{"id":205,"date":"2014-06-08T23:16:43","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T03:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=205"},"modified":"2014-06-08T23:16:43","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T03:16:43","slug":"review-of-the-wishing-tomb-by-amanda-auchter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=205","title":{"rendered":"Review of The Wishing Tomb by Amanda Auchter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Auchter<\/a><\/p>\n

Amanda Auchter. The Wishing Tomb. <\/i>Perugia Press, 2012. 87 pgs. $16.00.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

Before I read a single poem, I suspected I would enjoy Amanda Auchter\u2019s The Wishing Tomb. <\/i>Simply by skimming the table of contents, I could tell that Auchter is a poet engaged with language, its specificity, the sounds of one word colliding with another. Here are some of the poems\u2019 titles: \u201cThe Good Friday Fire,\u201d \u201cThe Punishment Collar,\u201d \u201cTestimony of Evangeline the Oyster Girl, 1948,\u201d \u201cThe Angola Inmate Coffin Factory,\u201d \u201cThe Chicken Man Walks the Quarter.\u201d These are not generic titles, the last resorts of a poet desperate for anything more creative than \u201cuntitled.\u201d And fortunately, the poems are as interesting as their titles.<\/p>\n

Like some other recently published collections (Lesley Wheeler\u2019s Heterotopia <\/i>and Nicole Cooley\u2019s Breach <\/i>spring immediately to mind), The Wishing Tomb <\/i>focuses on a particular city, documenting in this case the history of New Orleans. It is divided into three sections, the first beginning with early European contact and proceeding through the nineteenth century, the second exploring events of the twentieth century, and the third tracing the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The book is not, however, simply a history text broken into lines. The poems imagine the perspectives of specific characters, some famous, some anonymous, and the effects of catastrophic events on ordinary people. Not surprisingly given its location, the books overflows with water as a literal and metaphorical presence. Images and figures of speech echo each other from poem to poem, enhancing the collection\u2019s unity, yet the writing is taut and requires an attentive reader. Individual poems also connect with each other to weave each section together, \u201cThe Good Friday Fire\u201d and \u201cThe Good Friday Flood, 1927,\u201d for example, or \u201cEarly Pastoral\u201d which is the second poem in the collection, \u201cHighway Pastoral\u201d which is nearly centered, and \u201cLate Pastoral\u201d which is the final poem in the collection. As a book, The Wishing Tomb <\/i>is as thoughtfully constructed as the individual poems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Disordered Body\u201d from section one illustrates several of Auchter\u2019s strategies. It opens with a set of images that appeal to multiple senses: \u201cRain falls from the black skies daily, the city \/\/ a shroud of rot: garbage and heat and humidity, \/ the bright stink \/\/ of bodies. The body a branch after lightning, a language \/\/ of fever, delirium\u2026\u201d In the first line, the rain is comparatively neutral, even if the \u201cblack skies\u201d are not, but by the second line, readers feel the weight of humidity and stench. The repulsion of the olfactory image extends into the next line, but then line four turns in a new direction, creating a visual image and metaphor that is almost mystical: \u201cthe body a branch after lightning, a language\u2026\u201d Eventually, with the mention of mosquitoes and suggestion of impending disaster, readers understand that this is a poem about yellow fever and the\u00a0 inevitability of nature\u2019s power despite human intervention. The poem concludes with these lines: \u201cWe do not \/ say it will not come. It will come. \/\/ It will bring its terrible song, hum it into our houses.\u201d The penultimate line is effectively emphatic, with the simple sentence \u201cIt will come\u201d concluding both the line and the stanza, without however calling undue attention to itself as it would if it had formed a line by itself. This line consists of eight monosyllabic words, and arguably up to six stresses, further emphasizing the inevitability of the fever. Then the last line, a stanza of its own, slows the rhythm down, becoming almost melodic\u2014\u201cIt will bring its terrible song, hum it into our houses\u201d\u2014through the softer sounds, the number of unstressed syllables, the alliteration. This last line is equally ominous yet also oddly beautiful, an effect created through both image and rhythm.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Disordered Body\u201d gains significance from its position, immediately following \u00a0another poem that describes yellow fever, \u201cAmerican Plague,\u201d and preceding one that describes rituals of grief, \u201cMourning Brooch and Earrings, c. 1866.\u201d This latter poem also begins with a reference to the body and concludes with an image of a person who \u201chums and threads, hums \/\/ and threads.\u201d The humming here is different enough from the mosquito\u2019s hum in \u201cThe Disordered Body,\u201d however, so that the imagery remains fresh, echoing the language from other poems without defaulting to a poet\u2019s linguistic tic.<\/p>\n

Bodies and body parts\u2014mouths, hair, tongues, hands\u2014populate many of these poems, less to evoke eroticism than as signifiers of pain and loss. These are bodies that suffer and die and then are mourned through voices emerging from other bodies. Yet the book is ultimately as much about hope and longing as it is about pain and suffering. The final poem, \u201cLate Pastoral,\u201d describes an oil spill and its clean-up. Mourning a lost romanticized past, it opens with these lines: \u201cHow beautiful this was in the beginning: \/ white mulberry, Indian corn, a source \/\/ without suffering, without crime.\u201d The speaker describes oil-covered birds, sand, fish. Then the conclusion recalls the opening lines: \u201cHow beautiful this was when the sun flickered \/ silver in its earnest rising. How much we want \/ to unstrangle the marshes, the oil-rolled shoreline, to return \/\/ to the light in the cypress, the mangrove, oxgrass. The stirring \/ of seabirds rising, rising.\u201d As much as we long to return to an unspoiled paradise, we are unlikely ever to realize that dream. Yet the poem ends with ascent; sometimes individuals and even species recover.<\/p>\n

The Wishing Tomb <\/i>is Amanda Auchter\u2019s second collection. (Her first, The Glass Crib, <\/i>was published in 2011.) I hope we\u2019ll have the opportunity to read many more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amanda Auchter. The Wishing Tomb. Perugia Press, 2012. 87 pgs. $16.00. Reviewed by Lynn Domina Before I read a single poem, I suspected I would enjoy Amanda Auchter\u2019s The Wishing Tomb. Simply by skimming the table of contents, I could tell that Auchter is a poet engaged with language, its specificity, the sounds of one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}