Wild in the Plaza of Memory lives up to its title. With these poems, Uschuk has opened a public space where all things, all encounters--both beautiful and dreadful--are not only possible, they are inevitable. In this plaza of poetry, the poet moves effortlessly in time and space, addresses the living and conjures the dead, confesses personal losses publicly and public losses intimately.
The collection opens with a an ode to Lorca. It could be said that it takes bravery (some would say, wrongly, hubris) to evoke this poet. Certainly, other poets who have conjured him--directly or indirectly--have been alternately praised and dressed down for it. This said, I can think of more than a few poets who have summoned his ghost successfully (Malena Morling and Virgil Suarez come immediately to mind). Pam Uschuk is now among them:
some nights you fly through the window,
the eye of a hawk on fire,
black gaze gone to blood, gone
to the ropey bones of moonlight,
to the guitars laughing in the blue pines,
to the wet bulls of passion,
to the weft of love abandoned
to oiled rifles in an olive grove
on a sunny day before I was born. Did
they so fear the delicacy of your hands?
This ode, like so many of her poems, is part ornate tapestry of deep image, part protest poem. The poet rarely leaves the realm of public discourse, or activism, even when she is at her most personal and intimate. There is always a sense of wonder and awe in her images, and often a sense of outrage at injustice in her assertions.
This is also part of her bravery. It could be argued that there is a current, poetic aesthetic which often embraces and values language play, sonics, and anything deemed to be "new" (often a manufactured, confounding, mystery, as opposed to the everyday mystery of the human experience which has never been completely translated or transferred by words) over the sincere poem, the urgent poem, the direct poem--and most damning of all to many critics--the emotional poem that, in its wounded fury, attempts to confront social, political, and environmental injustices. Many of the these critics ignore the fact that some of the poets they hold in highest regard were poets of public--as well as private--discourse. Lorca's "Dawn in New York," is one obvious example. There are numerous others. Strange that poems of "pop culture" are also currently embraced, while poems of protest are often not.
Uschuck addresses the contemporary world, but, like Whitman, does not avoid the emotional, the dramatic, the rapturous, or the wide world. In the wild plaza of her poetry, students are murdered in Tehran and the poet responds with sincere anguish:
Say the students know they could die
but demonstrate because silence stings
deeper than a interrogator's electric cord.
Say a poet powers on a computer, half a world away
and blasts toad-sized letters of longing
into cyber space, and the lonely air bursts.
What Uschuk has done with this book is something that could bring poetry back into the hands of the non-poet. She, as Szymborska did before her, questions poetry's place in the world, and, also like Szymborska, gives us an answer. In her poem, "Who Today Needs Poetry," she writes:
not a belt unbuckling or the snap of the triggering
device on the homemade bomb about
to blow in a Kabul market, not the black widow's web
spun to catch wings for her children while we sleep, not
the blue burka slipping over a mother's head,
not a father's prayer rug clotted
with his son's blood. No, not any of these.
Not these.
Daniel Nathan Terry
March 27, 2012
To purchase this title: http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm/141/Wild-in-the-Plaza-of-Memory/Pam-Uschuk/
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