Fretwork

by Lynne Thompson

Poetry. "With Lynne Thompson's new collection FRETWORK, one feels spurred on by the cherished care of the American emigrant story, which is to say, the buttressing and fortifying of the dream with all of its inglorious and joyous plots and twists. In mapping her supreme truths, imaginatively rendered here in measured lines, embedded in the familial tales, and felt music of her people, she embraces that light that emanates from language that aligns memories to myth. This is a masterful collection; one cannot help but surrender to the calling of its cadences that resonate widely into the 21st century."--Major Jackson

Genres: Poetry

105 pages, Paperback

Published February 7, 2019

Reviews

[Lee Rossi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lynne Thompson’s forceful new book, Fretwork, is a verse narrative about race and other forms of marginality. An orphan girl, born in Los Angeles, is adopted by immigrants from the Caribbean. Like her parents (biological and adoptive) she is a mixture of several races, all of which are elided into the one word “Negro”. Her story is also story of the American Century, and of the many struggles to realize a more just and equitable society. As an adoptee she is Cinderella, as a dark-skinned girl she is the Ugly Duckling, but she is thoughtful and bright and learns quickly. From her adoptive parents she acquires a knowledge and taste for the culture of the Lesser Antilles, for gumbo and calypso. From her public school she learns about how people like her have been erased from history: whereas “little white girls [are] boasting of County Cork or about a Seder their forefathers prepared in what’s now called Prague,” both of which places are “easy to find on McNally’s,” she is unable to find St. Vincent or Bequia on the map.

She tells her own story, but she also tells her parents’s stories: travelling without the Green Book, sitting in the balcony with Okies, her “nutmeg-colored” dad playing cricket in Griffith Park in his all-whites. Thompson has a taste for forms with a repetition compulsion—villanelle, pantoum & sestina—reminding the reader that culture is a way of saying the same thing again and again, the point being for people to give up wanting what they want and instead take what society has to give, which for people of color is usually less and nothing.

Yet there is insouciance, an admirable resistance in all her characters, as they struggle with the limits society would place on them. In earlier times, the poor and the marginalized would not have been able to tell their stories, but thankfully we live in a different age, where writers like Lynne Thompson show us the dignity and pathos, the strength and resilience of such lives.