A SLIGHT THING, HAPPINESS, Joan Baranow. Saint Julian Press, Houston, Texas, 2022, 70 pages, $18, paperback. www.saintjulianpress.com
In A Slight
Thing, Happiness, Joan Baranow bears witness to the fragile nature of
happiness with a linguistic lens that celebrates the beauty found along its
spectrum. It is the “small things with or without wings” that Baranow most
celebrates, telling their stories with striking images that prowl and haunt
this collection of passionately-crafted poems.
Divided
into four parts, the opening poem of each section could serve as its title. The
first, “That Summer,” sets the stage for a baby—conceived, we later learn, with
a surgical procedure. The poem opens with images of uncertainty:
Cobalt.
Rust. A heave of fog
sliding
across the sand.
Fog
in the manzanita.
A
flower like goldenrod put forth
its
yellow pearls.
We
posed nearby, where the wooden steps
left
the parking lot.
The
camera lens kept the edges in. Ocean. Cliffs.
A
coastal summer. Before the baby
had
being.
The
seeds inside the shrubbery were neutral.
These lines describe both an actual
and an emotional landscape—“Fog in the manzanita” points toward the uncertainty
of would-be parents “posing nearby,” their world view framing and focusing on a
limited view, while “seeds inside” a human body only obey natural law. Other
poems in this section trace the beginning and development of the child in vivid
and gorgeous language. “Feeding the Son Born Premature,” the final poem in this
section, is emblematic of Baranow’s insistently energetic diction, alive with growing
tension and partial resolution. It opens with:
…the story
about
the starving Chinese family
in
which the father chewed the few
grains
left, then put them
into
his baby’s mouth.
I
tell my son, “It’s good, good,”
and
move his hand to the fork,
his
solid 2-year weight on my lap.
And then the closing lines reveal
the paradox of living in the present, aware that life can be taken at any
moment:
Once
when home he slept so deeply
I
couldn’t wake him
and
shook him the way I shouldn’t,
shouting
his urgent name
until
he opened his aggrieved eyes.
And
so I watch, as I must,
as
he eats the gold rice
glazed
with fat, make sure he has
as
much as he wants.
Section II begins with “An Old Story” about
Snow White’s stepmother ingesting a heart—“Each piece tough and delicious, her
body enter[ing] mine”—presaging the theme of death inherent in birth and life. In “Close Calls,” Baranow’s five-month-old
falls face down onto the floor, her four-year-old falls into a swimming pool:
“Close calls, the fractions of accidents, / the young man brushing broken /
windshield glass from his jacket, / the surgeon who nearly nicks the femoral
nerve, / even I, seven months gone, days away from seizure, / saved by the OB
who said, ‘It’s time / to get that baby out.’ Close calls.” Baranow’s virtuosic
word choices are again on display in these closing lines:
What
are they but rehearsals for the real thing?
Under
the rush of gratitude,
of
falling to our shaking knees,
we
know—there will be a next time
without
reprieve or rescue, the cancer
will
split its capsule, the driver won’t swerve.
On
that day prayers are dust in your mouth.
You’ll
remember Job’s wife, curled weeping
on
a frayed rug in a corner of that cursed room.
The prayers as “dust in your mouth”
is a layered image, bringing to language’s surface the burying of us all—“dust
to dust”—and the return of the “frayed rug” brings back the earlier image of
the infant falling onto the floor rug in the same way that humanity in
its infancy fell from grace in Eden and bore the curse of death.
In these poems, death may result from tragic human error or natural causes, or
a combination of both. In “Diagnosis,” death “puncture[s] from inside, / tumors
escalating / like pent gasses through O-rings, / organs exploding under the
skin.” In both space craft and the hapless woman, death fully blooms: “Nothing
to do but drive home / and make the terrible calls.”
Section III
returns readers to the beauty of beauty (rather than Rilke’s beauty as “only
the beginning of terror we are barely able to endure”) with the light-hearted
poem, “Things He Said”—he being a son: “He said he’d run out of dream power. /
He’d see if I had any extra. / He wanted to floor his room with sod / to plant
bamboo / and why couldn’t he spread sod on the floor?” The poem ends with humorous
lines spoken by the child beyond his years: “When his father said to watch out
for those / Paris Hilton types, / he said, So you have some experience with
that? // He said call me Inside the Rainbow.” The son who speaks in “Beautiful”
also demonstrates a child’s ability to perceive beauty in what we adults take
for granted. The child’s Blakean “doors of perception” have not yet clouded
over.
Section
IV begins with “Traveling Through,” bringing forward all of the trials and
difficulties in the midst of happinesses and resolves—not into ultimate bliss
or even hope, but rather into acceptance. In “Sanctuary,” Baranow hints at how
she learns from her mother’s efforts to find happiness: “You chose a place hard
to get to—23 miles to the gulf from Old Town, past longleaf pines and wiregrass
marsh.” After a description of the sparse interior—“Two rooms and a bathroom up
on stilts. A hot pot for coffee”—and an ominous exterior full of alien beauty
“with skittery palmetto bugs under the garbage bin. Spanish moss snapped on
bald cypress, crepe myrtle, cabbage palms, your own curve of canal, a single
banana tree. Rattlesnakes and cottonmouths. Magnolia blossoms like white doves
nested among rusty leaves”—Baranow brings the poem to the climax of the book:
You
believed people were made for happiness. My last visit there, you kept your
cheer despite the growth, undiagnosed. After you died, we found Christmas gifts
still wrapped among the clutter.
“Watching the Red
Squirrels” underscores the main theme of the book, that we must live in the
present because that’s all we have, and the beauty we find there includes
happiness as one of the most precarious of states, albeit one of the best.
Spending an afternoon with relatives, watching with amusement a squirrel
attempting to get into a bird feeder, Baranow concludes:
It was one of
those afternoons
that remains in
memory.
A slight thing,
happiness.
In A Slight Thing, Happiness, Baranow has given us in superb narrative lyrical poems a more complete picture of happiness than lesser poets would dare, without fear of sentimentality in celebrating poignant moments and without shying away from the underbelly of loss that eats away at all existence, making these poems all the more precious. The straightforward forms and organization of the book support the unblinking eye and unwavering voice of this poet writing in her fully developed voice. Reading this book will be no slight thing in the context of your lives—the living one and the writing one.
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