{"id":239,"date":"2014-07-27T15:27:01","date_gmt":"2014-07-27T19:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=239"},"modified":"2014-07-27T15:27:01","modified_gmt":"2014-07-27T19:27:01","slug":"review-of-eyes-stones-by-elana-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=239","title":{"rendered":"Review of Eyes, Stones by Elana Bell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bell<\/a>Elana Bell. Eyes, Stones. <\/em>Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 64 pgs. $17.95.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

Elana Bell\u2019s first collection, Eyes, Stones, <\/em>caught my attention in part because of its content: it explores relationships between Jewish and Palestinian people, each bearing hope for the land, each suffering enormously. Bell is herself a descendant of the Holocaust, but the poems are marked by compassion not only for Jews inside and outside of Israel but also for the Palestinians who have been displaced by Israel. The poems are not polemical in the narrowest sense of that word, but they are political. And they are also artful. I\u2019ve repeatedly returned to this book, especially in recent weeks, and the poems return to me as I pull weeds from my garden, open my cupboard doors, go about my day. Bell\u2019s skill with metaphor, image, syntax, and voice guarantee that these poems will be memorable.<\/p>\n

The poems are often both allusive and elusive; they suggest rather than explain (some brief notes at the end of the book are sufficient to assist readers who need more historical context). The collection includes several short prose poems and one ghazal, but most of the poems are written in free verse. Yet stylistically the book is exceptionally diverse; Bell is able to select forms that best suit individual poems. I appreciated the book\u2019s range which allows multiple entry points into the collection\u2019s thematic concerns.<\/p>\n

Although many of the poems are comparatively brief (frequently shorter than a dozen lines), I would first like to comment on one of the longest poems, \u201cOn a Hilltop at the Nassar Farm.\u201d On the page, this poems looks deceptively conventional; it\u2019s arranged into five fairly even stanzas, interrupted by one stanza of a single line, each stanza developing a bit of narrative as a prose paragraph would. The poem begins with a straightforward declarative sentence, but Bell backtracks later in the sentence to clarify that an idea that seems straightforward contains more meaning, more significance, than readers, especially American readers, would ordinarily assume. Here is the first stanza:<\/p>\n

This is for Amal, whose name means hope,<\/em>
\nwho thinks of each tree she\u2019s planted like a child,
\nwhose family has lived in the same place
\nfor a hundred years, and when I say place
\nI mean this exact patch of land
\nwhere her father was born, and his father,
\nso that the shoots he planted before her birth
\nnow sweep over her head. Every March
\nshe plucks the green almonds and chews
\ntheir sour fuzzy husks like medicine.<\/p>\n

Bell\u2019s strategy for the entire poem is embedded in this stanza: \u201cwhen I say place \/ I mean\u2026\u201d The speaker understands that the reader won\u2019t interpret these words as literally as they are intended. \u201cPlace\u201d doesn\u2019t mean this general area; it means this specific plot of land. Later, she says, \u201cAmal loves this land \/ and when I say land I mean this \/ exact dirt and the fruit of it\u2026\u201d The speaker contrasts her own family\u2019s itinerant history with the stability of Amal\u2019s family. She conveys the longing of both \u201cfor that place \/ where we had taken root once.\u201d This poem is remarkably empathic, willing to acknowledge the historical complexity of multiple desires for this particular land.<\/p>\n

Stylistically quite different from \u201cOn a Hilltop at the Nassar Farm\u201d is \u201cVisiting Auschwitz.\u201d This poem\u2019s orderly arrangement in couplets suggests such civility, which would be an ironic comment on its content, but the poem is also disorderly, entirely lacking punctuation and capitalization. The poem tells the story of one woman\u2019s survival through coincidence and accident, but it is memorable through its images. It opens with three anaphoric lines that could be questions as easily as statements (and so, given the absent punctuation, function as both): \u201cwhat extra scrap of bread \/ what glance from a slop-drunk SS \/\/ what rage raised the rusted shovel \/ struck it on the starving ground.\u201d The word choice here encourages meaning to compound. The SS man may be \u201cslop-drunk,\u201d but \u201cslop\u201d connotes the food of pigs, food only desperate human beings would eat. The ground is \u201cstarving,\u201d but so, obviously, did millions of human beings. These four lines contain a total of twenty-four words (counting \u201cSS\u201d as one word); of these, all but four are monosyllabic, and the insistent rhythm provoked by these monosyllables is enhanced through the assonance and alliteration. Bell obviously understands how many factors of a language contribute to its meaning, and she understands also how to convert language into poetry.<\/p>\n

I have not yet spoken of my favorite poem in the collection, a five-part sequence called \u201cWhat Else God Wanted.\u201d This poem describes the scriptural origin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Abraham as its founding father. This poem occurs approximately one-third of the way through the collection, and its placement demonstrates Bell\u2019s attention to the fact that she\u2019s publishing a book, not simply a group of poems. \u201cWhat Else God Wanted\u201d is preceded by a poem called \u201cGod\u201d in which God is, at best, not very relevant, and it is followed by a poem called \u201cBastard,\u201d set in the near-present but obviously also commenting on the relationships among Ishmael and Isaac, Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say I enjoyed this book, for it is too somber for that kind of pleasure. But I will say I admire it. I will say I wish you all would read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elana Bell. Eyes, Stones. Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 64 pgs. $17.95. Reviewed by Lynn Domina Elana Bell\u2019s first collection, Eyes, Stones, caught my attention in part because of its content: it explores relationships between Jewish and Palestinian people, each bearing hope for the land, each suffering enormously. Bell is herself a descendant of the […]<\/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-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","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=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}