NEIL LEADBEATER
Reviews
The Small Door of Your Death by Sheryl St. Germain
(Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, 2018)
Born
and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, author, editor, translator and poet
Sheryl St. Germain directs the MFA Creative Writing program at Chatham
University, Pittsburgh, and is a co-founder of the Words Without Walls program.
She has written extensively about the culture and environment of Louisiana and
has received several awards including two National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowships.
Anyone
who has read Addiction, taken from her book Let It Be a Dark Roux:
New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press) and anthologized in When She
Named Fire (Autumn House Press), will know just how powerful St. Germain’s poems
can be. Wild and impassioned, but superbly controlled, the close proximity of
addiction and desire that she describes in this poem is like a rush of blood to
the head.
Drug
and alcohol addiction is a harrowing subject. Tragically, it is one that is all
too present in our world today. This latest collection, which is dedicated to
the memory of her son, Gray St. Germain Gideon, chronicles his struggle with
addiction and death by overdose alongside the history of her family’s
addictions and her own fragile recovery.
In
an interview with Alison Schuette in October / November 2009, St. Germain says
“if I’m confronting something really terrifying, I’ll write a poem instead of
prose, and it will stay there for a long time. When I’m comfortable with it,
I’ll begin to make it a story, but sometimes all I can do is write a poem.” St.
Germain acknowledges that there is a dark undercurrent in her work but takes
the view that there is a richness to be had in thinking about the things that
have gone wrong and that this can feed the spirit.
This
generous collection of 53 poems is presented in five distinct parts. A single
poem, Benediction: A Suite marks the middle section which acts as a
pause between her son’s death and the fourth part of the collection which deals
with the immediate aftermath. It is a book that essentially looks back rather
than forwards. Yesterday is the
very first word in the book. Even though it looks back over several months, the
memory is raw – it is as if the events that she is describing happened
yesterday.
The titles of several of
the poems make references to tarot cards (Three of Swords; Nine of Swords;
Ace of Swords; etc.). Tarot cards are associated with change, force, power, oppression, ambition,
courage and conflict. Action can be both constructive and/or destructive,
sometimes resulting in violence. Swords mirror the quality of mind present in our
thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs. The swords themselves are double-edged. The
negative aspects include anger, guilt, harsh judgement, a lack of compassion
and verbal and mental abuse.
St.
Germain uses the sword as a metaphor for the word: words that can cut to the
quick. They are the words we dare not say or say when we do not mean to. The
tarot cards give us this sense that everything is ordained by fate and that we
are powerless to do anything about it.
Light
and dark is another constant in this collection. In Feral she writes of
her son:
Four months before you die,
you show up at my door
skittish, sober, not yourself,
whatever that self is,
like a dog lost too long in the woods
all
you once hoped to be
still
lights your face, though:
it
is almost a holy light
and
in Rehab we are told that
………..the lights
in the rooms here, after all, are so bright.
Colour
is also bound up with her son’s name:
We named you Gray because we hoped for you the
thousands of hues that sing between black and white….though we knew, too, that
gray’s the color of mourning, ambiguity.
In
Summer Solstice, 2015 she describes him as being a person of the
night and reflects that
This day, the longest of the year, you would
understand as the shortest night.
Snow
is another metaphor that is closely related to light but also to coldness and
to the fact that it can cover up so much that we do not wish to see in our
world. In Letter to My Son, Winter, St. Germain, referencing her own fragile
recovery from addiction, writes:
………Today, two
years sober, eyes burning with a white as cold and unforgiving as an unwritten
poem, I walk into the backyard. Snow, snow and more snow. White, white, more
white.
Needles
are another factor that come into play. Sometimes they are pine needles, the
needles of firs and spruces, needles used for stitching quilts, something to
make a blanket out of balls of breathtaking yarn and at other times they
are the needles that her son used to puncture …the small door of [his]
death.
Returning
to the interview with Alison Schuette that I referenced earlier, St. Germain
says that, for her, “the heart of the poem is the metaphor….to say that
something is like something else is incredibly powerful.” She goes on to say how consoling she finds
them because “like narratives, they’re ways of imposing an order on something
that doesn’t have order…it’s a rich, textured way of making beauty and sense
out of something that might not have beauty and sense.”
Despite
its subject matter, poems such as Louisiana Oranges and At a Writer’s
Retreat in France, Not Drinking and Reasons to Live: The Color Red catch
sunlight in their lines with their vivid portrayal of the abundance of nature
and its healing powers. Of particular note is the change of tone that becomes
immediately apparent in the final part of the book. The long poem, Versions
of Heaven is ecstatic in its exuberance revealing the passion for music
that St. Germain shared with her son. The effect is effervescent as, high with
adrenaline and wild with music, she kisses her baby on the cheek and says “one
more before bath time” with its double-edged suggestion of one more dance
for the child and one more glass of wine for the adult.
The
format of these poems is varied. Quite a number of them are right justified as
opposed to left justified. This gives the impression that some of the lines are
“up against” the extreme margin of the page, lending a certain degree of
intensity to what they are trying to express. Some poems are written with
long-flowing lines, others use a much shorter line and some are written as
prose poems depending upon what works best for each piece and the way in which
it is expressed on the page. The cover art by Morgan Everhart is appropriately
titled Gray. Helpful notes reference the lyrics mentioned in the text at
the end.
These
poems chart one woman’s colossal loss. Unflinching in their honesty, they also
show her unbounded love for her family and offer consolation for anyone who has
struggled with addiction or has walked through the valley of the shadow of
death. These accessible poems shine with a sustained intensity that brings
brightness and hope to all.
*****
Neil Leadbeater is an author, editor, essayist, poet
and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems
have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad.
His books include Hoarding Conkers at
Hailes Abbey (Littoral Press, 2010), Librettos
for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014) and Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press,
2017). His work has been translated into Dutch, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.
