Bone Pagoda

by Susan Tichy

Poetry. "In these incisive poems, Susan Tichy explores Vietnam - the war and the country. She has a keen eye, and her perceptual clusters are widened and deepened by sharp moments of recognition. 'Someone had drawn red circles / where his eyes would be,' she writes of a man who begs on the steps of a pagoda. Just as the circles 'make a place to look,' so these poems make a haunting place from which to see" - Arthur Sze. "Language tracks loss, both personal and cultural, making of her poetics the discovery of 'truth in ash'" - Michael Heller. Susan Tichy teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at George Mason University, and when she is not teaching, she lives in a ghost town in the Colorado Rockies.

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Susan Tichy is author of Gallowglass (forthcoming in 2010 from Ahsahta Press), A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan, 1988), The Hands in Exile (Random House, 1983), a National Poetry Series selection, and Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta Press, 2007). Her work has been recognized by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, by a Kayden Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Most recently, her poems have won awards from Indiana Review, Runes, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, which selected her poem "Stork" for the 2007 Chad Walsh Prize. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for Practice: New Writing + Art.

"

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetics of the book resists closure and resists representing the Vietnam war in brackets, as a done thing. Interrogations of language, memories encounters with artifacts of war, incorporated voices—from J. Edgar Hoover to Daniel Berrigan and George Oppen—are densely layered over one another in Tichy’s couplets. At times these elements become indistinct from one another, forming a highly volatile, complex present:

He said:

‘The burning of paper instead of children’
Homemade napalm draft board lawn

That ‘some property has no right to exist’

Bundles of ash, the burned draft records
‘Trundled into court like infant coffins’

And she:

‘I was a peasant girl, I had never set foot’
In such head-on encounter

Fighting with what words contain
Or fighting in, as

‘Whose daughter is that skinny girl’

A visceral dread haunted my reading of these poems. References to burning bodies and a rocket tearing a man in two are worked in throughout the book. Yet Bone Pagoda is not about bludgeoning us with the horrors of war, as some hardbitten, laconic war poetry can be. The poems enact their own resistance to this in several ways, the foremost, for me, being the sheer musicality of the tightly wound couplets:

Slave born in the master’s house

Walked into a web
With a dead spider dead center

Penny under the door o
War no more o

The first line is repeated you
Honeycomb and mutter me

If you are not war what are you? say
Brass pages that do not turn
My internal fortress sounds like this

The way, among all the full and slant rhymes, stresses bunch then momentarily diffuse with a slackened line is tremendous.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I still need to reread this book as I was mostly left with an impression and not much in the way of articulable thought. I can say that I started out not liking it that much, but as I often find to be the case with good poetry that challenges my desire for conventional syntax, I ended up really enjoying the voice and the mood of this book.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite line: "a grammar is a gun." I heard her read at AWP and it was kick-ass.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I need to spend more time with this book. I didn't read it as carefully as I probably should have.