Mule & Pear by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (A Review by Kim Loomis-Bennett)

New Issues Poetry & Prose

97 pages/$15

Mule & Pear contains voices of black women literary ghosts and their creators, collected and collaged. This is poetry made by a reader for readers—not ordinary rush-to-get-to-the-end-readers, but for those readers whose intimacy with characters continues beyond the page. If characters from your favorite works populate your imagination, you will discover an affinity with Griffiths’ offering. With an ingenious format, characters have much to say beyond their “pages of origin” in Griffiths’ thirty-eight free-verse poems. The first poem of the collection, “Mercy Does Not Mean Thank You,” begins with a series of images that incite engagement with the painful training ground of human emotion:

But say it is a body

with wounds

Say it is my father

bursting into tears alone

above his newspaper

*        *        *        *

Say it is four tongues

that puncture

a compass

& spin the points

of each season

towards a storm

Griffith continues the poem by capturing moments when crushing emotions overwhelm us with surprising self-awareness:

Say it is when our lips

finally touch after fighting

even though we are working

towards a type of kiss

that makes our teeth

click with ache

Say it is an elegy

for every hourglass

Toni Morrison’s novel, Jazz, centers on a love triangle between a young beauty, her married lover, and his fiercely offended wife.  Joe, Violet and Dorcus did not leave me when I finished Morrison’s novel. Meeting them again in Griffiths’ collection was surreal as it mirrored the strange sensation of when the characters “meet up with me” unexpectedly from time to time—Violet, before her life went wrong, early in her marriage, sleeping in a shack with a work boot on one foot, Dorcus’ mystified slide into death, and Joe’s unsettling self-loathing.

“Dorcas to Violet: The Photograph on the Mantle Speaks,” is dedicated to Ai, a poet invited into the conversation for her own unflinching exploration of the cruel acts humans inflict on each other. Griffith relies on an individual’s familiarity with Ai’s work—poems that get into the minds and soul of mad, lost souls.  Ai, who passed away in 2010, is essentially one of Griffiths’ literary ghosts. Griffith depends as well on a reader’s bond with Morrison’s Jazz characters. This is a big risk for Griffith to take, and in my case, it worked absolutely. While reading Griffiths’ Jazz conversation-poems, my familiarity with Ai settled over me—recalling my experience reading and re-reading Ai’s taboo-exploration in her collection, Vice, over a several week period. The day I learned that Ai died, I was in the process of composing a fan letter to her—never sent.  As I read Griffiths’ work, I had with me the ghosts of Violet and Joe Trace, Dorcus, and their creator, Toni Morrison. This is a lot of ask of a reader, but I was eager to engage—to be involved in a way a poetry collection has never asked me to be.

When Dorcus speaks to Violet in Griffiths’ poem, Dorcus has some tough words for her lover-murder’s wife:

Here you are trying to kill me again: a dead girl.

You & your raggedy husband taking

my slow dance away before the music

ended is what really hurt me in the end.

I was looking so goddamned good.

Death ain’t my song.

This is Dorcus’ say, a ruined black girl, beyond saving, so she takes care of herself by having her say, and she truly sounds like Morrison’s Dorcus within Griffiths’ verse. Griffith, haunted by the actions of fictional people, feels the same concern I do, yet she takes that concern and explores it, takes responsibility for it and creates out of it.

Dramatic monologues and personas in Mules & Pears rush over one another, interact, mirror and mimic, thwart and confront, as do authentic conversations. Griffiths’ aim for this collection, she tells us in the preface is that she “hopes that each voice would make its way towards other voices and [she] hoped [to create]—a space that is ideal, flawed, intuitive, and intellectual… clustered here are conversations, after-lives, interrogations, alternate endings, resurrections, bright detours, love-letters, rejections, desires, mid-wives, and what-ifs.”  I recommend sharing Mules & Pears with others who, through the intimacy of reading, have taken characters from the page into their lives.

Griffiths’ chance that readers might not relate to the literary heritage or influences upon her poems is one worth taking—if nothing else, readers will seek out the works that inspired Griffith. For a reader and poet, like me, Griffiths’ execution of Mule & Pear is an inspiring risk.

If you are looking for a genuine voice, not concerned with the self-conscious acrobatics of word play, open any page in Mule & Pear and find yourself captivated.  Whether you are a student-poet learning craft by reading fellow poets, or a reader ready to have his or her breath taken away for a moment—Griffiths’ enthusiasm and respect for the power of language is everywhere evident.

*

Kim Loomis-Bennett is the author of Soiled Doves: A Poetic Sequence published in the fall of 2011. Her work has appeared in The November 3rd Club Journal, The Legendary, and The Copperfield Review. Visit her at kimloomisbennett.tumblr.com.