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Tongue
By Rachel Contreni Flynn
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk
Red Hen Press 2010
ISBN: 978-1597094757
Perfect bound, 96 pages, $18.95
Winner of the 2008 Benjamin Saltman Award
Tongue, by Rachel Contreni Flynn, is a beautiful and scary book of poems. It has the grisly intensity of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, without any magical rescues. The heroine, in first and third person points of view, must transform and “rescue” herself, which she does by dint of diligent hard work, a Cinderella without prince or fairy godmother—or, as in the original Grimm tale, without magical birds or a hazel tree.
But there are body parts!—as scary as the cut-off toe and heel of the mean stepsisters in the Grimms’ version of Cinderella, or the requested cut-out heart (or lungs or liver) of Snow White. In fact, there is an actual tongue:
In her twelfth summer, a girl left the Midwest for an island in Maine
where her brilliant, ill grandmother lived in a cottage on a pine-rimmed
lake. The girl was to keep house, to keep the old lady company. Back
home, her older sister starved herself. That summer, the island was
troubled by the discovery of a human tongue on the beach.
This interesting little narrative introduction, simply and lyrically told, is one of the innovations of the Tongue section at the center of the book, where lineated, lyric poems are interspersed with prose poems, fragmented poems, and poems made up of numbered fragments.
Tongue is divided into three sections—Gnaw, Tongue, Hollow—each evocative of the body. A sister gnaws at her fingernails and is gnawed at by a mother who needs to correct that nail-biting flaw: “it was like a weed-tree growing / alongside a fence, helpless, // striving for light and release / finding instead the bite / of metal…”. At the end of the poem “Gnaw,” mother and daughter stand side by side: “The tree and the fence, both / damaged, neither happy.”
The Gnaw section sets up the eating disorder suffered by the sister who arrives at the breakfast table as a “scarecrow” one morning, who is fragile and dangerous to herself and others, and who must go to her namesake hospital in the poem “Saint Elizabeth.” Tongue is a book about loving and hating this dangerous girl, and surviving to tell the tale.
So “tongue” also refers to language, and the poet’s tongue, her voice, her painstaking expression of feelings, events, and images of the past, her transformation of these into compelling poems that speak the truth and spin it into gold. “Broomstick,” for example, is a series of transformations—starting even before the poem begins, with earlier poems, with remembered fairy tales, with grandmother into witch:
Broomstick
A witch
pokes her broomstick
from inside
the girl’s chest. It makes
hard spots
of tenderness. Raspberries
ripen in the garden,
and the girl picks them
for dessert.
A witch sits
at the table, complaining
the mascarpone
is too runny. The girl
shuts her eyes,
sees splinters of light
refracting
inside her chest, which is now
a basket,
a thin woven thing to be carried.
There are deeply frightening moments in this book. The very short poem, “Deep,” set in the farmland of Indiana, where the sisters are growing up, hints at the danger below the surface of their lives and foreshadows the axe one sister will encounter later.
Deep
There’s a blade
in the hay mow
and we’re jumping.
Later, during that summer in Maine, taking care of the witch-grandmother, no one coming to get her and take her home, the poet dreams of the axe, now speaking of herself in third person, and taking charge of her own transformation. From “Axe”:
When she dreams
of a monster coming, smothering her,
then chopping out her tongue
with the axe, she figures it’s herself
hurting herself. This notion calms her,
saves her, stays with her.
The poet keeps her tongue, uses it to utter phrases as simple and lovely as “a bowl of nectarines,” as delightfully odd as “a pop-eyed velvet lobster,” and as harrowing as “the murderous spit and tick of a twenty-pound grenade.” Contreni Flynn can observe “forearms flecked as with pollen” on a boy in the sun, or look inside to see and wisely say, “She protects herself by making fiction / of what’s happening.” She sees this clearly, loses her illusions, but knows what to do with reality to make it bearable. In Maine:
She learns to go away
and do awful work
in a lovely place.
In the poem “Small Gray House,” the speaker tells a story that begins, “Once upon a time.” A scared little girl in a red brick house climbs into a tree and turns into “a round-backed raccoon.” But another little girl, in a small gray house, has a mother who loves her and tells her stories and comes when she calls out in the middle of the night. That little girl will be fine, can fall back “asleep, curled / around the tough gray creature who never leaves.”
My impression is that poet Rachel Contreni Flynn has turned herself into a “tough gray creature” who can love, and who can speak of vivid colors, fears, and passions in poems lyrical, dark, and odd, whatever they need to be to survive and thrive. In Hollow, the last section of the book, the poet speaks again in first person. She is not hollowed out by grief; she has a heart that beats and feels, so she can tell us what it’s like to feel hollowed out. And how to heal.
Hollow
By leaving, our mother cured us.
Like sides of beef hanging
in a hollow tree, she cured us.
Smoke and cold and time.
The rusted hooks.
Those hooks are rusted; that time is long past. That curing has been done. The horrible carcasses are eaten, long gone. The tree is hollow. The poet still has her heart.
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Kathleen Kirk is a poet and fiction writer whose work appears online and in print in Eclectica, blossombones, Poems & Plays, Poetry East, and elsewhere. She has three poetry chapbooks—Selected Roles, Broken Sonnets, and Living on the Earth. A past editor and reviewer for RHINO, Kirk is poetry editor for Escape Into Life. She blogs eight days a week at Wait! I Have a Blog?!
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