{"id":265,"date":"2014-08-31T16:38:53","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T20:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=265"},"modified":"2014-08-31T16:38:53","modified_gmt":"2014-08-31T20:38:53","slug":"review-of-no-need-of-sympathy-by-fleda-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=265","title":{"rendered":"Review of No Need of Sympathy by Fleda Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Fleda Brown. No Need of Sympathy. <\/em>BOA Editions, 2013. 87 pgs. $16.00.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

All poems, I\u2019m told, are love poems in one way or another, and the object of all love poems is really the language in which it\u2019s written. Fleda Brown\u2019s most recent collection, No Need of Sympathy, <\/em>is all about language, and imagination, and memory, and perspective. Perhaps these four nouns ultimately refer to the same thing, but the poems in this book are characterized by a playful variety that doesn\u2019t boil down to just one thing. The poems often develop surprisingly, as one idea leads to another and then turns back on itself, so that one sometimes continues reading just to see where these words will go. More than many contemporary poets I read, Brown relies on rhyme and received form, but she does so subtly, as if the form were almost a coincidence. She is clearly a skilled poet, and her skill is perhaps most evident in the fact that she wears it so lightly.<\/p>\n

The collection opens with a poem called, \u201cFor, Or, Nor.\u201d Those of us experienced in teaching basic grammar find ourselves often reciting \u201cand, or, but, for, so, nor, yet\u201d the list of coordinating conjunctions students may use to correct their run-on sentences. Despite their identical grammatical purpose, however, and despite our temptation to view them as mere place-holders in a sentence, the conjunctions alter the meaning of a sentence and occasionally also alter our perceptions of a speaker. Brown\u2019s poem explores how language both reveals and forms person and persona. Here is the first stanza of the first section, \u201cFor\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m leaving you,\u201d she said, \u201cfor you make me sick.\u201d But
\nof course she didn\u2019t say that. She thought <\/em>the \u201cfor\u201d; she admired
\nits elegant distance, the way it\u2019s wedged like an iron strut
\nbetween result and cause, the way it\u2019s almost \u201cfar,\u201d and dire<\/p>\n

as a raised eyebrow.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor\u201d is certainly among the more formal of coordinating conjunctions, and it is used in ordinary conversation much less frequently than most of the others, as the speaker recognizes. It\u2019s formality does suggest distance. The speaker\u2019s analysis of \u201cfor,\u201d here is intriguing, for she initially claims to admire \u201cits elegant distance,\u201d as if it signals class\u2014the sort of personality for whom \u201ca raised eyebrow\u201d would be \u201cdire,\u201d but then \u201cit\u2019s wedged like an iron strut\u201d\u2014it\u2019s forceful, even implicitly violent. My favorite compositional detail in this stanza, though, is the inclusion of \u201cBut\u201d at the end of the first line. It not only amplifies the insistence of \u201cBut,\u201d but it also serves to gather in one of the conjunctions otherwise missing from the center of the poem.<\/p>\n

The second section of the poem, \u201cOr,\u201d finds it controlling metaphor in Beethoven\u2019s sixth symphony, the Pastoral, <\/em>which the speaker describes according to its compilation of options: \u201crepeat and repeat, always with variation.\u201d The third conjunction, \u201cNor,\u201d excludes rather than permits options, and this section of the poem becomes more somber. If in the first section the speaker is experimenting with persona, in the third section it\u2019s her life rather than her personality that\u2019s at stake:<\/p>\n

As a flower sheds petal after petal, as further tests
\nstrip away one after another of the last hopes for a cure,
\nas a person shakes into the waste bin all her cigarettes
\nand goes down the street not knowing who she is, the pure<\/p>\n

air of saints is achieved by abandonment: Jesus in the garden
\nalone, cold moon disappearing, Buddha at the morning star,
\nmind emptied of its snarl of ignorance. Neither to harden
\nagainst loss, nor to welcome it. To let it be who you are.<\/p>\n

The accumulation of choices available through \u201cor\u201d are absent here; choice is negated through \u201cnor.\u201d Through the positions of her figures of speech and allusions in this section, Brown has constructed multiple layers of meaning. Initially, it seems that the petals lost from the flower are compared to the hope lost through medical tests\u2014and those two events are compared here\u2014but then they both come to refer to \u201cthe pure \/ air of saints\u2026achieved by abandonment.\u201d The stanza break in this section serves as its fulcrum, as the speaker moves from hopelessness and disorientation toward acceptance and neutrality. The return to \u201cnor\u201d in the last line is particularly telling, for it doesn\u2019t close off an option, exactly, as we expect \u201cnor\u201d to do. Yet it doesn\u2019t exactly open itself to options either. Rather, it disengages itself from attachment to one future or another; it permits the speaker to be simply who and what she is.<\/p>\n

The rhyme in this last stanza is particularly effective, as the \u201ca\u201d rhymes\u2014garden \/ harden\u2014are also near rhymes with the \u201cb\u201d rhymes\u2014star \/ are. In fact, Brown uses similar near rhymes to fulfill the rhyme pattern in earlier stanzas, as \u201cadmired\u201d rhymes with \u201cdire\u201d in stanza one and \u201cwhere\u201d rhymes with \u201crepaired\u201d in stanza four. The concluding stanza, therefore, functions to enclose the formal strategies Brown has chosen earlier in the poem as well as to fulfill its thematic intent.<\/p>\n

In several of her poems, Brown incorporates multiple sources of knowledge, juxtaposing one image against another and then developing the first as metaphor for the second. This works particularly well in \u201cSugar, Sugar\u201d which initially seems to be about a sugar maple, and then seems to be about the ubiquitousness of refined sugar, but ultimately reveals its central concern\u2014a girl\u2019s adolescent development. She experiences herself as quickened energy, like what she tastes in \u201cPepsi, its sugar- \/ fizz, and the frozen orange clouds of the Dreamsicle, the slow \/ caramel centers of the Milky Way\u2026\u201d Each of these is like \u201clightning up my body,\u201d and her body is also like the tree:<\/p>\n

\u2026It was so far away, so far from the tip
\nof a tree to the ground, yet the waters traveled through the narrow
\ntubes and arrived from roots and leaves, and the trunk slowly
\nthickened with its quiescent heartwood that shored up
\nall the rest, that was, really, quite finished with all the rest,
\nthat let itself be wrapped by the sugar-hyped layers, so it could
\nthink. It was not really thinking. What was it doing,
\nnot bothering to call itself happy or sad?<\/p>\n

This poem is an exploration of growth and of life, obviously, but it is also an exploration of how creates meaning and invites us to accept our own meaning. Brown exploits this strategy in several other poems here, many of which are among my favorites: \u201cThe Kayak and the Eiffel Tower,\u201d \u201cMy Father and Hemingway Go Fishing,\u201d \u201cThe Dead,\u201d \u201cThe Puffball.\u201d No Need of Sympathy <\/em>is a collection that is clearly contemporary and yet understands its place in tradition; it is serious without being somber, playful without defaulting to the merely clever. The poems are set in specific geographic locations and often mention individual human beings, and their particularity succeeds in that paradox we hope for from literature, in reading of another to understand ourselves, \u201cTo let it be who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fleda Brown. No Need of Sympathy. BOA Editions, 2013. 87 pgs. $16.00. Reviewed by Lynn Domina All poems, I\u2019m told, are love poems in one way or another, and the object of all love poems is really the language in which it\u2019s written. Fleda Brown\u2019s most recent collection, No Need of Sympathy, is all about […]<\/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-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","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=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}