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The Spare Room : Poems About Survival
By Dana Guthrie Martin
Reviewed by Joanna S. Lee
Blood Pudding Press, 2009
hand-bound with ribbon, 36 pp.
Dana Guthrie Martin’s chapbook came in the mail with a spine be-ribboned in indigo and tied firmly shut with undyed twine. However much your mother may have warned you not to judge a book by its cover, here one quickly discovers that any tendency toward the darker, more delicate sentiments in The Spare Room has to be got at not only through the knot of raw thread, but through the untempered savagery of its language as well.
Then again, this isn’t exactly your mother’s chapbook.
Guthrie Martin calls these “poems about survival,” and while some ("Kept in a 200-Gallon Aquarium as a Circus Sideshow Attraction, Letter from a Parasitic Head") implicate without equivocation a situation or condition which can only be endured, others ("Operant Conditioning: a Training Manual," "Chew and Choke," the eponymous "Spare Room" itself) leave some question of exactly who or what has survived:
After they pull me apart, they slide
ligatures through my skin, sew me up with raffia.
After they block my mouth with mothballs,
they glad-hand their accusers. Skin is disinfected,
wrapped in oil cloth. Decoys are made to wick antifreeze.
Here is where I throb. This orifice. This hollow.
They caudle what’s inedible. I swallow.
I bleat out my dark rhythms for trespassers.
I am lubricated with grossulin and seep
like wounded trees. Epoxy sets what should
be expunged. Knuckles only stop at bone.
Here, as elsewhere, the poet sets quite a bit of emphasis on the physicality of the body with an almost clinical precision; using vivid, discrete descriptions she paints a technicolor autopsy of your most intimate imaginings. Spare Room is graphic in every sense of the word, urging the reader like a reluctant medical student faced with a first cadaver not only to see, but to touch “the tissue’s lumps and moist casing / push our fingers into its crevices.” Guthrie Martin even takes “graphic” literally, re-shaping the boundaries of poetic form into something more akin to the insets in said med student’s lab manual ("Table 1. Afterbirth" and "Table 2. Experiments with Hanging").
Not that Spare Room is all blood and guts. Some of Guthrie Martin’s more thoughtful pieces are drawn from Classical mythology, like the split-voiced “Two Seeds,” where we hear a sexually tinged version from both sides in Hades’ abduction of Persephone and which ends with the surprise confession of the “victim” herself:
I picked the insides clean,
took all day to eat three seeds.
Then his voice was sweeter.
Then my body, a carrier of life.
What we want is the unfamiliar,
a story that bears repeating.
What we don’t know we can almost taste.
Tell me you could have turned it down.
Guthrie Martin also takes on the story of Helen and Theseus, a lesser-known kidnapping. She gives guttural voice to the abductor as the chapbook’s second poem; Helen’s vituperative rejoinder is the penultimate (“...until you said, Yes my love. /Whatever you want my love. / Then I took your sword / ...and drove it / straight up through me...”). The pair together, like the Hades/Persephone piece, exhibits a symmetrical duality that characterizes the book’s overall organization.
In contrast to much of what the reader has already experienced through Guthrie Martin’s vivid verses,Spare Room’s final note, “Molting Frequency,” is as filled with longing and sea-air as ever a dreamer could want. Here, the poet is nothing if not philosophical, even concluding with a bit of Zen:
Your muscles connect with skin,
with bone, with sand, with me.
With me, you are a layer of beach glass.
Beach glass is taken by the water, returned.
As you are taken, as I return.
I return from the beach smelling
like kelp but not like you.
Gone the imagery of torture and disease and rape, gone the coroner’s lingo. Yet there remains that essence of raw physicality that pervades TheSpare Room from start to finish. Dana Guthrie Martin has spared us nothing in her unbridled descriptions of what seems like every imaginable form of suffering. But here there is balm from the assault on our senses that has come before. Like the subjects of her poems, we have survived, and looking back, we find TheSpare Room, just as the travails of Persephone, a “story that bears repeating.”
Visit Blood Pudding Press at http://bloodyooze.blogspot.com/.
Joanna S. Lee lives in Richmond, Virginia where she spends her free time searching the riverbanks for unborn poetry. Her first book, the somersaults I did as I fell, was released in 2009. She is an infrequent contributor at vox poetica and Ink Node and writes (semi-)regularly at the Tenth Muse.
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