Review: Joyelle McSweeney mourns in verse
Joyelle McSweeney (Photo courtesy of Nightboat Books)What I’m waiting for: someone to shout instructions from the sky
through some barely imaginable instrument.
I’ve cleared out all my hearing for this
but no voice comes.
The above poem is a prayer of sorts, dated Aug. 14, 2020, and spoken by Joyelle McSweeney—the author and narrator of Death Styles. McSweeney’s life, including her sorrows, is laid bare in this book through poems delivered with wit and solemnity.
McSweeney is an accomplished poet. A recent recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has written 10 books across creative and critical genres and is a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. McSweeney is also a challenging poet, and I mean that as a compliment. Her verse is linguistically complex; though certainly not inscrutable, her poetry requires sustained attention.
Death Styles rewards our attention. The book is a follow-up to her 2020 double volume, Toxicon and Arachne. In fact, I think Death Styles requires that previous volume in order to be fully appreciated.
McSweeney’s daughter Arachne died in October 2017 of a congenital birth defect. She was 13 days old. Arachne was the focus of McSweeney’s recent books, and she haunts this new work in a supernatural manner, in the way that only a lost child can; in almost all of the poems of the book, Arachne arrives. Arachne’s corporeal presence in Death Styles also demonstrates McSweeney’s Catholic lineage and vision.
In interviews and essays, McSweeney has articulated a compelling sense of the Catholic artistic imagination, voiced in the same breath as her criticisms of the institution. “My grave problems with this Church aside,” McSweeney has written, “my cultural instincts are definitely shaped by my early immersion in Catholicism: my taste for the drastic, for extremes, for the blood and the gold, for a faith based on Mysteries, on agonies, for the set-up-and-punchline structure of the Beatitudes: Let Beauty be convulsive.”
She is compelled by the Catholic sense that “there is something realer than real...transubstantiation itself, that a thing may be turned into its opposite through a tiny portal the size of a wafer, that’s just like a basic assumption of my day-to-day life.” Hers is a Catholicism of bells and smells—saintly corpses with the scent of flowers.
Catholic art is strange because Catholicism is strange. God is paradox and performance, Christ a magnifying impossibility. Tidy Catholic art is neither compelling nor clarifying. Bring on the baroque. One might identify some of McSweeney’s Catholic ancestors as Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Charles Baudelaire, Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí and Kiki Smith.
“It’s one of my loose theories,” Kiki Smith has said, “that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world—that it’s through the physical world that you have spiritual life—that you have to be here physically in a body.” Smith’s claims sound like McSweeney’s ars poetica.
Death Styles, at its core, is a simple affirmation: McSweeney’s daughter lives, in an embodied presence, because she once lived. The confluence of her haunting memory and the book’s pandemic setting create a dizzying result.
In the book’s first poem, dated Aug. 11, 2020, the narrator is out walking her dog at dawn. She thinks of a skunk that she’d seen another day, and the poem starts to gain energy; its mostly short lines accumulate quickly. Then, her memories of Arachne rise to the surface, and overwhelm the narrative:
I put my thumb in my mouth to mime the drinking
I will do at five o’clock
on the dot
at the spot
in the center of the clock
face, watch face, sundial, style.
Such incantatory lines herald grief. McSweeney continues:
We put the gel in her hair
for the EEG
then decided to scrap the test
so she died with her black hair gunky
I hate that.
“Surely I am evading my responsibilities,” she writes in a later poem; this sense of drifting through life suffuses the book. Further, the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates her grief: “I’m hiding in the tiny yard because I’m thronged with people, laundry, dishes, subfunctional computer equipment, weeds, animals, mold, and a virus wrapped around the planet like a tumor wrapped in veins. It should be exciting but it’s dank as a cape./ What I want is to be snatched out of this place.”
Yet McSweeney knows that grief is inescapable, not something to be outrun. In a poem dated Aug. 18, 2020, she leads with two curious epigraphs from Diana Vreeland, longtime advice columnist for Harper’s Bazaar. Vreeland’s suggestions to “rinse your blonde child’s hair in dead champagne to keep it gold” and to “have every room done up in every color green” are preceded by an anaphoric refrain: “Why don’t you?”
The question’s phrasing is accusatory, in the vein of cheeky magazine columns. McSweeney, in response, plays with the absurdities of domestic life and the flippancy of such advice. She borrows Vreeland’s phrasing:
Why don’t you
stand before the door
black bows on your wrists
in one of two identical pairs of shoes
this one with rubber soles for wet days
any cobbler can do this
why don’t you
palm frond, breadmold, emerald, seabladder,
filing cabinet, verdigris, eau du Nil—.
McSweeney’s lines roll forward, accumulating odd turns of language before disrupting their flow in a sardonic conclusion.
Her dark comedy only serves to enhance her sentimental turns; a deeply Catholic pivot in the tradition of James Joyce, Walker Percy and Fanny Howe. She continues:
Why don’t you
wash your dead child’s face in champagne
i did wash her face in blonde
no more tears baby shampoo
to release the residue of tape
when it was too late
I had already learned the scent of her: a shock
of alcohol that shook the brain
like priests and goblins shake the pews with censers
scrabbling up the aisle toward the altar.
In these lines, the funereal and the absurd are not in opposition; they clarify each other.
For a reader new to McSweeney’s past, these lines might be confusing. Death Styles concludes with an afterword; readers new to her poetry should start there. In a concise essay, she offers a way to understand her book. “Repetition, I have come to understand, is the shape trauma makes of time,” and her process was marked by self-imposed rules. She wrote every day. Rather than plan her poems, she “had to accept any inspiration presented to me as an artifact of the present tense, however incidental, embarrassing or fleeting.”
Once inspired, she, like Robert Frost’s famous poetic dictum: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." McSweeney writes: “I had to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me.” The results are poems that take surprising routes through ephemera, observation and grief.
“Hospital Planters,” a poem dated Aug. 25, 2020, contains breathless lines:
Mauveine, fuchsine, magenta, maybe it were better
you were never born
I’m sorry you never wore the navy blue singlet
we bought to escape from all that baby girl pink
we escaped it all right
even the cartilage on your ears went bent and rigid
as a cartridge
you couldn’t bear a secret there
even if you tried
and you tried
I’m sorry for that.
McSweeney is masterful at juxtaposition; after all, in this world we must deal with the signs and wonders that we encounter. Although her turns of phrase are often jocular, at essential points in Death Styles, McSweeney is beautifully lyrical as well:
I’m sorry we didn’t take you out to feel the rain on your face
before you died
or after
sorry we didn’t take you up on the roof
or out on the breezeway amid the hospital planters
pale concrete things crowned with improbably fragrant grass
a precious scent
like something from the song of solomon.
With Death Styles, McSweeney has crafted a moving elegy. This is a book for Arachne, a longing best articulated in a pair of heartbreaking lines: “Good bye good bye/ come back this time.”
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