Resin: Poems

Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

by Geri Doran

In poems of quiet force, Geri Doran maps the fragility of human connection and the irreducible fact of grief. From the communal ruptures of Chechnya and Rwanda to the personal dislocations that attend great loss, Resin weighs frailty against responsibility, damage against the desires of the heart. For the poet, a factory fire in late-nineteenth-century Portland becomes a tool for precise "The phases of wood are a means / of dead burn what is built / and gauge your passage / by what is lost." Even in so quotidian an act as the planting of potatoes, Doran's sure, meticulous, and carefully calibrated lines reveal the intensity of our "What carried us from year to year was / potatoes in, potatoes out, like rowing." Variously plaintive, passionate, intuitive, and serious, the voice in Resin tells how the natural world, in both its wildness and regularity, expresses and mediates human longing.You entered me like migraine, left
like migraine a private vacancy.
The darkness outside is great and wild.
Blue plums falling from an old tree
demand we believe in wildness,
fallingness. What's the matter is memory,
shrivel and tart. How in this sweet
aftermath of everything the mind
should settle on plums (blue plums!)
is one of the mysteries. That God
and my window-blinds should conspire
to refract the light to look like plums.
Out in the wild nothing.
-- from "Blue Plums"

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2005

Reviews

[Mackenzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's rare that I have a mixed opinion of a book, and it's even rarer that the mixed feelings have any power either way. But after reading the 2004 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets award winning book, Resin by Geri Doran, I am torn like a weathered cornfield. It is clear the Doran knows how to put together an image-- the book is ripe with beautiful, fierce moments of lucid sight filtered all too consciously by the lyric speaker, utterly aware and in control of the things around her. The opening image of the collection, in fact, speaks the exact inaccuracy which moves me between loving and hating this collection:

The sky fell open to the map of the constellations.
Earlier the snowmelt reconfigured the field.
I tried to describe it, but the field transformed
into the plains of the soul pressed flat.

Here we have an image, nicely constructed, though perhaps a bit cliché to open one's first collection of poem with, but nonetheless. Then a mirroring: the sky with the field, making the image of the sky a bit more interesting. Then the poets annoying intrusion, the speaker's statement of, "hey, here I am, trying to describe everything to you just as it is, but life is just too complicated to do it." If the speaker fails in the telling, that's fine. Let that failure make a statement.

Meanwhile, poems like "Self Portrait as Miranda" are complex in construction, vivid and unstable in a very tasty and scrumptious way. Opening up with a beautiful account of place, "My story begins at sea, in the bitter liquid./ If not, it would begin in Florida, along I-95". Here, Doran creates a beautiful parallel of landscapes, which she carries on throughout the poem quite amazingly, mirroring the dramatic stage of Shakespeare's Tempest with a "lime-green motel" in Florida (could there be a tackier image?) which seems to be relating a separate incident told by the speaker. Brilliant. But she intrudes again, if only for a moment. As if she can't trust the reader to gather the consequences of the images, Doran can't resist pushing the moment just a little too hard and telling the reader just how to interpret the images:

As the crew, in desperate but unspoken straits,
wishes belatedly for a drag on the anchor.
Frequently, we are thus carried along.
Frequently, de profundis, we struggle ashore

to find ourselves, if not stranded, then beached.
We are inclined to be grateful for land.

Are we? Really? She has pushed too hard, breaking the carnal rule in poetry of telling instead of showing. The "we" here is ambiguous, though not in a tantalizing way- in a way that removes the reader from the poem more than it locates him/her in the poem.

The poem of most interest to me is buried at the end of this relatively short, 51 page collection. "The Bitter Season" is written in four sections which are labeled as a sequence of letters, 1-4. Again, Doran places us in a landscape, sparse but populated with ghosts and faceless men and women who exist in isolation, in darkness. Letter III and IV are the most innovative and interesting of the poems in this collection, representing a disjointed and confused voice that seems to be constantly suppressed by some sense of order of "God" evoked throughout (which I just don't buy). In letter III, the images are allowed to explode without interruption, and we are left with a soggy pile of poem by the end, but this time in a good way-- in a way that poet intended, I would guess. The momentum moves into the next section, which is my favorite part of the collection. Letter IV is the closest Doran comes to music; the springs of this little pearl are tightened and it's ready to burst.

While we are again placed in a landscape, it is one of abstract and impossible location. Like the speaker, we are dislocated, but delighted by it. . .the pressure is released just slightly by the language. There is also tension, however, created by the inevitable hang of gravity.

[Gregory Ashe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provocative collection of poems that suggest the frailty of human existence. Lines such as "Believing wasn't always hard./The river forked in three: I knew/truth could go in different ways" (Resin) and "Are we always/measured by what we do not reach?" (Lives of the Gods, Lives of the Saints) strike home to how fragile we are. "I want the god I pray to to be real" (Beyond the 45th Parallel). Don't we all?

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

A key word, one that opened up this entire collection for me, was in the first poem, “Tonight Is a Night Without Birds”: “reconfigured.” In each poem there is a reconfiguration, whether it is of a field, of a television image, of a memory, or of words themselves.

In “Barn Burning,” one of my favorite poems in the collection, which, as the title suggests transforms Faulkner, the language reconfigures itself in sound: “The cold surmise that had begun to dawn, drawn as it yet was / from the uncollected….” In just these opening lines, we have the true rhyme of “dawn” and “drawn” and the splintered rhyme, if you will, of “cold” and “uncollected.” This poem unravels in one long, verbose, sonorous sentence to crescendo at the end with this layered image: “…the man had been passing forever, / had forever passed / back beyond his father’s first lit match to the first match ever lit, / and farther back / to a god’s transgression in passing fire to man, but more than fire— / no, fire’s thieving use.” Through repetition, rephrasing and gerunds, Doran both penetrates and elongates time, trying to connect, as she does throughout this collection, the human with the god, for “ripeness, answering.” The motif of “resin” becomes for me a visceral symbol of this attempt at connection; a faint suggestion in the air of the soul not being severed from the land, of the present not being severed from the past, and of the god being there.

The ultimate reconfiguring occurs in the last poem, “The Cedar of Lebanon,” which gathers and slightly shifts the fragments between sections, as well as words and motifs echoed throughout: soul, knowing/unknowing, passing, the passive/active speaker, trees, and, most evocative for me, “moving water.”

[Sydney Goggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doran's use of language is very unique; somewhat cryptic lines are often the most powerful.
In 'The 45th parallel' she writes,
"Like alchemy, endlessness is a fiction.
We are always halfway to somewhere.
I want more than trasmutation:
I want the God I pray to to be real."

Many of these poems are also rooted in a specific sense of place. Doran's poems take us to Asylum street in Portland, the Mission range mountains in Montana, and a family farm in California, evoking urban and rural life in unique ways.

"Work is the brute thrust of steel,
The cold oblivion of pelting rain", she writes, imagining a construction site in East Portland in the late 19th century, while in the title poem 'Resin', she uses natural imagery as a metaphor for faith:

"Believing wasn't always hard:
the river forked in threes. I knew
truth could go in different ways."

Overall a very compelling collection of poems.

[Leisha Wharfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

She had me crying "Cross the damn cornfield, already!" right from the start. I kept being pulled back, stopped, frustrated by finding myself in an unfortunate place that is not my intended destination. I loved the "Bitter Season" letters, too, but had to work hard to understand them. I have to force myself to emphathize with the angst of it all, when the poems speak to me of not getting there, but of existing pathetically, unhappily, lonely, impotent.

But the poem "Near Grozny, Chechnya" was definitely my favorite. Because if Doran really needs limitations & God to help me feel the woman inside the soldier, the way a weapon could actually be a sack of grain or vice versa, then she can keep on wailing all she wants.

kyrie, kyrie.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let us heap the laurel branches into nice neat piles for Ms. Doran. It seems to me Resin engages in a debate that has continually engaged religious writers: the role of free will. It seems to me the speakers in these poems is very familiar with the power of the will, its potency, but then how is it that that will can so easily engage itself with something that it knows will be self-destructive. Sometimes it feels the will is completely helpless to what it knows it will regret later, and yet it still goes on. Doran covers this idea especially with "Barn Burning," where the conversation becomes even more complicated, as people, collectively, notice the use of fire to destroy something in their lives by some man's will. Yet, in the beginning, that fire was given to a man by God.

[David]

With all the appeals to God, the breathy lines, and the sensual, bodily description, I can see why this book won a Whitman Award. A lot less ecstatic, though, than the award's namesake. Can't recall how many times I saw the word "nothing" in this collection, but it's there.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geri Doran is one of my new favorite poets!