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By John Zheng
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Anne Myles’s Late Epistle opens with a poem titled “Bane,” which functions like a prologue that sets the tone and prepares the reader for what the poet says in this collection. The poem starts with the speaker’s plain statement that a subtle pain which is something unknown since her girlhood has been “pushing against my heart and breath.” Because it’s unknown, it provides a space for the speaker’s imagination: “a rock whose weight” slings against her ribs to cause dense cold, “a sleek canister / of poison gas” which writhes in her body, a fetus turning out to be unreal or dead in dreams, or a familiar one curling against her spine with its cramped limbs. Though the pain hurts, the speaker treats it with lighthearted humor as if it needs extra care:
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I walked slowly, carefully,
so I wouldn’t jostle it
was that my charge upon the earth?
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Her humor continues with an exaggeration in the next stanza:
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I’d start up at times to realize
I’d been soothing it, whispering
The secret name I called it.
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Now the reader realizes that Bane, the word used as the title, suggests respectively the secret name and the unknown pain. Also, this unknown pain is both physical and psychological, but the poet continues her creative thinking by associating the pain with an assiduous creative process:
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Or was it a seed, dark and lustrous,
splitting and rooting into the rock,
unfurling its lone stalk
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to cast out lines on emptiness,
defining the blue of an October sky
with a dragonfly buzzing through it—
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now, perhaps?
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“Bane” is made up of nine tercets, but it concludes with a brief yet emphatic line composed of two words: “now, perhaps?” The question mark seems to suggest a lack of sureness.
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Page after page, pain and grief thread through many poems in the collection. “Four Interiors,” a prose poem in four numbered paragraphs narrated in the first-person voice, presents a Jewish girl’s four encounters or psychological activities at different ages of growing up. Paragraph one compares birth to “the world’s end waiting to be launched.” The irony of this phrase is that the baby who can see the glow in her mother’s belly sees also the dark of the light at birth, and the speaker stresses that’s what she always sees. Paragraph two works like a footnote to the dark of the light in the human world. It’s about an encounter in the malfunctioning elevator of an apartment building. Myles contrasts the elevator and the encounter, saying that although the girl is prepared for the elevator to “smash into the roof” she is never prepared to be called “Kike” by an insulting woman. The sudden intensification of this elevator encounter does hurt like something twisting within. The girl realizes ever since that she must walk carefully and identify with a human being who is “one of us” though she also understands that this way of approaching someone is like “seeking an expanse of darkness that would light me up within.”
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Grief and regret loom in another prose poem, “An Origin Story,” which focuses on the mother’s dementia. Myles builds up the tension by describing a daughter who barely understands her mother’s restless behavior hissing the curse with a b-word when she sees her mother up three times at night, “dressed, brushing her teeth—about to head downstairs” to prepare breakfast. Upon hearing her curse, her mother, whom the daughter had loved, responded by spitting at her and pulling her hair. Years later, the daughter still feels guilty about her curse, saying that “the image of my own ugliness turning and turning behind my eyes.” This reminds us of what Robert Hayden regrets about his misunderstanding of his father in “Those Winter Sundays”: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
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However, in “Happiness,” again a prose poem, Myles presents a different scene about the mother-daughter relationship. The daughter remembers a happy moment shared with her mother in the kitchen: “Later she would wash and I would dry with the radio playing. We’d knock our hips together on purpose, then knock then again.”
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Some poems are narratives about secrets of women-loving-women stories. The one titled “Women’s Studies” is a sonnet composed of seven couplets. It reveals a tender and honest feeling about approaching a woman. The female speaker reminisces about the Women’s Studies potluck in a lesbian’s house. The door image is both literal and figurative. It opens and closes when other women leave for home to make dinners for their husbands. But the speaker who has nowhere to go is eager for a talk with the hostess in the kitchen, and this eagerness seems like opening a closed door for her new understanding of Women’s Studies.
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Late Epistle is a heart-touching collection of self-revelation through personal narratives. In a sense, it is a lustrous seed growing in the rich soil of figurative language and imagery. It’s a delight to read.
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You can find the book here: Amazon.com
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John (Jianqing) Zheng is the author of The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville Publishing, 2023), A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review Press, 2021), Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press, 2019), Delta Sun (Red Moon Press 2018), and The Landscape of Mind (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). His edited books include Conversations with Dana Gioia, African American Haiku, The Other World of Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku. He is a professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. Zheng’s newest chapbook Just Looking: Haiku Sequences about the Mississippi Delta is available for download via Open: Journal of Arts and Literature.
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North of Oxford 