Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Burt Lancaster: An American Life" by Kate Buford
This gorgeous hunk with a limited range became one of the finest and best-loved actors in Hollywood.
By Daniel Mangin
[03/10/00]

Green market
Conservative Peter Huber says capitalism can save the environment, but he's fudging the bottom line.
By Tom Gogola
[03/09/00]

Reviews
"On Parole" by Akira Yoshimura
A bestselling Japanese novelist depicts the grim aftermath of a grisly crime.
By Emily Gordon
[03/09/00]

Ivory Tower
The Tao of "Seinfeld"
A sitcom that forbade hugging and learning becomes a tool for teaching Aristotle. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
By James Nestor
[03/08/00]

Reviews
"Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy" by Frances Kiernan
A host of gossips weighs in on the left-wing scrapper and wickedly erotic novelist.
By Pam Rosenthal
[03/08/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The fantasy of leaving Earth behind altogether animates "Isolato," Larissa Szporluk's second book. The centerpiece is a series entitled "Seven Maria," "maria" being, she tells us, "'seas' or great dark plains on the moon's surface." What follows are seven poems about the attractions of escape as represented by outer space. Thankfully, Szporluk never lets her reveries degenerate to a low-budget sci-fi level. In "Mare Desiderii," she writes thrillingly of living on the moon, where "June summons June across the planet;/the sun this year is silver,/just a sliver in your eyes./Maybe you can live/in full aversion. Maybe you can limn/the far side of the moon."

Sure enough, however, conscience rears its ugly head, even millions of miles from home:

But some night God is going to come
way up here and find you
erotically divided,

moving like two swans
one with a slight lead, the other
with a cache of food ...

  A warm hate

will loosen in your throat:
Don't speak, you'll motion to Him,
None of us can face it.

There seems to be no escape from the guilt and contingencies of life on Earth, after all, but that doesn't mean the pull is lessened. In the last "Mare" poem, "Mare Incognito," she writes:

The moon makes my son go silent.
It sucks the fight from his mind,
leaving him hollow in my arms,
like a final piece of tunnel
diminished between lights.

I lose him to the brighter world;
the dark one vibrates with alarm.

It's a haunted view of things: the idea that there is always another world where we might be living in another manner entirely. In "Mare Nubium," Szporluk regards a stranger who has stopped to watch her children playing in the yard, and suddenly recognizes that he is "frozen in a process/of his own, in which the children figure as dilations,/the double-life of something that went wrong,/that turned around inside the cornea."

This idea of self-alienation is picked up elsewhere in "Isolato" as well, primarily in a poem with the somewhat unimaginative title "Doppelganger."

Thought I loved light in the morning.
Thought I loved food.

Thought I saw my son
running from a diamondback,

tears in the billions ...

Then, after a strange little sidestep into a scenario involving a screaming bird, Szporluk concludes: "Thought I had authority./Thought I had a stake./Didn't know me." Alas, "Doppelganger" has none of the spookiness that makes the "Maria" poems work so well. Its workmanlike diction only robs it of the otherworldliness it takes as its subject.

Szporluk runs into language problems elsewhere, too. In "Hatch No. 2," a generally affecting poem about a failed relationship and the child it produced, she starts off with some wonderfully sinuous lines:

Can't see a thing for the snow,
its rabid, haywire blowing,
something bigger than us
on a binge, plucking, skinning,
boning, the lie in my heart.

But then she lapses into a kind of colloquial chattiness that jars:

Can't see my ex in his bright
existence, new live-in woman,
new business.

There is fine language in almost every poem in "Isolato," and Szporluk clearly has high standards, but at certain moments it's as though she didn't have quite enough time for final revisions. One poem in particular, "Leaving the Eccentric," does a beautiful job of spooling out its metaphor of a queen fish fighting her way to a certain spring every year to be near her king, only to leave as soon as she arrives and realizes that he is supposed to eat her. But it sags at its conclusion, where Szporluk asks, "Are blood and love just things that run,/and if they're not, do they belong/to what they are, or to the place/they're running to or from, and what/if that's the point of life, to turn/your back into your front/and mount the beast again?" The rambling tone and unfocused language give the impression that Szporluk isn't fully engaged in her ontological search; it's more like she's considering it for the first time. The search is not nearly as well thought out or expressed as, say, her ideas about life on the moon.

Still, those ideas alone make Szporluk worth reading. Who hasn't wished to escape life on Earth once or twice? We recognize our own daydreams in her lunar reveries.
salon.com | March 10, 2000

Melanie Rehak's column on poetry runs every month, alternating on Fridays with Ann Hodgman on cookbooks, Polly Shulman on science fiction and fantasy and Jacqueline Carey on mysteries.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon