Here's my review of Kristina Andersson Bicher's debut poetry collection which ran on Doug Holder's Small Press Review blog several weeks ago.
She-Giant
in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again
by
Kristina Andersson Bicher
MadHat
Press, 2020
67
pages
Review
by Lo Galluccio
Every
so often one comes across a stunning new poetry collection, a book that leaves
you a little dizzy, one that beckons to be re-read, so rich and fascinating its
verse. Such is the case with Kristina
Andersson Bicher’s debut book, She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again. Even
the title delights, a kind of clue to the book’s grounding in both mythic and
modern worlds. This work swells and
delights like the hooks of a good pop song, but its textures and tones are more
like the fantasia of a dark classical symphony.
Kristina
takes us through the perilous chambers of her “sloppy heart” and through the channels
of an episodic tale of loss, madness and new-found identity. There are bereavements
and confessions and rants as well as poems that run a few scant lines of
powerful epiphany or cryptic message. One of the masterful joys of this collection
is the range of form and content – one cannot stay attached to any one style of
poem—Bicher leads us along a forest of many kinds of trees, some bearing ripe
fruit, some stripped bare to winter’s austere and frigid touch.
The poet
is widow, divorcee, lover, sister, prophet, folksinger, mother, daughter and
goddess. From the first poem, “The Widow
Sings a Love Song,” she writes:
praise
the nape of you where/dark bee of my mouth goes troubling/the plum swale
let me
sink through some small bore…
P
1.
This
bee somehow alerts me to Sylvia Plath’s work but is not a direct allusion. One feels sure the poet has read Plath and
Sexton and many other poets whose techniques she adopts and wields, always in
the service of creating something original and new.
In “Unborn”
she sizzles with rhyme:
I am
mar scar flat star
eat and
heal
pig’s
squeal
I
verve and flash
verse
when I slash…
p. 4
There
are several poems with Icelandic titles, Bicher’s ancestry is Swedish and she
peppers the book with references to places and myths in Scandinavia. In the poem Kirkjubaejarklaustur, she writes:
This
is how you break the children—
This
is how you sever the husband
with
ice and flame.
p.5
This
story of wrecking, breaking, abandoning is one of the threads that run through
this book like a fever chart. In a poem with
the contemporary backdrop of NYC, Bicher overlays Biblical references. Her endings are generally powerful and surprising:
In “Ode
to Restraint in a West Village Bar” subtitled (“Or other gods I have invoked”
she ends with:
Slither
me up the white calf/of Atlas to burn that bright scapula/blade blue. I would
rip the sky/to fill my mouth---
p. 8
In
the short poem “Eve Dreams” she blasts:
her
son is a child
in
the desert
has
no skin
is
lonely
and
no longer hers
p. 15
This
is a poem of consequence, the dreaded consequence of leaving children behind, of
striking out on one’s own, where dreams turn into emblems of brutality. Kindled in the crucible of elements, these
poems are often primal awakenings and the writer is an icon of womanhood. She
is not only herself, she is Eve, the woman who supposedly caused mankind’s fall
from grace.
In a
poem that takes on the largess of mythology, it’s source an Icelandic Rune
poem, Bicher inscribes a series of bold statements:
Sadness
is the toil of the steed.
Fear
is the leavings of the wolf.
Comfort
is a god with one hand.
Divorce
is the pickaxe of the doomed.
p. 21
And yet,
despite the nightmare of divorce, Bicher is far from doomed. She writes a love poem to a present-day
lover, in “One Year In,”
He continues
to talk in circles
I do
nothing to improve my life
I
still come to him with the hunger of a junkie
Our
night-dreams are kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic
It
has become impossible to sleep without his hand on my belly.
p. 38
The
hard edges of desire nevertheless ends with this simple sentiment:
I
buy him heatproof spatulas; he buys me handmade paper.
He’s
gained weight since we met. I think this
means he’s happy.
This
is a book that oscillates and travels, from Arizona to Bellevue (where her
brother Krister lies in a hospital bed) from NYC to a countryside where we
would expect to find Hansel and Gretel’s witch. The book’s shifts and swells
are deftly achieved with brilliant syntax and phrasing. There are three poems
titled, “Prophecy” and two labeled “Lament” these numbered and each one a tale
of beauty and woe. The poet also
introduces Antietam (famous battleground of the Civil War in Maryland) in a
poem called “Missing” about she and her ex-husband driving to the mountains to
leave her brother, Krister, behind. Later in the book the poet writes two
shorter pieces, “Antietam I” and “Antietam II” which deconstruct the situation,
in the first piece, referring to Kirster as a “ghost” and in two stanzas of
disjointed verse embodying the traumatic pain of leaving him behind.
We left
him in amid red hills
Swings
empty and sitting on it
Krister
is him in the doctors’ rightness
So a
hollow swing
Krister
is.
p. 54
Bicher
uses compression and space well. In “The
Famine that Follows” she writes:
We
die not
from
fire
But its quenching---
…
We will fall
upon
each other
with forks
and fingers
we will
eat our very names
p 48
Bicher
rarely lets the intensity flag in this collection. These poems are brazen and lustrous, well-constructed
and brave. She is constantly aware of absence,
neglect, passion and the aftermath of human connection. In “Then” she writes:
When
you are gone, for good
From
me, irrevocably gone,
Irretrievable
…
Will
you be sun-dust risen
From
nowhere, insubstantial
Dissolving
in shade
That
cannot enter me
Or
will I burnish our story into myth
Harden
you to marble
Will
I put you on a horse?
p. 50
I
urge you to order a copy of this book.
It upends, terrifies and delights.
There is a plethora of excellent poems – too many to reference. Kristina
has through her imagination and passion transformed her life into an object of
reckoning and pathos. A truly beautiful work.
