The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Book Review

Watermark
By Jacquelyn Pope.
Marsh Hawk Press, 2005. $12.95.
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt, M.D. (Laurie_rosenblatt@dfci.harvard.edu).

Watermark by Jacquelyn Pope won the 2004 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize.  Pope’s poetry is striking, direct, and true.   “Alice, After” begins:

                        I should be glad for the roof,
                        shuddering with rain,
                        for the wool pulled warm
                        over my eyes.  I should be
                        glad for the old walls
                        that keep me inside—
                        but I want to be sweet-talked
                        into something else,
                        want to be surprised....(4)
                       
This is poetry that touches on despair, identity, history, and hope.  It’s a poetry of dead-ends and new beginnings that catches a self and a voice in transition against the sights, habits, and smells of Amsterdam.  Pope’s language has energy and mystery with quiet passion attaining the directness of incantation or prayer. Here’s the start of “Woman in Translation”:

                        Weeks, months, seasons:
                        each darkness fit to paper,
                        cut to size. Mirror
                        in the window, make
                        a measure of me.
                        Lend me hope, hand
                        on heart, a folded fan,
                        a flower.   Bitumen bloom,
                        my name at the end
                        of the letter.  End of the year:
                        the streets are feathered,
                        red, fired out.  Nothing I see
                        makes a sound.  Let me
                        make a start.  I will
                        stand in the middle,
                        rest in the middle,
                        of this soft fresh tide:

She ends the poem with a direct statement reflecting the sense of having disappointed followed by a series of images that serve to fill out a portrait of feeling (rather than a narrative) that brings us to an understanding of the speaker’s coming to grips with a relationship, a language, with a life attempted that falls short.  But even the failures are not without significance:
                       
                        I have fallen out of favor,
                        out of phrases, learned
                        the fluency of shadows
                        moving deeper, downward
                        in the dark.  Let me
                        be written into this world:
                        something of substance
                        behind me now. (6)

These poems are technically accomplished and interesting.  Pope uses enjambment, rhythm, and sound as gestures to reinforce the speaker’s character, conflict, and mood.  Her controlled tone preserves emotional complexity and gives the voice integrity while speaking about identity, relationship, crisis and transition.

Pope’s poetry is also replete with haunting phrases and lines that bring to mind glittering mosaic tiles. For example in “Raddled” is “bruise of a buttonhole,/ the gap where I gather”; from “In the Bonehouse,” emerges,” “a stitch of skin gave shape/to the hollowed form I fit;” or, in “Furiouser and Furiouser,” we find, “I’ll swing out, tipsy and shifting,/beggared by my rounds/ and the curse of cowardice.” She shades feeling and event into being rather than using stark outlines and detailed events. About mid-way through “Watermark” is the poem entitled, “Goodbye to All That,”

                        Good night, goodbye,
                        I undo all I’ve said and done,

                        this life unlived, depending,
                        all the evenings spent upstanding

                        (wallflower, dormouse, doorflower)
                        given the same going-over

                        no matter how scarce, withdrawn.
                        No matter the shifts from side

                        to side, the sworn elisions,
                        swallowed sighs: they read me

                        the riot act, loud-mouthing words
                        I learned by heart.  And learned

                        it’s luck like this, disguised
                        as luck, that’s led to life

                        in corners, days declined.
                        Now my days are done for—

                        I turned, X’d them aside.  Time’s
                        worn through, and I’ve resigned. (50)

For both occasional and compulsive poetry readers, Watermark is a worthwhile journey.  Get it.  See how and where Pope goes from here.

Published: February 11, 2008