Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

The Book of Ten by Susan Wood   
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. $14.95.

Review by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

When grief and sins against oneself weigh heavily on the mind, poet Susan Wood finds a way out through the blessing of thought and narrative clarity. In her new collection, The Book of Ten, she navigates the world of sin against oneself and others and records what happens when those transgressions have become fixed in the memory.

Marked by speculation, and long-lined reflection, Wood approaches her subject with a mixed tone of humor and a deep-seated sadness. But it is not kind of all-encompassing grief that resolves to give up—it is one that looks carefully at the way the world is made to find reasons for living. In “The Soul Bone,” Wood examines the nature of the soul while illuminating the speaker’s condition:

            Now, in late middle age, or more, I like to imagine it,
            the spirit, the soul bone, as though it were hidden
            somewhere inside my body, white as a tooth
            that falls from a child’s mouth, a dove,
            the cloud it can fly through . . .

            Sometimes at night I imagine I can feel it,
            shining its light through my body, the bone
            luminous glowing through the dark. Sometimes
            if you listen, you might even hear the light
            deep inside me, humming its brave little song.

The poems vacillate between public and personal narratives, many of which were inspired by a series of short Polish films, “Dekalog,” by Kryztof Kieslowski. (The films examine, in a loose way, the Ten Commandments as sins against oneself rather than sins against God.)

Interestingly, Wood’s poems imply that the hardest sins to contend with are those which God commits against people, rather than those that people commit themselves. In “Decalogue: Thin Ice,” Wood ends the poem with a scene in which a woman is saved from a fiery car crash while her husband and three children die. Wood writes: “Oh, and don’t try to tell me/this is beyond our understanding, that it’s all/part of God’s plan, because the god who’d plan this/he doesn’t even deserve the name.”

In later poems, anger at God transforms into anger at oneself, the speaker’s parents, or chance. The incident that seems to hover over these poems is the speaker’s failed marriage, and her abandonment of her children from that marriage—a memory that clearly haunts the speaker as a “sin.” “Oh, God, if you’re out there/what Commandments did I break?/I know I broke many. All,” Wood writes. “Especially the unwritten one,/the one that should have read,/Honor thy children.”

In “Decalogue: Rooms,” the speaker’s anger against herself becomes grief, as Wood writes: “I huddled in the corner/of my body as though that body were a locked room/someone might break into at any moment./I was alone there, so alone it was like drowning,/and I could hear the birds outside crying in the bois d’ arc trees . . .”

The collection progresses, if not towards forgiveness of others and oneself, but at least toward an acceptance of the past. Wood describes this forgiveness in “Decalogue: Ethics,” as a continual revisiting of the past:

            It was winter and I turned away
            and left (my son) standing in an empty house, and now
            he is showing me how it feels like to be left like that . . .

            To forgive oneself is a work that never ends, every day
            cutting lilies, putting them in a cheap crockery jar.

Overall, this collection is full of the interrogative, looking at life through the lens of questions and wonder. The best part of the poems is that Wood doesn’t answer these questions but merely poses them, allowing her reader to become part of the conversation.