Calamity's Quilt: Reviews


First, one cautionary statement: This author is not for those readers seeking a quick fix. Instead I find that the best way to come near Janet I. Buck's work is slowly, a tad tenuously, and with that certain respect required by any substantive work of art. Calamity's Quilt belongs with those works compelling such deference, as evidenced by how her poems tilt and shift the heart, to find the crevices of the soul, where wisdom lives. This is a thing only a poem can do. And this is the nature of Buck's poems. Also in the poem's nature is the ability to sing with more clarity by repeated readings, so that it will some day come to explain itself clearly; but like any other love, it rarely does so at the first meeting. Who knows this better than an artist of Buck's considerable talents?

Buck's very life is a metaphor for the human condition; she examines the constancy of pain, she explores the caprice of bad luck, she dissects the afflictions that come to all us humans. Only someone who has lived through the torment of unyielding physical assault, only someone who has achieved compromise with death, only such a woman can write with this authority.

But why do we need to be reminded of these serious topics? The succinct answer is because it is supremely important; because, in the end, Buck demonstrates it is all worthwhile and life itself can be a radiance. This then is what Buck has woven, and what she has to reveal to us. The greatest of suffering can be cut as patches, and transformed, into a personal quilt of redemption. Regarding these serious matters, she once wrote to me, "I firmly believe that the job of poetry is to bring horror as well as beauty to the surface; it helps us choose between the two. If I didn't believe this, I would not write about the sadness in my own life. From what I've found, that which is hardest to approach . . . needs the approach most of all."

So let us approach. But the approach requires care. Buck cautions us in this book, "Those who see the lace of life / are rocking on its brittle edge." Her warnings are clear and poignant, "I sharpen the scissors of a poem / and live embodied in the curse." and, "I laminate a scorching sun / reminders and remainders call." and, "The slug of death / was here and left a trail / in tire tracks upon her naked flesh."

She shows us what it's like to live in her world: "Coming home to art was hard." This world is abrupt, dramatic, a startle, "Summer spanked." and, "Hope was snapped asparagus. / Never stayed in season long." A place where answers may be found, but they are slowly, courageously, earned, "Determination's shiny Packard / on the showroom floor / of a swimming pool / I work this anger out and float." and, "waiting for candor's clamor / (it wears no shoes / and sneaks around)."

The way is hard, a trial, "You can't plant shrubs in mud despair / and expect their bodies to stand up straight. / The same applies to little girls." At times one can be defeated, "our angels are / too few, too fat / to squeeze through / poverty's cracks" or find despair, "I know I should have prayed instead, / But God would surely understand / how pain can rape a midnight mass. / The pillar monk of crippled tides / was sadly sealed off from wise." and always find pain, "My Rolodex of bones complain; / you listen to their rhapsody. / Our passion's testament at work."

Then, at the end of this way, comes the understanding, the compulsion. "My pen, a haunted house at times. / At others it's a German tank, / reminding me it owns my soul." There comes the power of the poem. "I want and need a poem to shriek. / To slice your ear as others have." Poems of daring answers, "the answer is the honest gristle / of a tear that there was not enough / to lay in tombs of empty pages here."

She achieves a transubstantiation by changing pain into purpose, "Through it all, there sings a muted / victory of how you put another first: / just like straw for eagle wings, / Quixote winds live in your hair." the ceremony's rituals all involve the pen, "she was beneath balloons and / courage pouncing mountain lions. / The smack, the whip was artistry." a pen of great treasure, "A pasture full of ocean pearls / I stroke but dare not analyze." the treasure of intuition. "She had this way -- / of revising defeat -- / of pouring waterfalls of misery / into margarine tubs"

And, in the end, there is triumph, "We talk as roses opening / in palms of concentrated light." the answers, "Love was such a rising choir / that no one could mistake the song." the passions, "Of course, when love drifts by, / you jump on without much choice, / like a moving sidewalk / that jets toward joy / you just can't stop." and poems who shelter forever, "Umbrellas popping to meet clean rain."

Then, even though you have savored this slowly, even a little tenuously, too soon the book is done. You close the book, not necessarily wanting to leave this theater. At last one moves away from this book thinking Buck has over and over whispered psalms to us, to those of us still trapped, here, in the teeming, psalms describing how the task of life is not the avoidance of suffering, but rather the response to suffering. This, she tells us, is how life can be a radiance. - Ward Kelly




Revised January 5, 2001