THUNDERBIRD by DOROTHEA LASKY

rob mclennan Reviews

Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky

(Wave Books, Seattle WA/New York NY, 2012)

Death and Sylvia Plath

My student in the city college

Really likes the poems of Sylvia Plath

She is writing her research paper about

Lady Lazarus

I like this student

She spends some time

Leaning over me and telling me

How in the poem Plath turns from an object

Into an entertainer

And finally into a demon

Oh yes, you are right, I tell her

We are pleased

I wonder afterwards,

Why do young women like Sylvia Plath?

Why doesn’t everyone?

The student tells me that when she was young

She liked Plath

I did too

I did not ride horses

Sylvia Plath rode horses

I don’t have a thesis

I don’t have a structure

I am a demon

There are blue streaks in the sky

It is Spring

I am not you

Nor do I want to be

It is 2:21 on 2/21/2010

I am not alive

No, I am no longer breathing

I don’t live in this world

I already live in the other one

In her third trade poetry collection, Thunderbird (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2012), American poet Dorothea Lasky continues the sharp lines and striking images of her previous collections, Black Life (Wave Books, 2010) and AWE (Wave, 2007). There is such a starkness, a directness to Lasky’s poetry that holds nothing back, as she composes a series of straight lines and phrases sharp enough to cause the fingers to bleed. In Thunderbird, short narrative essays disguise themselves as poems, and poems disguise themselves as something entirely else. In Thunderbird, Lasky continues to weave a series of narrative straight lines and dark subjects. The narrator(s) of Lasky’s poems embrace the dark, with poem titles that include “Why is it a black life,” “Is it murder,” “The world doesn’t care,” “Ugly feelings” and “Death and Sylvia Plath.” There is an odd, pessimistic humour to Lasky’s writing, as in the poem “Is it murder” that includes:

Writers make workshops

Artists make hell

To live in

I make hell to live in

I make hell

I make hell

Where it already is

In the poem

Lasky’s writing is very much an exploration of the dark, without shedding light to erase or castrate the dark, but feeling her way through, two hands deep. The short lines in her poems give the cadence and appearance of a series of chants, and I wonder if Lasky is the sort of poet who reads her line breaks as pauses, or sweeps directly through? Given the work in this collection, it would appear as though poems are Lasky’s best thinking form, a particularly intense and incredible intellectual catch-all for arguments, musings and critical questions, although I would be interested to see what she might do with essays or other forms of critical prose. A particular highlight had to be the poem-as-essay “Ugly Feelings,” dedicated “after Sianne Ngai,” that opens:

Why are people so cruel?

I mean that as a very serious question

Why can people be so cruel and why do they want to hurt

    other people

And why do they hate with such intensity

And why do normal things make normal people so mad

Matthew Savoca wrote in a poem

That Mother Nature is the new art

If that is true then what

Would that nature be

I really don’t know

*****

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2011, and his most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com