Ghost Signs

by Sonya Taaffe

A lantern hangs for the ghosts, both desolate and numinous. The white road and the black river run down into the dark and return again. In this collection of thirty-six poems and one story, Rhysling Award-winning poet Sonya Taaffe traces the complex paths between the dead, memory, and living. A two-part cycle written over the course of seven years, “Ghost Signs” leads the reader through the underworld of myth to the hauntings of the present, where the shades of Sappho, Alan Turing, and Ludwig Wittgenstein exist alongside Charon, Dido, and The War of the Worlds. “The Boatman’s Cure” follows a haunted woman and a dead man as they embark on a road trip through coastal New England, an exorcism at its end. Sharply imagined, deeply personal, Taaffe’s work in Ghost Signs is at once an act of remembrance and release.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fantasy

84 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Francesca Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wanderings of Odysseus could end only if he carried one of his ship’s oars far enough inland that people, knowing nothing of the sea, would mistake it for a winnowing fan. At that place, if he offered sacrifice to Poseidon, he would find peace. In “The Boatman’s Cure,” the short story that caps Sonya Taaffe’s poetry collection Ghost Signs, that oar, or perhaps it’s Charon’s own, has turned up on Massachusetts’s North Shore, in the hands of a ghost. Delia Tabor, who has kept company with ghosts for many years, has need of it.

The poems in Ghost Signs are augeries for this story, but—as is the way with most augueries—you will only recognize this after the fact. If you read the story first and then the poems, you’ll hear the language of the story in the poems, see the hints. If you read the poems first, you’ll understand what’s happening in “The Boatman’s Cure” as the story unfolds.

“Prologue: Kalligeneia 2012” prepares you:

you fell in love with Charon, coming out of the dark
with his half-light smile, taking tickets for the river’s underground


The story starts with Delia in a car with the dead guardian of the oar:

He must have had a faun’s face once, long before he died, when that cross-cut mouth could still smile without turning in on itself, before he hid those wide-set eyes behind glasses so heavy, passing views of sky and saltgrass and green-darkening trees flowed off them like the bend of a windshield.

“Anakatabasis” offers this:


Hades is where I open my eyes,
the white river flashing
in empty windowpanes,
a coin in each mouthful
to close my throat

Delia, as I mentioned, sees ghosts:

That last, feverish summer before she left the no-man’s-land of her mother’s house for Berkeley and all the degrees that she never would use, a codemaker from Brixton sat every night at the end of Delia’s bed and said nothing as streetlight and the setting moon made silver coins of his glasses, cloud-wrack of his schoolboy-fair hair. Sometimes he had a manila folder in his hands, a coat folded over his lap; he was dappled with his death-marks like a breaking wave.

He’s not the only one—she also sees “the boy from Miyakojima, still clutching his torn net with mulberry leaves in his tsunami-black hair, the rag-shod girl who had died at Riga with a pistol in her hand … the painter with her laudanum cough … the Boston bootlegger”—and there are others. She has helped some on with song, but it doesn’t work for all of them.

“Clear” says a little more of what it’s like for Delia:

Say she calls the dead
only if copper calls lightning
or north calls geese …
Say she will draw the ghosts from you
only as time draws tears
or soldiers draw fire

The ghost with the oar doesn’t want to release it to Delia:

The oar was clapped to his chest like a childhood toy, the green-shaded lamp among the desk’s bric-a-brac of pens and papers a third-degree glare from the way his fingers folded over his eyes

“I can’t let it go,” he tells Delia. “It makes things safe for me.” And so he comes with her, back to the house that was her home in childhood. “Catullus V.101” says the rest:

Over strange seas, Ulysses returned home
and I came here to a windswept family grave
to offer the last, least things the dead are owed
and words that work nothing, no answers in the ash.
All that you were, a swing of fortune’s wheel
exchanged for silence and cinders, not fairly, brother,
and all I can repay are the hand-me-downs of law,
the grief-gift, as wet as my eyes with weeping,
to last for all time, brother, greeting and goodbye.

How “The Boatman’s Cure” takes up this theme, you will have to discover by reading the story, but I can assure you it’s moving, cathartic, and true.

[Amal El-Mohtar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly magnificent. Review forthcoming at Lightspeed in March; meantime, here's a review of "The Boatman's Cure," the novelette in it: www.tor.com/blogs/2015/01/rich-and-st...

[Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghost Signs is a very good, thoughtful collection of poems, and I especially liked the story at the end. It tied together and unified the poems from the first section in a way that was incredibly beautiful, and the prose was extremely lyrical.

[Giovana · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5