~BARBARA CROOKER~
JUDITH
MONTGOMERY: RED
JESS
Montgomery’s imagery reaches a deeper level when
we consider the three
strands that unite this book:
the color red (including blood),
which binds
us to earth; flight, which loosens these bonds;
and flame,
which encompasses both. These patterns
are deliberate, hanks of
yarn which the writer
threads on her loom for some very deft
weaving.
The poems in Red Jess, Judith
Montgomery’s impressive debut book, want to wear wings and soar, want
to “slip. . . the surly bonds of earth,” (“High Flight” by John
Gillespie Magee) but are instead, held like trained falcons by jesses,
those “countless silken ties of love and thought” (Robert Frost).
This tension, this struggle between flight and containment, is what
makes these poems leap off the page “on the grace of rinsing wings”
(“Anger, Iron, Origami”). They are “blood-lit and underwrit by
bone” (“Augury), and yet joy is present as well, the kind that Wendell
Berry writes about when he says, “Be joyful, even though you have
considered all the facts.” Montgomery achieves this through her
careful, precise language, musical diction, and mixture of contained
and open forms. These are poems that remind us what it is like to
be human, at this time, on this planet.
“Aperture,” the prologue poem, acts as an
invocation, and also
includes all of the book’s major themes: flight (the falcon), red (the
jesses and the photograph’s negative, “Suspended in the
red”), and fire
(“sparks lightning branch // to branch” and the tip of a glowing
cigarette). These images thread again and again
throughout the book. Also, the very word “aperture,” the camera
term for an adjustable hole that controls or limits the amount of light
that can enter, works symbolically for the book as a whole.
In her construction, Montgomery has divided the book
into three
sections. Part I, “Composition with Machete,” focuses its
lens on the larger world of history and its wars: World War I,
Bosnia, Jakarta, an unnamed war of Virgil, ending with the deathbed
scene in “The White Boat.” Section II, “Scarlet Box,” focuses
inward on personal history: a bad marriage, infertility,
separation, divorce, loneliness, healing. The main image here is
the heart: “Here is my heart, folded as a box” (“Gretel’s
Spell”). “Blaze, with Apples,” Section III, opens out to the
larger world again, but here it is the world of nature, poems of
hiking, fishing, and sexual love, along with poems about aging and the
body, the wick of the candle guttering out. It is as if she is
playing with a spyglass, shifting the focus of “the rich lens of
attention” (Jane Kenyon) out, then in, then out again.
Montgomery also shifts our focus by using a variety
of formal and
informal elements. In closed forms, there is a pantoum, “Blaze,
With Apples”(cleverly broken up into couplets), and a villanelle, "The
Metaphysics of Insomnia." In open forms, most of the poems are
in triplets (twelve) and couplets (sixteen), although many of these
have interesting variations: single lines thrown in that alter
the rhythm, stepped lines, dropped couplets (where the second line is
indented), triplets with the second line indented, triplets with lines
two and three indented, couplets with an in and out pattern (lines two
and three are indented, line four is back out to the margin), and
broken couplets, where the white space in the middle of the
line is used as a rhythmic device. This is done to particularly good
effect in “Shiver-Man,” where the white spaces echo the staccato of
gunfire or the drumbeats of the soldiers’ hearts. Because of
these variations, the reader’s expectations are always
challenged. In “Cardioversion,” the irregular stanzas and indents
mimic the irregular heartbeat that is the subject of the poem, an
excellent blend of sound and sense. Even fixed forms are played with;
in the aforementioned villanelle, the first repeat, “The moon pours
her white waterfall of sleep,” becomes “the bright moon pouring
waterfalls of sleep,” “myself on purling waterfalls of sleep,” and
then, in the penultimate line, returns to the original; while the
second repeat, “I have no bucket, and the well is deep,” stays the same
in the first repetition, then becomes “but I have no bucket for a well
so deep,” and finally, the powerful “I am the bucket, and the well runs
deep.” It’s a great deal of fun for the reader to find a poet
willing to be contained by form and to expand it.
But it is in terms of language — imagery, sound
devices, unusual
syntax — that these poems really shine. Consider the assonance in
“Shiver-Man”: lung, hung,
shudders, stump, drums numb, muddy
Somme, bumbles, ruts, how they sound like the distant mortar
fire
referred to in line one. Or the consonance in the last part of
the poem: dark, flick, walk,
clinic, jerk; short bursts of
ack-ack from the battlefield. Sometimes these sounds are
more
subtle, such as the off-rhyme in “At the Metolius River, We Walk in
Falling Snow”: “You turn, we turn to each other through the dark,
/ while snow shadows land, water, rock.” Or at the end of “Rose/Wood,”
where the third to the last line, “fire- / crisped leaf, thorn curved
deep, red rose hip” slant rhymes internally with the last line, “She
will repair what she can reach,” helping it click satisfyingly shut
like Yeats’s well-made box.
Many of the images are original and stunning.
In “Gallop,” a
stethoscope presses “its hard, cold coin / into her chest.” In
“Housekeeper,” the monitors in the hospice are “peeping like Easter
chicks.” A woman’s womb is a “plum reticule” (“Sonata for Tide and
Light”). The moon, in “The Metaphysics of Insomnia” pours her
light
“down a scarp of stars to flood the earth.” The speaker in “Wake-Robin”
is “heart-shot // by April’s pulled pin.” There’s a certain
startle here, the thrill of the unexpected, and it adds texture and
complexity to the narrative lines.
Throughout the book, Montgomery uses gorgeously
sensual language, and
she uses it to best possible effect in "Rose/Wood":
each coupling drowned
in rose-tides—
Sweet Surrender* lapping at the
sill,
he trails blossoms underneath
her chin, breastbloom, belly, knee
and she reflects like buttercups
the gleam of skinshine where he
strokes—
(*“Sweet Surrender” is a type of rose)
And again in “Fragrance,” where she describes the smell
after sex
(certainly an unusual topic for a poem):
. . . and I
cannot help myself, I bend to breathe
in the lovely steamy scent that
blooms
like the smell of baking bread—as
though I
could take you in again—and
again, ever
after, in one hundred fragrant
mortal ways.
These sensory images remind us that we live in animal bodies, that we
are as much a part of this earth as leaf mulch and loam.
Montgomery’s imagery reaches a deeper level when we
consider the three
strands that unite this book: the color red (including blood),
which binds us to earth; flight, which loosens these bonds; and flame,
which encompasses both. These patterns are deliberate, hanks of
yarn which the writer threads on her loom for some very deft
weaving. There’s the red stallion in “Gallop,” the heart and
the robin’s “redder breast” in “Wake-Robin,” the
“red drop” that “shudders” in “Shiver-Man,” the scarlet cape and the
“bloodweight // of their hearts” in “Composition with Machete,” the
lips that are “bloodstopped” in “The White Boat,” the heart in
“Gretel’s Spell” (“The walls — lacquered dragon-red,” “the cunning
scarlet box”) the red pen in “A Cultural History of Fences,” and then
those red jesses again:
Fine scarlet threads
stake her soles
to ground, lace her instep,
ankle, heel. Her
signature. Ligature.
She smiles for the
camera,
tests the jesses braided from her
veins. They hold.
There are also blazing apples (“Absence”)
and the heart in
“Cardioversion”: “the blood —pause / that would bud its
scarlet
fist / and knot a black bouquet in your brain.” Clearly, Montgomery has
dipped her pen into this red ink for a purpose, to make us aware of the
streams and rivers coursing through the body. Sylvia Plath wrote,
“The blood jet is poetry,” and here it is, running throughout this book.
The second component to this braided imagery is
flight. In
“Gallop,” Montogomery’s speaker questions her heart: “Will he run
into the sky / without her?,” reminiscent of Rilke’s “I would like to
step out of my heart / and go walking beneath the enormous sky.”
In “Swift,” “the unfledged boy” is “at tip-point of flight.”
“Wake-Robin” has as its central figures a fallen hawk and a robin,
while “Hawk, Rising” give us images of Kitty Hawk, Wilbur and Orville’s
historic flight, Daedalus, the Montgolfiers (hot-air ballooning
pioneers), Otto Lilienthal (who broke his spine when his glider plunged
to the ground), warplanes, and also nature with “the rise and
glide of osprey, hawk.” In “Composition with Machete,” the young
man at left “is catapult in flight.” In “Anger, Iron, Origami,”
the heart, which has been ironed into a box, is freed, and “[a]
thousand wings flutter // from the hollows of her bones.”
Throughout the book, we are reminded of the trained hawk, who is free
to fly but returns to its owner, (the jesses only restrain it on the
arm), those silken ties of love and thought again, all the things that
bind us, each to each, our family, friends, and home.
The third strand, the uniting element, is
flame. Fire is red,
like blood, rooted to earth, but it flickers up to the sky, sparks
taking flight. In “Aperture,” Montgomery admonishes:
“[S]trike a smoke, wait // out the burn.” In “Hawk, Rising, “ she
asks, “Does one arc spark you to consider?” In “Composition with
Machete,” readers are asked to admire “the impeccable diagonal //
blazing
through the center of the shot,” while in “Gretel’s Spell” there are
“maps / scribed in lemon juice that speaks over flame.”
“Rose/Wood” contains “thirty fire-coin moons” and “scarves [that] slide
to the edge of scorch,” a lampbulb that “shakes and smokes.”
In “Drought,”
All week the heat set,
gluing words to walls.
Incinerating sills.
At midnight his cigarette
burned its heart behind the
kitchen screen.
Her face cracked in silver ash,
a flickering in attic panes.
Dog moon scorched the tender sky.
These poems are hot; these poems are on fire.
In “Anger, Iron,
Origami,” the speaker even “sets the iron // to her chest. A
crisp silence. Smoke. // Her heart sizzles." In
“Absence,” they “could part at the fork, / walk away from the flame /
that singes our fingers when we touch,” but there is the
“smoking incense of paths / fingers take to discover / the presence of
flesh — the thrum, the clamor // of the succulent, unreasonable
heat.” Indeed, the very last image of the book is one of small
flames, as the speakers launch floating candles on a lake:
Dipping in
mirror-ink,
the boats
stroke on a silk
that shivers moon and mountain
the name of every
light
that
flickers, and is gone.
[“Wick”]
And so, here we have them, these poems
grounded in the stuff of
ordinary life, blood and earth, that want to fly, lift right off the
page. They create their own fire, heat and light. These are
poems we can return to with greater pleasure on each re-reading, poems
that brighten our way, small candles “in this troubled world”
(Shakespeare), stanzas of incandescence to bring light into the
darkness of our human lives, and we, her readers, will gratefully await
her next book.
Montgomery, Judith. Red Jess.
Cincinnati, Ohio: WordTech
Communications (Cherry Grove Collections), 2006. ISBN: 1-933456-17-5
$17.00
© by Barbara Crooker
