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Paddock
Mary Lou Buschi’s, Paddock, is a poetic palindrome best read in one gulp, shuttling between Greek tragedy and lyric ellipsis…a poetry of desire and despair as the girls refuse to allow the story end.
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2021
4 people want to read
About the author
Mary Lou Buschi
11 books25 followersMary Lou Buschi holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and a Master of Science in Urban Education from Mercy College. She has taught creative writing and literature in the SPS division of New York University. Mary Lou Buschi is the author of 2 full-length poetry collections and 3 chapbooks, most recently, Paddock, through Lily Poetry Review Books(LPR). Her next book, Blue Physics, will be out in January, 2024 through LPR. Mary Lou’s poems have appeared in many literary journals such as Ploughshares (forthcoming), Indiana Review, 2River, The Laurel Review, and Against the Seawall. Currently, she lives in Nyack and teaches in the Bronx. For more information: https://www.maryloubuschi.com
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 6, 2021
This collection is so beautiful and striking. The lyric-play tells a story of two girls in the woods as they search for mother, home, safety. So many details in the emotion, objects, nature and senses while also being every woman's story of stumbling upon danger or being pursued as the object of danger.
Part 1 opens:
Chorus
Once, as there are many,
time stretches infinitely,
2 girls set forth,
to find a mother,
who is She,
who is I,
who is Dear.
Part 1 opens:
Chorus
Once, as there are many,
time stretches infinitely,
2 girls set forth,
to find a mother,
who is She,
who is I,
who is Dear.
April 6, 2022
Playful and tragic, this collection tells a story of absence, of waiting, of seeing, of hiding, of telling stories. The chorus works as a chorus should--observing and commenting without influencing the action of these wise yet naive girls.
As soon as you finish, you want to read it again to see what you missed, to resee what you think you saw, to solve the mystery. Best read from cover to cover in one go, this book is worth your attention. You won't be able to help but give it.
As soon as you finish, you want to read it again to see what you missed, to resee what you think you saw, to solve the mystery. Best read from cover to cover in one go, this book is worth your attention. You won't be able to help but give it.
January 27, 2022
My four stars should not be taken to mean that this is not a good book. I think four stars means “very good,” but then again, my students always thought I was a hard grader. This collection of poems is well-written, sure of itself, and knows what it’s doing. Nevertheless, the pleasure one gets from a work of art, no matter how well-crafted, is to some extent a matter of taste. I’m the kind of reader who prefers narrative and other sure-handed rhetorical structures to guide me through a reading experience. I didn’t tackle Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell until last year, and found it more enjoyable than I expected. My apologies to the Symbolists: I was ruined by Shakespeare and Whitman, by the comfortable rocking of iambs and the rhetorical flourish.
Paddock is governed by dreamlike whispers dropping hints, populated by souls in a kind of limbo working their way in darkness towards, if not a remedy, then some kind of relief. It’s highly lyrical and unresolved. It’s like those dreams I had last night that I’d rather not remember. That’s what it is, and it does its job well.
A collection of poems, it also reads like a surrealistic play with a small cast of ghost-like characters. There are two girls (or two sides of one girl), a chorus, a mother (both dead and alive), and a father in the wings. And then there is the narrative presence itself (I call it that rather than “the speaker” or “narrator” because of its insubstantiality). They struggle with identity, captivity, and violence, but mostly with the problem of memory and how it both shapes and distorts time. While the form of the play/poem and the themes remind some of Waiting for Godot, the sparse dialogue has more logic and less mania; nevertheless, the undercurrent of violence and existential angst resonates.
The book is divided into three parts. The first two set the scene (evanescent as it is), establishing the characters of the girls (such as they are) who search for location and, at times, authority over each other and their situation. Part 3 offers some solid ground in “Night Swimming,” which gives a more narrative account of a stalking and assault on a subject and the loss of her male companion “to the furious oscillation of the bedroom fan” before returning to the detached voices of the girls. A sense accrues that this incident is what has split the consciousness of the narrative presence into these two girls who seek to either overcome their dilemma or to be submerged in an oblivion that might erase it.
The two parent figures might be expected to help protect or rescue the girls from their limbo. There is a “little mother” who is a mother to them and to the narrative presence who might have been a mother if she had not suffered the assault. And there is the father who stands passively by “in the drive under / the shadow of the open door,” and who then “turns to leave her, in the garage / among the boxes of forgotten things” (47). This is the same unmindful father of “Night Swimming” who dispassionately “watched the surgeon / examine the sides of the laceration / for a gate of skin to pull and sew shut” (45), a gate which has slammed shut between the subject’s innocence and, worse, her identity.
There is a brief moment of respite when Girl 2 tells the unnamed subject, “Open your eyes. / The sunlight is a lucid stain / One morning we met.” Although this image recalls the fallen world, there is also a suggestion of acceptance, or perhaps resignation: “There is nothing to be undone” (51), which recalls Godot’s “nothing to be done.” It’s hard to know which would be worse.
The work is ultimately about our modern dilemma of psychic displacement. As the literal child is abandoned, aspects of meaning—identity, coherence, and belonging—are fragmented. In sparse, clear imagery and diction, this dilemma is whispered loud and clear in Buschi’s Paddock.
Paddock is governed by dreamlike whispers dropping hints, populated by souls in a kind of limbo working their way in darkness towards, if not a remedy, then some kind of relief. It’s highly lyrical and unresolved. It’s like those dreams I had last night that I’d rather not remember. That’s what it is, and it does its job well.
A collection of poems, it also reads like a surrealistic play with a small cast of ghost-like characters. There are two girls (or two sides of one girl), a chorus, a mother (both dead and alive), and a father in the wings. And then there is the narrative presence itself (I call it that rather than “the speaker” or “narrator” because of its insubstantiality). They struggle with identity, captivity, and violence, but mostly with the problem of memory and how it both shapes and distorts time. While the form of the play/poem and the themes remind some of Waiting for Godot, the sparse dialogue has more logic and less mania; nevertheless, the undercurrent of violence and existential angst resonates.
The book is divided into three parts. The first two set the scene (evanescent as it is), establishing the characters of the girls (such as they are) who search for location and, at times, authority over each other and their situation. Part 3 offers some solid ground in “Night Swimming,” which gives a more narrative account of a stalking and assault on a subject and the loss of her male companion “to the furious oscillation of the bedroom fan” before returning to the detached voices of the girls. A sense accrues that this incident is what has split the consciousness of the narrative presence into these two girls who seek to either overcome their dilemma or to be submerged in an oblivion that might erase it.
The two parent figures might be expected to help protect or rescue the girls from their limbo. There is a “little mother” who is a mother to them and to the narrative presence who might have been a mother if she had not suffered the assault. And there is the father who stands passively by “in the drive under / the shadow of the open door,” and who then “turns to leave her, in the garage / among the boxes of forgotten things” (47). This is the same unmindful father of “Night Swimming” who dispassionately “watched the surgeon / examine the sides of the laceration / for a gate of skin to pull and sew shut” (45), a gate which has slammed shut between the subject’s innocence and, worse, her identity.
There is a brief moment of respite when Girl 2 tells the unnamed subject, “Open your eyes. / The sunlight is a lucid stain / One morning we met.” Although this image recalls the fallen world, there is also a suggestion of acceptance, or perhaps resignation: “There is nothing to be undone” (51), which recalls Godot’s “nothing to be done.” It’s hard to know which would be worse.
The work is ultimately about our modern dilemma of psychic displacement. As the literal child is abandoned, aspects of meaning—identity, coherence, and belonging—are fragmented. In sparse, clear imagery and diction, this dilemma is whispered loud and clear in Buschi’s Paddock.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews