REVIEW OF "HOLY LAND, WATERBURY, CT" FROM RHUBARB IS SUSAN

"She drove the car first in one direction & then another,

the arcs of her going made parentheses around the town

where people wandered by daylight in the streets,

between the lion & the lamb, later the waxing moon

would rise again over the cross on the hill. She saw the weathered sign,

"Holy Land," welded to the signpost where there were woods

& little rolling hills & no other cars there. She drove

along the road until the periphery: an old house & a dirt path.

No-one within. She followed the path into the woods, by herself,

a little while & she saw it then, the little Jerusalem that made the hill

a mountain, shining strangely on the hillface, playing

games with scale. & also Gethsemane, where she walked,

placards' sans serif script fading into concrete, some sacred names

erased by rain, others remained unblemished:

she looked into the neck of a headless camel & saw its

concrete guts there, stone heaped around its legs

like the earth had spit it up, two thin tines of metal where

the left leg had been. Here it had stood for 20 years or

more, looking out on the Temple ground, Golgotha,

the holy streets of the little holy city where children now

adults had eaten lunch & asked about god & heaven--the city

considered & gave its answer decades later: the Temple

was large enough to enter standing, her head close to

the vaulted roof, the minarets where spiders lived. On the walls,

austere grafitos, nameless initials & prayers.

She finds a discarded photograph (the

god who lives in desolation), sees shimmering green plastic,

immune to weather, on the path to the cross that can still

be seen from the highway.

As Lamoureux notes in the preface to this poem, we are in an experience of narrativity, which means we interpret the opening lines of this poem not as any kind of (usual, for many poets) metaphysics, but as a metaphor for the experience of driving itself.

Driving, in other words, is going to be, not stand for something else, and in the parataxis of the ongoing word rush, we are going to experience not any particular state of mind, but the journey itself. Lamoureux in other words is giving us the thing itself, and not some kind of larger metaphor -- this turn is getting rarer and rarer as poets (myself included here) graduate from Universities of more and more refined thinking.

We are also sitting smack in the middle of the American experience of the city on the hill, and in a sense reality provides the poem where the poem provides reality: the decaying rebar camels are actually out there somewhere and the poem requires only that the speaker be clean, unprejudiced enough to confront them without the artifice of interpretation. That's the demand the subject makes, at least -- for the speaker to background himself to observation, letting the speaking fall between the cracks as it were: in little details such as the catachresis of "nameless initials" or the aside on the god in desolation.

There are some open questions here, of course, in a poem that seems almost to be the music video to accompany some wordless song. The primary in my mind, and sort of unanswerable, is why the choice of a female speaker? Why does Lamoureux choose to make his speaker female, in a poem where the gender seems completely irrelevant, there being no gendered moment in the poem proper? Perhaps that's a psychological question, about Lamoureux in the context of his larger projects (of which I am unaware.)

A few nice moments to remark on in passing that one might miss: the shift of time to give an answer "decades later" so that the experience of the faithful overlaps with the experience of the speaker. And the little spider minarets, bringing us into the 21st century and the clash of civilizations."

--Simon De Deo from Rhubarb is Susan