Haunting the Female Body: The Evolution of Joan Larkin’s True Subject:
A Review by Jen Garfield

My Body: New and Selected Poems By Joan Larkin
Hanging Loose Press, 2007

Traversing the decades of a poet’s career, a collection of selected poems industriously exposes the subjects that still haunt the poet, the themes that will never be fully explored and thus abandoned. For Joan Larkin, this subject is the inexhaustible story of the female body, traced through 30 years of shame, desire and liberty in her latest collection entitled My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press). Through unadorned language that achieves a simple, rhythmic elegance, Larkin’s shockingly honest poems portray the far-reaching, abiding narratives of both the political and personal landscape of female sexuality.

Let’s start backwards. Hailing from an era saturated in the exposure of physical and sexual repression, the voice in the selected poems from Housework (1975) probes the origins of the body’s myths and secrets. It begins “My mother gave me a bitter tongue./ My father a turned back . . . I discovered my body in the dark . . . I did what girls were supposed to do” ("Rhyme of My Inheritance"). The musical voice in these poems, at once hushed and provocative, divulges a young woman’s discovery of her sex and the simultaneous requirement of repression, as she at once hides “memories in my skin” and warns a bombed village to “Hide yourself/ in your language.” Overwhelmingly, these poems literally and figuratively dissect the manifestations of sex and gender, stating boldly “I think it is only fair to warn you/ the heart is sexless” and then, “This whole thing is unfortunate, but petty/ like my hangup concerning the English Dept. memos/ headed Mr./Mrs./Miss – only a fishbone/in the throat of the revolution-”.

Fast forward ten years, and the selected poems from A Long Sound (1986) delve deeper into the consequences of the body’s secrets. Attempting to explain the need for covering, Larkin enters the world of drugs, alcohol, abortion and sexual abuse with bitter, mournful beauty. Ever-questioning the origin of things, this selection includes poems simply labeled “Blackout Sonnets,” “Rape,” “Self-Doubt” and “Co-Alcoholic,” reminding the reader of the prevalence and dire, institutional penalties of abuse. Yet through this unraveling is an imagistic voice of life, ringing through in poems like “How the Healing Takes Place,” which pleads, “How the gray house of the lungs,/ frayed and weather-beaten,/ fills with moist breath./ How the breath brings healing/ to all parts of the body.”

Cold River (1997) continues to probe the precincts of the body, now through sickness and death, focusing on the loss of the speaker’s mother. A writer more confident in her skin both in metaphor and craft, Larkin offers the previous two collections a softer vision of the body in its decline. In “Inventory,” she rhythmically eulogizes a collection of the lost through compassion and affirmation, including “one whose minister said Beth and her lover of twelve years were/ devoted as Ruth and Naomi.”  Twenty years later, Larkin sees the body transforming from one that is taken and beaten by others, towards one that is now hers to give. “Want” opens with the line “She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts/ of last century’s lesbians.” The body, now a friend, moves beyond its own story into the realms of history and the spirit world.

At long last, we descend upon new work in The Offering: New Poems. Larkin has come a long way, and this section opens with the title poem, an affirmation of life renewed through a baby’s birth. The rest of the poems jump back and forth through time, revealing a speaker still gripped by the complexities of sex and gender, a speaker still discovering new manifestations of shame and “passing,” though this time with unruffled composure and an occasional acquiescence to pleasure. These poems intermittently explore a teenage abortion, latent religion, and the various deaths of friends and family members, most ambitiously in “Wreath,” an expansive poem covering the familial span of love, loss and grief. In “Tough-Love Muse,” the speaker simply states, “Praise grief all you want,/ More is coming.” Whether she is sidetracked or augmented by death and loss in these poems, Larkin primarily remains true to her essential calling – to tell the victorious story of the female body. It’s a body with “untouched skin practicing to know everything,” a body with a “face like a swept room,” and a body that, finally, “had never felt such pleasure in my house of flesh.”

For Larkin, all things originate, breathe and conclude with the body. In one of the final poems, “Bethlehem,” she retells a biblical story of a woman giving birth. As the woman lays down in a bed of straw next to her newborn son, she says, “There were no shepherds yet,/ no magicians no gifts no ideas – only his body/ and my body, flesh joyful and shivering.” And thus, we are back at the beginning.