Joanna Rawson is a piercingly passionate, necessary artist. The riches in Unrest are as demanding as they are beautiful.
“It is art’s sacred ancient trick to beautify pain.” The distinguished novelist Cynthia Ozick said that, and it’s worth noting that she did not say “prettify.” There’s a chasm between the two and Joanna Rawson, in her second collection of poems, stays unflinchingly on the side of ‘’beautify.’’ Unrest is an apt title for a writer who is also a master gardener and understands the depths and complexities of the earth’s natural and forced moments of repose. Utter stillness, even after death (think decay) is an illusion, and illustrating that point, Rawson makes fine sounds in “Four Seasons Read The Cloud of Unknowing to One Landscape” :
Give no attention to the ivy clawing at the white scat in the speckled mortar and no atten-
tion to the fireflies like galaxy dust and the burn sedge and the creek’s reeking and none to
the willow after a week of heat taking its hair the rest of the way down.
It’s a spacious, detailed engagement with plant and animal life, and though Rawson is sometimes overly fond of the word “reek,” this poem is an example of the imperative of engagement with one’s surroundings. Her lines are long, but they suit her subjects. “Fallow air” and “snow” need the kind of room one would expect from a writer who calls Minnesota home , as another example from the same poem underscores :
And it lasts, in the fallow air—this source of the singing, bearing its ecstatic devotion into the atmosphere above the oblivious snow
The placement of the last two words offers an acute reminder of what is never controlled. In “Return Trip By Night,” air is a “wild vow,” an especially interesting pairing because, of course, “vow” is more commonly associated with a kind of containment, as in boundaries one vows not to breach. This is a fearless display of infinite reach, and helps prepare the reader for pieces even more impeccably accomplished.
“Kill- Box ‘’ is a good place to start:
The air—and by the air
I mean the cube of breathable space inside the boxcar—Isn’t going to be enough.
Meaning the total number of available breaths.
Which you could tally out, divided by the number of stowaways on board,
To figure how much time the 11 of them—even as the train was picking up speed out of Matamoros, however long ago,
midday, midway into June, snaking its way across the border—
have left. Which isn’t enough.They’re inside the grain hopper, the 55 foot long 15 high 100 ton Union Pacific boxcar with
3 compartments and center loading hatch.Our passengers aren’t anybody to speak of.
They aren’t newsworthy yet.
Shortly before the third verse on the third page of this poem she imagines a gardener studying the micro-climate of the interior of the boxcar and by the fourth verse she’s conjuring “this garden that’s disintegrating,” a deft nod to the ways humans force the ongoing desecration of Eden by the way they treat each other. Rawson doesn’t overtly name the connection between boxcars holding and transporting desperate living /dying cargo in America and boxcars that held equally desperate, doomed Jews in Europe. There is always wisdom in her understanding of when to be explicit and when to be implicit.
“Hush,” she declares in “Return Trip by Night”. “It was exactly then,” a distressing time, that like every word, works as prelude for “Riptide,’’ about the first female suicide bomber. Rawson writes equally compelling pieces about military exercises in her state, and the stark, ungentle ways of the garden, and she does it with energetic originality : “A pattern of blown glorious roses, the kind you can’t get any more,/has been burned by dull sun onto the floorboards,’’ is from “A Summer under Occupation Reports Its News & Weather,” and is another multi-pager combining the sublime with what wounds or wraps one in longing.
Reading this book is an exercise in active observation, even when observing is unnerving, and leads to a brutal discomfort like that in ‘’Riptide.’’ It’s a bit of an affectation to number verses backward, but the point is understandable. It may be a struggle to grasp in ‘zine form, but it will be worth the effort. What is quoted here are fragments from verses: She begins with the number 6:
We’re talking now
in the ticking away of a few hot minutes on this lethal morning.5 .
The place was known as a civil operations center.4.
There’s this few minutes in the evening in early autumn,
when my mouth still tastes like smoke, smoke and salad flowers
and I go out for air.
By the time Rawson arrives at more mundane listings the reader still knows that she’s daring physical reactions to lines that question severely, as in 2:
When did the horizon get so unstable
as if to disregard us?
before mentioning the “blasted plumes’’ of the bomber’s “ethereally lethal skirt,” and on to 1., which ends—this gives nothing away—with an act of refusal.
