Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Miracle Arrhythmia by Rachel Eliza Griffiths   
Willow Books, 2010. $14.95

Review by Metta Sáma

Years ago, I lost a best friend to either walking pneumonia or an overdose of potassium. I say, “lost,” as if she were a button, once sewn loosely onto my favorite cardigan, mysteriously vanished one morning and left a thread as reminder of her presence. This is the language of human grief: loss; a material and visceral response to permanent absence. In Arundhati Roy’s elegiac novel, God of Small Things, the children Rahel and Estha denote human grief and loss as “a ________-shaped hole in the universe”. The absence of someone who will never fully return, visualized as a hole, a hole specific to the shape of the person who once occupied the earth, has always struck me as the most powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of “everyone with lungs” (to quote from Juliana Spahr). More importantly, Roy’s explanations of human loss gave language to what I had not been able to easily say: my friend was gone, and yet, she had taken on a new form, and that new form was ever-present, signaling, in its presence, its very absence.

Visual artist and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ collection, Miracle Arrhythmia, easily re-articulates, in stunning image and metaphor, the “_________-shaped hole{s} in her universe”. Griffiths takes the title of her collection to heart: the poems are simultaneously filled with the wonder of the beautiful pains in the world and the juxtapositions/bumps/disruptions between the hearts of those of us living and those in the spirit world. Griffiths’ collection, too, makes me think of the miracle play, blending mythology and Biblical references with the speaker’s own history, to come to some kind of truth, about life, about living, about death, about dying, about pleasures and pains, about the delicious joys of shame.

Griffiths’ poems capture the aches of death and dying and the articulable madness of loss and losing. I’m called to think of South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda’s aptly titled Ways of Dying, a novel that imagines a “professional mourner” who attends funerals of the under-sung, to sing them to their graves. Griffiths is a U.S., Black, woman version of the professional mourner, a spirit who understands the profound impacts of death and loss, whose poems alert us to the uncelebrated ways of dying and losing. In the poems in the “Tributaries” section, Griffiths demonstrates “what the living do”: pay homage to “largeness”: hurricanes, Baldwin, peonies, mothers, Ken Saro-Wiwa, spiders, and minds, to name a few. In “I Leave the Lonely Iris for Baldwin” Griffiths calls upon the literary giant to attenuate her ongoing griefs: “I leave the lonely iris, its center/golden in the glare of the snow. I can’t manage this” (11-12). Later, she resolves, albeit fleetingly, “One day we may dig you up to explain something absent/in us, the living, old forensic evidence of love” (18-19).

In part, Griffiths asks: “what the dead do” and “what can the dead do”? What can the dead do to teach us about living, what can death do to teach us about life? What are the great joys of being alive? Silence, is one answer: “I come here to learn what I cannot know: silence” (“I Leave the Lonely Iris for Baldwin” 20). But not silencing, not erasure. In fact, Miracle Arrhythmia is about (among many things) unquieting, unsilencing, refusing to smother the voices of the underclasses.

In “Bone Music”, Griffiths writes:

         A soldier from Ogoniland told
         the woman to walk into a pond oil.
         The fish were gone, the water
         was yellow as pus; the soldier’s gun
         was exhausted by its own fire (40-44).

Griffiths returns to the woman, whose dying brings life to a dried-up pond:

         Against her cries, the contractions drummed
         through her hips like bullets. The woman said
         she would drown. Her breaking water
         fed the starving pond, rinsed
         the soldier’s boots (55-59).

The sentiment is familiar: out of death comes life. However, the sharp contrasts between language, so masterfully created, and the reality of the excruciatingly painful image, transforms this poem and its poetics, from the familiar to the radically unfamiliar, from the distance of reading about atrocities in the news, to witnessing, through the imagination, such barbarity. The unsettled feeling continues in “African Woman on Almerian Road”: “The woman becomes. . ./a place./Her mouth? A wasted road for stops” (21-23). Figurative language is the tool that Griffiths uses to acknowledge and come to temporary understandings of her world, which collides with those around her. There is considerable care in Griffith’s phrasings, attentive crafting in her images. “His mind must be under the steps,” (1) she writes in “House of the Mind”. The tenderness and the honesty, as raw as it often is, strike me as unsentimental and compassionate, a poet whose first priority is to write what she imagines and sees.

Often, the poems are too masterful in their treatment of the subjects, the metaphors and images are too glossy. In “Daughter of the Ward,” for example, I wanted to feel something, an unknown thing, this feeling, as I waited for the poem to simply take me to that feeling. Instead, I began to drift into my own pedantic jottings of life in a mental hospital. I didn’t feel the burden or/and relief or/and grief or/and freedom or/and resignation or/and confusion or/and loss (etc) of being a patient. The figurative language and images, however, were stunning. Too stunning: “. . .tell anyone about those midnights/I crawled up the stairs of our house, a girl/with new breasts” (6-8) and “Dad should know/a letter would be fine. If it is soft/and has no mouth for speaking” (45-47), for example, clean the heart of its break. It’s neither detached nor attached, and the feelings don’t exist in the in-between, either. In “Small Prayers to the God of Depression,” as well as others in the section entitled “Chamber of the Drum,” the poems lose their edge, their reaching towards human connection, towards a deepening of human experience and transformation. In this poem, for example, Griffiths writes: “Smallness:/I tolerated its destruction like an armada/of locusts in a garden” (23-25). This poem is a list of “small things” that “trimmed my appetites and sent a plague/upon every desire” (26-27). The near perfection of the loosely connected images eradicates any emotions that Griffiths works so diligently to evoke.

Despite these heavily polished treatments of raw subjects, Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet to watch, a poet who is genuinely delighted by beautiful phrases and striking images. The work in Miracle Arrhythmia makes me remember the greatest writers I’ve come to love, and I imagine that Griffiths will soon be on that list of writers we must read and read and read.