Her poem recognizing the end of childhood, "A Postcard," plays with these concepts, and does it very well.
"that day my dolls did not return my kiss.
In their blank eyes all flashing evidence
sank to lack-lustre glass; about me spilled
the shrouding light of a new genesis.
No hand lay palm to mine in innocence."
I like these early poems of Harwood's the way I liked Edna St. Vincent Millay when I was a girl, making up magic and mists and all-night rides on the ferry when young and merry. We all make it up the way we make up God in His heaven. And what could be more pleasing than Harwood's poem "O Could One Write As One Makes Love?" With the assertion, "then language might put by at last/ its coy elisions and inept/ withdrawals, yields, and yielding cast / aside like useless clothes the crust/ of worn and shabby use, and trust/ its candour to the urgent mind". I almost want to believe all's right with the world too, if beauty can make it so, and friendship, as in the fine poem "An Impromptu for Ann Jennings".
But I like Harwood best when she questions, gets slightly edgy. Although "slightly" is about as far as it gets. The sharpness, however, is welcome. "In the Park", "Burning Sappho" and "Suburban Sonnet" are classic poems that deal with the anger of a housewife and mother who finds raising a family was not what she expected. They must have been brave poems to write at the time, especially the closing words from "In the Park" when the mother thinks on her children, and says "They have eaten me alive". Another good, strange poem on the theme of maternal ambivalence is "Night Thoughts: Baby & Demon", with its off-key nursery rhyme stanzas, its little dance on the dark side.
While there is much to admire in Harwood's work, including her sense of craft, I must confess that I live in a time when no one is really sure God is in His heaven. And all is not right with the world. So that when I read the following lines, from a poem called "Pastorals", I became angry.
"Why does the body harbour
no memory of pain,
while a word, a name unspoken
in the mind cuts to the bone?"
The body certainly does hold memory of pain. Victims of war crimes would agree. I recently read an article in The New Yorker which described the lives of child amputees in Sierra Leone. In many cases, their hands had been cut off by soldiers, or their hands and part of their arms. Often, the cut had not been even, and the limb dangled by a shred of skin, or a sinew, for hours. The job had to be completed by relatives, friends, or neighbors in a village.
What are the words to describe a hand dangling from a shred of skin? There but no longer there? I would, however, say the pain of those children was real. The obscenity of how they came by that pain created that reality, and if language does not acknowledge how a human body suffers, I have no use for it.
And in the end, I find Harwood's world of middle-class complacency suffocating, her salons and concerts, endless visits of nice earnest people chewing on mythology, and pastorals. Her crashing bore Professors Krote and Eisenbart. Her safe, dull stanzas, but for a very few poems - fit to be taught anywhere, that change nothing. Her sanitized world, and derivative art. For if she means well, so do many people who have written in the past. It's not the words that please us that count. It's poetry that cuts to the bone.
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, September 2003)
