SHEILA BLACK Reviews
Old Ballerina Club by Sharon Olinka
(Dos Madres Press,
Loveland, OH, 2016)
Sharon
Olinka’s latest book Old Ballerina Club
opens with an appeal, an invocation to the reader: “Will you/hold this bone.”
The last word in the book is “residue.”
In between we encounter a ferocity of poems that beguile and taunt us,
being at once achingly beautiful and forcefully direct. This is a speaker who
is widely travelled, urban, knowing, skeptical, measuring and measured; yet
also and simultaneously—and this is what makes the book so extraordinary—as
recklessly in love with the things of the world and as vulnerable to them as a
fierce child might be. Indeed, the book
opens with poems about childhood—girlhood in particular—and lay out with
precision and filigreed imagery the experience of the child woman awakening to
being a body in the dazzling and disappointing world:
At eight I made a scar
on my chest
from a chicken pox scab.
Every two weeks,
To this day
I take off my fingernails
(“Burning Pen”)
This stanza with its razor-vivid physicality,
combined with its sleight-of-hand slippage of time, captures a vital stand of
this book—Olinka is concerned with identity and memory and the layers of
consciousness in which memory and the present struggle against and also contain
one another. Hers is a world of vibrant sensual
surfaces that also—like the Old Ballerina
Club of the titles--are beautiful things, which have been used and
worn. She evokes spaces in which we
literally feel the presence of human passage, human fingers, the wear-and-tear,
the way in which even love is a kind of violence. Her speaker is both resigned
and furious; yet careful, tender and expansive about the cataloguing of lost
things:
My friend Girard dead of AIDS before he was thirty, cloisonné
bottles
in his antique store gathering dust.
Past
Verti Mart on Royal Street where I’d go
for
fried catfish, barbecued chicken, congealed
squares
of macaroni in cheese.
(“Desire Bus”)
It is the
sheer lushness of Olinka’s eye—able to unreel scene after scene with breathless
clarity—that makes her clear-eyed and at times caustic sense of life’s cruelty
(e.g.: time, death, decay, and other people) so palpable and painful. She is a
writer who is able to hold in her head the raw beauty of being alive alongside
life’s simple—one almost could say primal—brutality. Olinka’s purpose, however,
is not simply to make us aware that both forces play out in our lives, but
rather to trace the ways in which these form our selves, our very identity—or
what might in another age be called ‘our souls.’
Olinka tells
us early in the book: “My life’s prayer/has been:/Open me. /Art is a wound/given
to strangers” and many of these poems evacuate the difficulty, the rigor, the
terms of that opening. From gorgeous sensual odes to a past lover (“For a Man
with a Guava in his Mouth,”) to memories of travel and risk (“Prayer to Make Me
Whole”), these poems convey how quickly and relentlessly the joy of immediate
existence is shadowed and subsumed by memory. Similarly, many of these poems focus on the
tension between the individual conception of self and the social, larger,
outside world, which is always working to unmake or swallow that self:
I
stopped
telling you things.
My heart
was off limits to you,
who said with everything she did
that a woman’s dreams
meant nothing.
(“Killing the Piano”)
Olinka tells us these things, but the
charm and rising power of this book comes from all the ways in which her poetic
voice consistently upends, subverts and challenges the expected response. In “Hand in the Dark,” she writes:
Nights of honey
among ghosts,
orchids and lizards
when my wounds
become my strength.
This notion of wound as the heart of
strength is key to Olinka’s poetic vision. Hers is an energized despair,
stringent in its honesty, but always embracing the sheer excess of living in
the world—its rich pentimento of surfaces, memories, experiences, nations, and,
most of all, bodies. (I should add that
the sense this work gives of being crowded, even haunted by memory, by the
layers of things is intensified by the exquisite collages by Wayne Atherton
which illustrate many of the poems).
In an exuberant and also unbearably sad
section in the middle of the book, Olinka crafts an extraordinary series of
poems in the voice of Donkey Woman.
Donkey Woman is a folkloric figure in San Antonio where Olinka now
lives—a woman of middle-age turned into half woman, half-donkey after being
pushed over a bridge by some teenagers, she is both a figure out of a horror
movie and the unlikely defender of the abused, overlooked or bullied. Olinka marshals the voice of Donkey Woman to
get at some of her most pointed observations about the various cages and powers
of being a woman. Donkey Woman is feared for her “ugliness,” her animal self,
but in her experience of being despised, she uncovers both strength and
charity:
Bring
me parents
who hit
their little boys,
girls
who hiss
Donkey Lady will get you.
I go
where I want.
I get
what I want.
I never
hit no child.
“Halloween on Elm Creek”
Like the crones of fairytales, Donkey
Woman is all that society does not wish women to be—an image of the fear and
disgust society feels for the aging female body and its distrust of female
strength and wisdom. Olinka finds in
this figure a poignant alter-ego for expressing her anxieties and the traces of
the world’s abuse. At one point in these poems, Olinka as Donkey Women notes
wryly: “We try hard/to get human days
right,” (“Love Me as I Am.”) lines which could almost serve as an epigraph for
this beautiful and necessary collection.
*****
Sheila
Black is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Iron, Ardent (Educe
Press, 2017). She co-edited Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of
Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2012) and The Right Way to Be
Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2017).
She lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary
arts center.