An Idea Held: A Review of The Darkened Temple
by Mari L’Esperance
review by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
A first book, often the work of a beginning writer, cannot be compared to the author’s earlier efforts; it cannot show the growth or lack of growth in ‘style’ or ‘voice’ it represents; it cannot be checked against reviews of previous works. A first book’s reviewer cannot steal engaging phrases from others about the author’s maturation or ‘deepening vision’ to insert into her own review. As a first book, The Darkened Temple, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in 2007, comes to us from an unfamiliar universe of discourse, adheres to unknown rules. A reader must venture into it without preconceptions, but an author can give clues as to how her book should be read, its direction and proposed destination.
Mari L’Esperance accomplishes this with an epigraph from Tess Gallagher: All these fears. Finally no choice, alerting the reader that she will be venturing onto a world of foreclosures. She then illuminates what life in this place must be like, what her poems hope to accomplish:
…telling the story/ of the life you have chosen, of the life/you could not help but choose (p 79).
My mother disappeared without a trace (p 53). This stunning central fact anchors the imagining, narration, and growing conviction that led to those unalterable choices. To interrogate these events and decisions, The Darkened Temple moves through three sections: the first imagines varieties of loss and death, the second delineates the real disappearance that anchors the story and the third envisions a life after such loss. Thus, the book decodes a personal tragedy, but here Ms. L’Esperance does not seek to control sadness with form, does not use a regularity of meter or foot to make sense of the random cruelty of history. Although she acknowledges formal poetry with a pantoum and a variety of stanzaic poems, she accomplishes her vision through the exquisite rendering of moments: Somewhere a muddy hillside is slipping in a relentless rain.// Drenched roots surrender the soil… executed in plain language, frozen for us in accomplished lyric free verse. She has said, The short lyric, to me, is a single breath. For the book’s 80 pages, the reader breathes with her.
To open The Darkened Temple, Ms. L’ Esperance imagines or observes other people’s losses. A bush warbler regrets that [her] three daughters became birds/ and flew away from me forever (5), Margaret Fuller and her family die at sea, the salt swells swirling and foaming around their waists/ //then their shoulders and necks (p 8), a tourist “In the Valley of the Kings” is left to die alone, her final charge to whoever finds her:
Kiss the children for me
Tell them I have found the door
to the next world
Tell them I am entering history (p 9).
Heartbreak is the poet’s métier here, each poem in the section a pinprick of conscience reminding us of our failure to communicate, to love what we love properly or enough:
Something
fails to translate. Something is coming apart as I speak.
the huge moon looming outside
my window is too brilliant. It hurts me.
My brother, tell me how we failed you (p 13).
But what is lost in these first poems is not gone forever for [w]hatever you abandon returns in your dreams (p 6) and the poems that follow ask if memory is a curse or a form of prayer like the one that ends the first section, to remind us that we must acknowledge losses, deaths, and stupidities and use them to enrich, not encumber, our lives:
Haul it up into the light as the rusted
pulleys and frayed ropes creak and groan
with their burden—crates of skulls, broken
cars and bodies, sacks of stones, their
horrible tonnage, the lost and discarded, all
that we would rather forget: our angers and fears
the lives we betrayed, the souls
we abandoned while we looked after
our own comfort and gain. Let’s see them all,
here in the open, unbound and pulsing,
with that which was never extinguished,
which survives even death itself, brave
flicker at the back gate of our oblivion (p 25).
The section that follows finds a way to release memory, to bid farewell to the mother we see first leaving her daughter on a train, riding /back/to the only life she knew….// because the idea of sanctuary/ was as remote to her/ as the constellations but the mother never returns, at least into her daughter’s life. She is gone, and although she is present again and again in the girl’s dreams and fancies she has vanished, her body envisioned
departing and arriving
the way it does,
always departing and arriving
and without warning/(p 34 ).
remaining in imagination as the dream-mother …kneeling among the irises in a/ wide straw hat/ digging with her bare hands (p 37). And her daughter must dig and dig into the pain and fog of her going, a barren, exhausting excavation. The fog wants in. I cannot see beyond it//Someone tell me how the story ends./ I am tired and want no more of this journey (p 39). Indeed, this has been a long, sad trip with no easy finish. But the daughter, not finding her mother, she finds a way forward to:
…lie down/ on the ground beside my mother under falling darkness/ and draw my coat over our bodies (p 40). In this coming to terms with the past, the daughter moves on, for This must be how the heart makes a place/ for the life that still demands to be lived,//turning away in stages…(p 41). At last, the mother’s disappearance becomes palpable: What I mean to say is: she was of this world/ And then she was not (p 46) and in that instant of crossing over/ from innocence to knowing — (p 54) she can begin her life again.
The short third section of the book is devoted to that new life. From this point on, the book is not about the child’s loss but the adult’s acceptance of that loss, the rebuilding of a life based on that acceptance.
The thrum, the whine, rasp of board
against board, wind hammering
at a slant, dry and incessant.
Dead limbs. Stumps. Suck
of mud, stink of sludge
in the dark ditch. Then bracing
heel to stone, knuckle to bone,
hunkering down in the frame of it,
of your own retrievable life.
These final poems render the beauty of the burnt away, of a once ash filmed pond that…
now glints
beneath a fringe of wild lilies, pink
and yellow, the fierce life returning—
insistent, unrepentant—despite everything (p 63).
and of the possibility that can accompany such destruction.
How does one go back to repair the bridge? I don’t know. Listen:
The rain keeps falling the way it has to.
The begonias make the exact shape
they were meant to make. Such possibility.
At the end, The Darkened Temple is not a typical first book; it is not the work of a young writer on the edge of becoming, not the expected first-book miscellany that often begins a poetry career; nor is it hampered by the author’s limitations in style and experience. Mari L’ Esperance comes to us in her mature form. Raised in Japan, Guam, and California, she brings to her work a broad world view and the life experience of a marriage and family therapist.
Her taut lyric narrative, evolved as L’Esperance has said over a span of about 12-13 years, but, she adds, …the idea of a book of poems was always with me.* The Darkened Temple is not so much the story of a mother’s disappearance as it is a story of her daughter’s reappearance and the result of a life fully lived and deeply considered and an idea held and refined.
From the Interview: Writing the Life Poetic
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Mari L’Esperance’s first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was selected by Hilda Raz for the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. An earlier collection was awarded the 1999 Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize and published in 2000. L’Esperance’s work has appeared in several literary journals and most recently in Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry by Sage Cohen (2009 Writer’s Digest Books) and When the Muse Calls: Poems for the Creative Life, edited by Kathryn Ridall (2009 Pomegranate Press). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, former New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow, and recipient of residency fellowships from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Wendy Taylor Carlisle is the author of two books of poetry, Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000). She lives in Texas and Arkansas, and has read her poetry in the Bay Area in August 2008 and recently in December 2009.
