{"id":590,"date":"2019-03-14T12:33:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T16:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=590"},"modified":"2019-03-14T12:35:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T16:35:11","slug":"review-of-all-that-held-us-by-henrietta-goodman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=590","title":{"rendered":"Review of All That Held Us by Henrietta Goodman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Henrietta Goodman. All\nThat Held Us. <\/em>BkMk Press, 2018. 66 pgs. $13.95.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henrietta Goodman\u2019s third collection, All That Held Us, <\/em>consists of untitled Petrarchan sonnets that explore relationships among a daughter, her absent father, shamed mother, judgmental and peculiar aunt, and at least one early lover. The family is more dysfunctional than most and so makes for interesting reading. What is most striking about the collection, though, is how Goodman manages the <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

sonnet. Most writers in English opt for the Shakespearean\nversion because it requires fewer repetitions of each rhyme, yet Goodman\nadheres to Petrarchan expectations and seems to do so with ease. Although\nalmost all of the rhymes are true rhymes, they are never forced and are often\nboth subtle and inventive. Similarly, the diction throughout the collection is\ncolloquial, interestingly subverting this most classic of classical forms. In\naddition, she adapts the strategy of a crown of sonnets, repeating a line from\none poem in the next, though the repeated line often occurs in the middle of a\nfollowing sonnet rather than at its opening. The poems are woven together as\nthey would be in a crown, that is, but more inventively, more surprisingly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the fifth poem in the collection:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t innocent, the way they mocked
each other, screeched and grumbled a grammar
of perfect bitterness\u2014wore it, armor
of status, even though my mother hocked
her rings in Charlotte. So easily shocked,
my aunt had packed away the old glamour
of dances\u2014sweat-stained dresses, the clamor
for a partner. She sprayed Lysol and locked
her door when my friends came, called me the child<\/em>
in notes she wrote to God or no one, scraps
of paper buried under piles of stuff.
I called her shithead <\/em>once at thirteen, wild
to separate myself, to spring the traps,
to find out whether words would be enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of Goodman\u2019s strategies is to use \u201cthey\u201d toward\nthe beginning of a poem without an explicit antecedent. Although the referent\nsoon becomes clear, readers sometimes interpret \u201cthey\u201d to mean one couple, e.g.\nthe father and mother, when it refers to another, e.g. the mother and aunt.\nThis ambiguity, which from a less-skilled poet would result simply in\nconfusion, here reinforces the turmoil of this family\u2014so much is unstated, so\nmuch can be inferred only through close observation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The form here, particularly Goodman\u2019s choices of\nrhyming words, reinforces the content with understated wit. The rhymed words\n\u201cgrammar,\u201d \u201carmor,\u201d \u201cglamour,\u201d and \u201cclamor,\u201d for example, suggest in themselves\nthe ambivalences within this family. Arguments proceed according to an expected\nform, and the two women\u2019s symbiotic misery ironically armors them against\nfurther risk, and the potential for pain risk entails. \u201cGlamour\u201d might once\nhave been desirable but is now characterized distastefully, by sweat and noise.\nThe aunt\u2019s attitude particularly can be characterized as the sum of these\nwords. Goodman\u2019s facility with end rhyme is enhanced by her attention to sonic\neffects more generally, the alliteration of \u201cgrumbled a grammar\u201d or \u201cwhether\nwords would\u201d for instance, or the near rhyme of \u201cnotes\u201d and \u201cwrote.\u201d Throughout\nthis poem, the sounds are aggressive, the hard \u201ck\u201d and short \u201ca\u201d being\nparticularly insistent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aunt\u2019s character is conveyed here through memorable\ndetail, especially in the sestet. She sprays Lysol to disinfect her house after\nguests arrive, refers to her niece as \u201cthe child,\u201d and writes complaints to\nsome invisible figure. There\u2019s a second turn in this sonnet, midway through the\nsestet, as the speaker shifts attention to herself and her own desire to escape\nthis place and these people. She discovers the power of language, not simply to\nevoke a reaction as she likely did here but also to validate her own\nexperience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following poem begins with a line adapted from\nthis one: \u201cThe clamor for a partner\u2014how to give \/ it up?\u201d This subsequent poem\nexplores the adult lives of the mother and aunt, their tamped down desires\nconverted to arrogance and bitterness. Several poems in this section focus on the\nrelationship between the mother and the aunt. The speaker herself observes the\nadults but only comes to understand, as children will, a few years later. The\nrelationship of the two women is invariably inflected by knowledge of the man\nwho appeared for one of them, briefly, a few years earlier, the man who came to\nthe house only once after the speaker was born but who is as psychically\npresent as if he had moved in and claimed the lazyboy and tv remote. Midway\nthrough the collection, two poems illustrate, through their structure, how one\nrelationship infuses the others. One poem describes the baking of a birthday\ncake for the mother, an unusual event in that very little actual cooking\notherwise occurred in this family. The line that links the octave to the sestet\nstates: I think they loved each other \/ once, shared their mother\u2019s cookbook,\nwatched TV.\u201d The next poem begins with this line: \u201cI think they loved each\nother once, or thought \/ they did, the day they fished Lake Elsinore \/ from a\nsailboat he\u2019d bought\u2014a whim before \/ they conceived me.\u201d When the reader begins\nthis poem, the temptation is to assume that the \u201cthey\u201d in the first line\nconsists of the same individuals as the \u201cthey\u201d in the similar line from the\npoem before, that is, the mother and aunt. By line three, however, that\nassumption is proven wrong, and the \u201cthey\u201d who \u201cloved each other\u201d becomes the\nmother and father. The dyads cannot escape each other, and Goodman guarantees\nthat readers understand this through not only the form and content of the\nindividual poems, but also through her arrangement of the poems within the\ncollection. Goodman\u2019s thoughtful attention to the progression of the individual\npoems and to the effect of the entire collection is, for me, one of the most\nsatisfying elements of All That Held Us. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many readers of contemporary poetry, I\nsuspect, I spend most of my time with free verse and, more recently,\nexperimental and hybrid forms. Many poets still write in received forms, some\nregularly, some more occasionally. All\nThat Held Us, <\/em>though, is unique among collections I\u2019ve read over the last\nfew decades, not simply because Goodman has written an extended series of\nPetrarchan sonnets, but because she has both retained the conventions of the\nform and adapted it to the 21st<\/sup> century. The poems are a pleasure to\nread individually, and they are even more pleasurable to read as a group. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henrietta Goodman. All That Held Us. BkMk Press, 2018. 66 pgs. $13.95. Henrietta Goodman\u2019s third collection, All That Held Us, consists of untitled Petrarchan sonnets that explore relationships among a daughter, her absent father, shamed mother, judgmental and peculiar aunt, and at least one early lover. The family is more dysfunctional than most and so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18,17,19,16],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek","tag-all-that-held-us","tag-henrietta-goodman","tag-lynn-domina","tag-poetry-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","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=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":594,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}