Mrs. Dumpty (Volume 1998)

by Chana Bloch

The poems in Mrs. Dumpty are about “a great fall,” the dissolution of a long and loving marriage, but they are not simply documentary or elegiac. What interests Chana Bloch is the inner how we are formed by our losses and our parents’ losses, how we learn what we need to know through our intuitions and confusions, how we deny and delay and finally discover who we are.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 1998

About the author

Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book knocked my sox off. How does she manage to write with such control, yet such emotion, in a disintegrating situation? The marriage disintegrates under the pressure of something dreadfully wrong with the husband. TBI? Alzheimers? Mental illness? I must admit I'm curious just to be curious, and maybe there were more clues in the poems that I just missed. Nevertheless, I was sucked in to the point where I read the whole book from start to finish in one session, something I rarely do with poetry.

[Lisa M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last weekend I was searching for the book I needed for my thesis. It was the key source I needed, and I really didn't want to have to buy it. My department has two bookshelves that are free to students. I found the book I needed there.

The next day I went to my favorite local used bookstore. I needed a poetry collection to read. I have a hard time finding the poetry books I put on my to-read list; people don't read a lot of poetry, and I can want obscure titles. Yet, I found this book, which has been on my to-read list for over a year. It seems the universe wanted to help me find books this week.

I am happy it did. This book was great. Bloch has a clear control over form and sentence structure. Sometimes I wished she'd stop experimenting with run-on sentences, but I think that was my only structure complaint. Or my only complaint about the whole book, really.

This book is courageous and shockingly honest. It details a couple's divorce without hiding. Chana writes about years spent wavering between happiness and unhappiness, not leaving her marriage because of the status quo. She writes about moments where she remembers the past with happiness and contrasts them with moments when her husband becomes extremely controlling and terrifies their children. She reflects on how a separation may affect her children very openly and vulnerably. Despite what we read about her husband, she also portrays him as a complex character with a difficult background. He is eventually fleshed out fully. Both parties are complex; her husband doesn't become a mere object of hate. I really appreciated this.

This type of open work makes me wonder how her ex-husband and children reacted to this. It is so brutal. I have often wondered the same thing with my own writing. I will certainly read more of Bloch's work, if not to learn about the juicy details. Seriously, if you're a gossip, read this. You get the inner details about the destruction of a marriage.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never read this entire book through until now, and when I did, it came alive as an entity the way a music album has an integrity as a whole work of art that is a sum of its parts. The poems took me from one crucial moment to the next of a marriage that becomes a divorce in the course of the book. It was very sad, and painful, especially since I was an inadvertent witness to some of the events in the book while they were happening when I lived in the East Bay in the mid-late 1990s.

[Annburnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very touching book. It is about marriage and its falling apart. It is a book everyone can identify with.