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A Walk through the Memory Palace
Poems by Pamela Johnson Parker; winner of the 2009 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest.
- GenresPoetry
28 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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December 4, 2019This chapbook is a steamy one, full of hot weather and heat-slick slugs, love, sexual desire, family relationships, the body and iced tea. It teems with color and flora, and I almost wished I’d read it in summer rather than a German snowstorm. Parker is a poet obviously entranced by sound, hepped up on nature and attuned to emotion.
I went two ways on the collection. There was a lot that I enjoyed, including many images and the use of sound. I appreciated the subject matter and I admired the craftmanship, its attention to linebreaks and structure. On the other hand, there were a couple things that weren’t my cup of meat. I’ll touch on them below.
The first striking image in the book occurs in the first poem “78 RPM.” Here, an adolescent couple, sometimes chaperoned by an aunt, are hanging out on the porch listening to Billie Holiday. The poem is slow, in a good way, also because it’s hot out, and there’s an audible undergurgle of teenage longing, and all the senses are engaged. Halfway through, there’s a suggestive image of the needle as it drags along the vinyl record.
“The stylus traces
Its sapphire finger
Down the record’s groove,
As he skates a single
Finger along the sun-
Bleached down of your
Arm”
Not that you wouldn’t have gotten it, but these lines clearly evoke the vagina, like a fuzzy groove in a record, like a closed purse about to be plumbed, and BOOM! it is a very sexy poem.
My favorite poem in the book is probably “Breasts,” the last one. Usually I’d scrunch my nose up at a poem about breasts, the poor things have been so romantized and adored and exploited for literary purposes. Parker doesn’t ignore the symbolic baggage – nurturers, sirens, cancer factories – but she handles the subject well, and in all those guises. The poem is broken into six parts - Figures A to F –every segment prefaced like a text book illustration, as in “Figure D. Table showing statistical survey of definite tendency toward the development of breast cancer among family members.”
Figure A shows a woman inspecting her breasts in a mirror. It’s an intimate shot, adoring but respectful. Very tactile, very sensual. Figure B is similar, showing a woman examining her breasts laid back in bed with the fingers circling the breast “inward like a nautilus,” an image I liked a lot.
Figure C is the absence of breast after a masectomy. The body in this segment comes across as hide, as material, a bother, a wound. The scars are like zippers and the chest is disturbingly nippleless.
Figure D harks back to childhood where a girl observes her grandmother’s wobbly breasts, and is glad to be yet undeveloped. But the tree from which she observes is “weighted down with a pearly spray of bloom,” and the child shakes the branches knowing some day she’ll “sag like gran.”
Figure E is my favorite part of the poem. The subject is the speaker’s boyfriend, a pathologist working in cancer research. I like this segment for its distance, its clinicicity and it’s humorous last line, where the boyfriend tells the speaker, “You’ve got great lungs.”
Figure F has the speaker up late nursing her daughter when she receives a call from her sister with the news that the sister has breast cancer. This is the emotional apex of the poem and while it packs a punch, I thought it could have served it up more subtly. As it’s written, the speaker learns of her sister’s cancer while clutching her baby to her breast. Nevertheless, I liked “Breasts.” It’s an honest poem that works like a 360 degree examination.
Parker pays close attention to sound, and, regarding structure, she is a solid craftswoman. If I have a quibble with the book, it’s that sometimes it reaches too far for me for what is traditionally considered “poetic,” for example with alliteration, such as the “feathering fronds of seafern” in the poem “Engendering.”
In the same way it brings scrolls of beautiful language, which, while pleasurable, don’t seem to serve to convey somehing beyond themselves. The poem “Unreal Gardens with Toads in Them” begins “Today’s listless, nothing to / enumerate — no light / in its hues of jade, and no white- / green heads of hydrangea, / no dark hearts of redbud leaves, / no celadon of the sun- / lit maples, no sea-green treefrog’s / back with each inclusion / of amber and topaz (though he’s / never seen the sea, why / not sea-green?), no silver-tipped spears of lavender now / poking up in the herbal bed —“
By that point, I wanted a reference point and felt I didn’t I have one. This is, of course, a matter of personal taste. Parker’s chapbook took first place in the ezine Quarrtsiluni’s Chapbook Contest, judged by Dinty Moore, who said “this poet sees through the obvious to something radiant on the other side, painting a startling portrait of an intimate world.”
This chapbook is both a physical fact as well as available entirely at this lovely site: http://memorypalacewalk.com/new/
I went two ways on the collection. There was a lot that I enjoyed, including many images and the use of sound. I appreciated the subject matter and I admired the craftmanship, its attention to linebreaks and structure. On the other hand, there were a couple things that weren’t my cup of meat. I’ll touch on them below.
The first striking image in the book occurs in the first poem “78 RPM.” Here, an adolescent couple, sometimes chaperoned by an aunt, are hanging out on the porch listening to Billie Holiday. The poem is slow, in a good way, also because it’s hot out, and there’s an audible undergurgle of teenage longing, and all the senses are engaged. Halfway through, there’s a suggestive image of the needle as it drags along the vinyl record.
“The stylus traces
Its sapphire finger
Down the record’s groove,
As he skates a single
Finger along the sun-
Bleached down of your
Arm”
Not that you wouldn’t have gotten it, but these lines clearly evoke the vagina, like a fuzzy groove in a record, like a closed purse about to be plumbed, and BOOM! it is a very sexy poem.
My favorite poem in the book is probably “Breasts,” the last one. Usually I’d scrunch my nose up at a poem about breasts, the poor things have been so romantized and adored and exploited for literary purposes. Parker doesn’t ignore the symbolic baggage – nurturers, sirens, cancer factories – but she handles the subject well, and in all those guises. The poem is broken into six parts - Figures A to F –every segment prefaced like a text book illustration, as in “Figure D. Table showing statistical survey of definite tendency toward the development of breast cancer among family members.”
Figure A shows a woman inspecting her breasts in a mirror. It’s an intimate shot, adoring but respectful. Very tactile, very sensual. Figure B is similar, showing a woman examining her breasts laid back in bed with the fingers circling the breast “inward like a nautilus,” an image I liked a lot.
Figure C is the absence of breast after a masectomy. The body in this segment comes across as hide, as material, a bother, a wound. The scars are like zippers and the chest is disturbingly nippleless.
Figure D harks back to childhood where a girl observes her grandmother’s wobbly breasts, and is glad to be yet undeveloped. But the tree from which she observes is “weighted down with a pearly spray of bloom,” and the child shakes the branches knowing some day she’ll “sag like gran.”
Figure E is my favorite part of the poem. The subject is the speaker’s boyfriend, a pathologist working in cancer research. I like this segment for its distance, its clinicicity and it’s humorous last line, where the boyfriend tells the speaker, “You’ve got great lungs.”
Figure F has the speaker up late nursing her daughter when she receives a call from her sister with the news that the sister has breast cancer. This is the emotional apex of the poem and while it packs a punch, I thought it could have served it up more subtly. As it’s written, the speaker learns of her sister’s cancer while clutching her baby to her breast. Nevertheless, I liked “Breasts.” It’s an honest poem that works like a 360 degree examination.
Parker pays close attention to sound, and, regarding structure, she is a solid craftswoman. If I have a quibble with the book, it’s that sometimes it reaches too far for me for what is traditionally considered “poetic,” for example with alliteration, such as the “feathering fronds of seafern” in the poem “Engendering.”
In the same way it brings scrolls of beautiful language, which, while pleasurable, don’t seem to serve to convey somehing beyond themselves. The poem “Unreal Gardens with Toads in Them” begins “Today’s listless, nothing to / enumerate — no light / in its hues of jade, and no white- / green heads of hydrangea, / no dark hearts of redbud leaves, / no celadon of the sun- / lit maples, no sea-green treefrog’s / back with each inclusion / of amber and topaz (though he’s / never seen the sea, why / not sea-green?), no silver-tipped spears of lavender now / poking up in the herbal bed —“
By that point, I wanted a reference point and felt I didn’t I have one. This is, of course, a matter of personal taste. Parker’s chapbook took first place in the ezine Quarrtsiluni’s Chapbook Contest, judged by Dinty Moore, who said “this poet sees through the obvious to something radiant on the other side, painting a startling portrait of an intimate world.”
This chapbook is both a physical fact as well as available entirely at this lovely site: http://memorypalacewalk.com/new/
March 11, 2012
A memory palace is not an actual place. It is, rather, a technique for recalling memories.
Memory is tricky, elusive, and often not an accurate representation of the actual object, event, or emotion. Johnson Parker’s word choices are quiet, often sensual, lacking the in-your-face attitude of much modern poetry. Thus, the reader enters the poem by recalling and developing our own memories. Many of these poems utilize multiply-indented lines, which leave enough white space for the line to breathe, to expand.
My favorite poem in this collection is “78 RPM.” Composed of 3 short line stanzas, the poem is spot-on in the way it captures a young couple discovering love and lust while listening to a record. As somebody who grew up with vinyl, I could immediately identify with the images of the needle tracing the groove in the record. The opening lines,
Dusk and three minutes/Of fading light, set the scene. Just as things heat up, the boy’s aunt brings them glasses of iced tea, and the young girl realizes the inherent danger of listening to music alone with a boy:
You’ll have to keep your
Knees pressed tight together.
As the light dims.
As the record changes.
The first section of the poem “Tattoos,” Ink, is filled with rich, warm colors, and the second section, Canvas, transitions to a couple in a motel room, ostensibly talking about his tattoos. Johnson Parker gives us a vivid image of a metaphorical tattoo:
Our window, through blinds
that won’t quite shut(one slat slants
diagonal) printing
its ladder of light
all the way down your back.
Toward the end of the closing poem, “Breasts,” Johnson Parker describes a phone call from her sister, informing her that the sister has stage IV breast cancer. Again, the word choices and images are ideal, the scene immediate and real.
Between
Our phones, there’s the roar
Like the ocean’s, as
If we were holding shells up
To our ears, a song
Not unlike the blood’s.
Although this book only contains 10 poems, they are poems to be savored, thought over, and re-read. I look forward to reading more of Johnson Parker’s work.
Memory is tricky, elusive, and often not an accurate representation of the actual object, event, or emotion. Johnson Parker’s word choices are quiet, often sensual, lacking the in-your-face attitude of much modern poetry. Thus, the reader enters the poem by recalling and developing our own memories. Many of these poems utilize multiply-indented lines, which leave enough white space for the line to breathe, to expand.
My favorite poem in this collection is “78 RPM.” Composed of 3 short line stanzas, the poem is spot-on in the way it captures a young couple discovering love and lust while listening to a record. As somebody who grew up with vinyl, I could immediately identify with the images of the needle tracing the groove in the record. The opening lines,
Dusk and three minutes/Of fading light, set the scene. Just as things heat up, the boy’s aunt brings them glasses of iced tea, and the young girl realizes the inherent danger of listening to music alone with a boy:
You’ll have to keep your
Knees pressed tight together.
As the light dims.
As the record changes.
The first section of the poem “Tattoos,” Ink, is filled with rich, warm colors, and the second section, Canvas, transitions to a couple in a motel room, ostensibly talking about his tattoos. Johnson Parker gives us a vivid image of a metaphorical tattoo:
Our window, through blinds
that won’t quite shut(one slat slants
diagonal) printing
its ladder of light
all the way down your back.
Toward the end of the closing poem, “Breasts,” Johnson Parker describes a phone call from her sister, informing her that the sister has stage IV breast cancer. Again, the word choices and images are ideal, the scene immediate and real.
Between
Our phones, there’s the roar
Like the ocean’s, as
If we were holding shells up
To our ears, a song
Not unlike the blood’s.
Although this book only contains 10 poems, they are poems to be savored, thought over, and re-read. I look forward to reading more of Johnson Parker’s work.
January 6, 2010
A slim volume of marvelous poems by Parker, this book won the Qarrtsiluni Poetry Chapbook Prize.
These poems, varying in subject from love to koi to bamboo to breast cancer, are very accessible and yet surprisingly complex, both in the range of emotions expressed and in their artful construction.
Two selections quite literally took my breath away: "Tatoos" and "Breasts". I also especially enjoyed "78 RPM" and "Some Yellow Tulips".
Really, I can't praise this little book highly enough. Poetry is difficult for me and a sadly neglected area of my reading life; Parker inspires me not only to re-read these, but to explore other works as well.
These poems, varying in subject from love to koi to bamboo to breast cancer, are very accessible and yet surprisingly complex, both in the range of emotions expressed and in their artful construction.
Two selections quite literally took my breath away: "Tatoos" and "Breasts". I also especially enjoyed "78 RPM" and "Some Yellow Tulips".
Really, I can't praise this little book highly enough. Poetry is difficult for me and a sadly neglected area of my reading life; Parker inspires me not only to re-read these, but to explore other works as well.
September 27, 2009
'Perhaps the worst of absence is return.' telling of longing most pronounced by distance, whether of bodies or the ethereal, keenly touched by the familiarity of memory.
December 26, 2009
Here's a review: http://somewhereinnj.blogspot.com/200...
I hope some of you like these little songs.
I hope some of you like these little songs.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews