dangle at her lips.
Consistent with the stronger images of women
represented in her poems, and again expressing the influence one family
member may have over another, the speaker tries to advise with her wise
guidance, aware her recommendations about regarding love reflect her
own knowledge and experiences: “all I know about love / does not
contain / a reptile box, race / toward reward, points / awarded the
last one standing.” Indeed, the closing stanza supplies a fine example
of how Lynnell Edwards sometimes combines entertaining and humorous
lines derived from seemingly frivolous subject matter or odd
inspiration with delightful insight, and she capably constructs a
movement from a supposedly lightweight topic toward more illuminating
language that provides a surprising ray of light with which to see more
clearly and more cleverly:
And what difference
you will someday divine
between fear and delight,
hold tight when the world
cracks open, shows its black box
of desire, its treasure
of petal, earth, bright fang.
As indicated, many of the poems in this new
collection continue to explore personal perspectives in an informal and
almost conversational tone, serving readers with language evidencing
witty observations and intelligent insights on topics one sometimes
might suspect
to be ordinary until treated with Lynnell Edwards’ deft touch. However,
with The Highwayman’s Wife
Edwards expands her poetic scope and elevates her craft in the added
complexity of traditional form or by presenting linked pieces in an
extended sequence.
Also, the inspirations provided by John Clare or the
mythological women given active voices within this volume have allowed
Edwards to attempt more difficult tasks and accomplish more ambitious
goals. As the poet notes in a speculative poem (“In My New Expanded
Life”) about what an ideal life might be like — where one would find
“room for all things” — perhaps the poet’s ambition exhibited in this
collection and her desire to develop further or extend her voice can
best be expressed as she seeks to “find a way / to walk outside when it
looks like rain, // name what it is I really want, consider / its
impossible heft in my open palm, / stand up straight in the sparking
storm.”
The poem suggests such a life is impossible and
hints achieving it is unrealistic; nevertheless, any effort exerted in
search of an ultimately unattainable perfection in poetry occasionally
results in an admirable advancement, a forward movement toward more
understanding or greater expression of emotion and wisdom. In The Highwayman’s Wife Lynnell
Edwards’ further advancement of craft and the admirable poetic
achievements enclosed between the book’s covers can easily be seen by
readers rewarded by this poet’s willingness to be adventurous and
accurate in the strong voices she or her personae employ as they stand
straight and proclaim themselves in vivid language as unique
individuals worthy of our attention.
The Highwayman’s Wife,
Lynnell Edwards. Red Hen Press, 2007. ISBN: 139781597090759
$17.95
© by Edward Byrne
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