Leslie Friedman

Unleaving

Everyone has a father. Some are with their children all their lives.  Some never meet their children. The father may love the children; a child may or may not like or love the father. The father may love one or some of the children more or less than others. Some will die before children; others may have a long life. All fathers die.

In Father Elegies, Stella Hayes loves her father, her father loves her, but he dies at age 50. She is only 14 years old and will spend much of her life missing her father, thinking about him, condemning him, praising him, loving him. She also has a mother who has a cameo role in the daughter’s book about her father. The author thanks God for the “small” gift that her mother is alive.

The story travels: Ukraine, Russia, Paris, Chicago, Los Angeles. This reader found it hard to know where the family was and when. Sometimes the author threads where and when with remembrances. The first three poems establish the father’s heart trouble. In “Regarding His Heart,” the daughter describes “I eavesdrop on the sounds/ Of his heart.”  

She would sacrifice herself for him, “Any air for myself, I would swallow fire wrapped/In fire for you. I’m not far----somewhere, Father,”   

In “Root Cellar,” Her father wants “one day”…. “A refrigerator full---/Eggs, red skinned onions, butter, milk, …“ The author’s observations of her relationship with her father and her emotions are full of pain and devotion. Her parents were also devoted to her and each other. The parents made a plan. “My    mother  &   father   mapping out, in secret, a way out  …. He was the mother I never had.” The daughter must have had an idea of what a mother or a father does. The three of them stayed in the wheat field near their home, waiting to go away.

The daughter stayed with the father while the mother was on the “opposite side of wheat field re-reading the Russian canon.” Then, in “Dark Night, Her Song,” the author/daughter realizes time is going away, “Where are you, Father?/You have been dead for so long----“

The girl/daughter/author seems to contemplate killing herself because her father’s heart was killing him. She hides in a wardrobe. She compares her pain to that of Pasternak’s Yuri Zhivago. The prose poem, “Tempera,” is printed as a paragraph. Its form purposely misleads the reader who might think, “oh, look, it is prose. I can get that,” but the author grabbed the sign of something straightforward to dress something that it is not.

          ….Yuri Zhivago climbed upon his mother’s grave on the morning of her burial. The dead soil going in ---, to dead soil.

            He looks into heaven and “performed a movement that, to the crowd, gathered looked like the beginning of a howl.     I howled like a wolf cub as a girl at Papa’s funeral.   

No one could feel the loss of a parent so deeply as she: not an imaginary character who had received emotions more powerful than an emotional live person could feel, and certainly not any other person’s daughter. The man’s/father’s wife does not approach the wasting sorrow. The daughter knows that her loss is the single worst loss. As her reader, I accept her view. Her life is suffused with terror of a loved one’s death; he who is the center of her life. The girl has her own rituals. One is envisioning a rope.

Here on the edge of everything             I ride in & out of wishful thinking

I’ve spent my life braiding                    ropes in one room & dying in another

                                              without him

These lines and the theme, without him, appear again. Whisper It to Me begins and ends with the rope. 

Hayes has innovative, visual ways to use in her poems. She makes them work well for her. The first poems in the book use fewer, newer layouts. As the collection proceeds, she leaves varying numbers of spaces between lines. Some have 6-10 spaces between lines. It gives the reader breathing room or time to assimilate the thoughts of the lines above. There is also the need to relate one set of lines which could be a paragraph in meaning or not.  The words or phrases, as in Whisper It To Me, separate meanings and positions on the page.

Running the lines sideways is a new design. Instead of going left to right on the narrower part of the page, her layout goes left to right from bottom to top. It allows longer lines, and also is used for poems with short lines or poems with wide spacing.

Hayes uses ampersands instead of “and.” I wonder why. An ampersand is a graceful character, so it could be used for its lovely shape. It could be considered more casual, or, perhaps less casual if looked like something from an earlier century.

There are poems alternating English and Russian. My two years of college Russian helped mostly in the sounds of the languages. Hearing the rhythm of each, was, after practice, a walk into forgotten sounds. I cannot explain Hayes’ use of long dashes. The long dashes come in short long dashes and longer ones, as in “Drunken Night For Two Voices, after Berlioz’s  Nuit d’iversse et d’extase infinie, Les Troyens”    . 

         I didn’t learn to read music

         The language of gaps & pauses

         Timing ------,  the shame is mine alone

         Time isn’t going to heal all wounds ---,  

Hayes does employ a language “of gaps & pauses.” Like the spaces, long dashes followed by a comma, especially the very long ones, allow a reader to mull over the author’s thought. It could be a place to add a word of one’s own. Ending a phrase or poem with -----, could make a reader feel air has left one’s mouth waiting for the next syllable or beat.

The author’s version of Les Troyens is fascinating and surprising. Aeneas, founder of Rome, and Dido, Queen of Carthage, were lovers, but they sacrifice love for destiny. Does this emphasize Hayes’ feminism? That is the surprise. Devoted to her father, she, like Dido, “would swallow fire wrapped/ in fire for you.” In “Loss’s Motion,” “Aeneas” is correct spelling, but this poem changes it to Aeneus. I first thought it was a typo. The male ending in Latin is “us.” Was that used to make him doubly manly? Hayes writes, “ A man’s suffering is more beautiful than a woman’s”  Act I, The ending of Les Troyens hands Dido horrific suffering.  

Dido drives Aeneus’ sword into her diaphragm

The sword casts a light & a shadow

Aeneus follows her into the fire until he recoils from its elements

                          (The gods have spoken)

Dido loves

& burns half-alive in the fire

Aeneus abandons Dido, Queen of Carthage

He flees from her love to found Rome

(the gods have ordained it to be)

Hayes comes out of her mourning (she writes not to use “mourning,” it is “too psychoanalytic”) to write in anger at her father. In “An Accident of the Imagination,” the speaker asks: “Who did you fuck on your trips to Bulgaria? Was it Maria with green eyes & a scar above her lip? Or Masha with an afterglow of a rabbit?”   

As an aside, the author notes that her mother should have written poetry instead of working at a hair salon.

Hayes does not mention that her parents were Jewish. No reason to add that fact; it does not appear in the family life or her own. However, she includes poems about Babi Yar and sitting Shiva, which is mourning after a funeral. Her Babi Yar starts in an unusual way. She writes:  Not words/I wish for/Eyes meeting  ----Babi Yar, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1961.  Those words are not in Yevtushenko’s poem. Maybe I missed it. I read it three times in English and read Father Elegies four times. Why is the title set this way? Hayes writes that her great grandmother, a great-aunt, other relatives were murdered in this mass murder of 33, 771 human beings. The author never met these relatives but knew the tragedy. Babi Yar means grandmother ravine. It became a place of killing. There were 100, 000 to 150, 000 murdered there during the German occupation. Hayes understands that the 33, 771 killed were individuals. In “Babi Yar,” they thought, played, laughed.

…a baby/Feeds on a woman’s dead breast

As he suckles on death.

The ghost of father tells me to remember

Them as tones culled out of water. We place stones

As tears that turn into stones.   

In An Accident of The Imagination, Hayes considers interaction with her father; that leads to a declaration for her children.

                                                  Sometimes I would check for his chest to lift

like a lid on a pot.

The same movement Margot’s & Finley’s chests made when they were babies

All I cared about was for them to keep breathing-------

                                                                                                               for them to survive

babyhood.   

Hayes wonders if her mother is “hopeless” as they tour Italy. She writes she visited Italy with her own daughter. In “At the Beauty Shop with My Mother:” “I have been back a handful of times. At twilight, my Margot just two, in the stroller facing Rome…” 

One visual effect achieves a sense of dangerous secrecy. Hayes redacts information in “Erasure, Police Press Release.”  She also makes a thin line through a word or phrase in the six poems that are about being raped when fourteen. Sadly, she states that then and now she feels shame for being raped. In her Afterword, she wishes she had not told her family. She waited to tell her children about it when they are “old enough,” after this book’s publication. Young, she had a terrible experience. “I wanted it to unhappen. If I did, maybe it would bring my father back to life. If I did, maybe, he wouldn’t have died. It broke his heart. I believe he was ashamed of me instantly.”  Afterword, I hope her narration will not upset her children so it sticks with them as it has for their mother.

In “Afterword,” Hayes makes an “attack on form, the dissolution & disillusionment of form,” although above that statement she calls her book “a sonata, a serenade, a series of arias.” Those musical arts have forms. She has innovative ways for new forms.  

Gerald Manley Hopkins, 19th c. poet, has an answer to Hayes’ struggle.

          Margaret, are you grieving

          Over golden grove unleaving?

…..

          Sorrow’s springs are the same.

          Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

          What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

          It is the blight man was born for,

          It is Margaret you mourn for.

                                       Spring and Fall to a Young Child