Sandra Meek
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Review of Sandra Meek’s (Botswana 1989-91) Road Scatter
Posted by John Coyne on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013  
http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pc-writers/2013/02/12/review-of-4/   
 
Road Scatter: Poems
by Sandra Meek (Botswana
1989–91)
Persea Books,$15.95
86 pages
2012

 Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79)


The revolutionary aspect of Sandra Meek’s new collection Road Scatter--in  which the poems are focused, although not exclusively, on a daughter’s  vigil at her dying mother’s beside-is that it gives us elegy as kinetic  sculpture.  Instead of traditional lament, we get clatter, crash and  shimmer. It is as if, in each poem, grief plummets like a ball down a  shoot, hits a force field of running water and is then channeled to a  lever, which flings it onto a piano key, forcing it to set off not just  an echoing note but also a flashing light. We get a sense of how living  through a death-in the dullness of its seemingly endless repetitions,  but also in its unexpected scintillations-is like turning on a grief  machine. Grief is not static, but rather in constant motion, is one  message of Road Scatter.

 “A word is elegy to what it signifies,” Robert Hass wrote thirty or  so years ago in “Meditation at Lagunitas.” That poem famously ends,  “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”-an utterance that simultaneously  confirms the power of the word blackberry as universal and highlights the failure of any universal to capture the multitude of particulars to which a word like blackberry might correspond.  Indeed the pathos in Road Scatter derives from the very failure of mother as universal to even begin to capture the multitude of particulars to which the word corresponds in Meek’s life and art.  “If mother is alpha and omega/spoken  back to the rain,” Meeks says at the start of “O,”
indicating that she  understands what she is up against in trying to solve the signification  problem. Limited as they must necessarily be, the particulars do begin  to accumulate and cohere into a luminous whole.   In “The History of  Air, Part I,” we learn that the mother’s moan as the nurses turn her in  her hospital bed is the flavor of strawberry yoghurt, and in “The  History of Air, Part II,” that in a plaintive role reversal the daughter  has inked her mother’s name onto the vomit tub in the same way that the  mother used to ink the daughter’s name onto the soap dish she took to summer
camp. In “Spreading Ash,” we learn that the daughter  experiences the mother’s rasping sickroom breath as “a stone  skipping/across a lake-two, three,/ four times before sinking/ somewhere  short of the glittering/horizon I first knew/as home….”


Meek limits her palette to a (mostly) monochromatic gray. A mother’s  face pools and stills in shadow in “Shadow Portrait,” the first poem in  the book.  The hill’s “buzz cut of winter,” the daughter tells us in  “Round Trip,” is as gray as the ashtrays her mother would habitually  wash out each night.  The ash in  “Spreading Ash” is the mother herself,  now “a gray arc shimmering/between pines.” In “Healing by Secondary  Intention”--in which birds weave hair the
mother has shed into nests up  and down the street-we also get glimmerings of silver. These poems are  the poetic equivalent of museum-quality black-and-white photographs.   They derive their eloquence and grace from Meek’s exploitation of a  limited tonal range.

 Numerous poems fall strictly outside the narrative of the mother’s  death.  “Urban Warfare by Design” gives us a blown-up mosque, with one  man dead in the rubble and another above him cocking a gun. “The human  heart can be measured/by two human fists,” Meek tells us.  “Museum of  the Party” introduces us to Desi Bouterse and his cronies, who were  responsible for untold human rights violations during their reign of  terror in Suriname throughout the 1980s.  An
(allegedly nonexistent)  U.S. plane dipping below U.S. radar to deliver a cache of AK-47s to  militants and then rising into the sky in plain sight of a whole village  stands in for Bouterse’s (unreliable) version of the truth. “Transparency’s  a platform,” Meek argues.  Like the pebble that hits the windshield in  the title poem and spiders the glass, the anonymous deaths of powerless  people, while perhaps seemingly inconsequential, do cause the  world irreparable damage. The shock of these deaths is meant to register  on us, along with that of the mother’s demise.

 One of my favorite poems in the book is “In Case, Since You Left,  You’ve Been Wondering”-something of a “Dear John” letter to a former  partner from the harrowing confines of the terminal ward. It is a  seething, incendiary, cacophonous symphony of a piece, in which multiple  griefs collide, and duende runs deep. Instead of dying after  five days of maximum-dosing on morphine, the mother gets a new lease on  life and dictates memos to the hospital staff “demanding/ her right to vanilla ice cream and chocolate/ice cream and by god chocolate-vanilla-swirl ice cream.”
Instead of falling asleep in her  mother’s hospital room, the daughter channels late-night vampire movies  and conflates her mother’s 30-year-old divorce anger with her own. “The  labor of love” Meek tells us, ” is not letting it crush you in its  collapse.”

Another favorite is “Cumulative Sentence,” is which we get,  essentially, a hospital-room psalm drawing reverent attention to the  very objects that make the average person a little queasy-umbilical  tubing, bedside commodes, breathing masks, catheter bags.  “Mother of  Coughed Blood’s Garnet Wings,” it begins, and builds powerfully, via  anaphora, to great incantatory effect.

 Many poets writing elegies have sought consolation in glimpses  heavenward. Meek does not. Her approach to grief is more in keeping with  the truths of science than of theology. The law of conservation of  energy specifies that the total amount of energy in a closed system must  stay constant over time; energy can neither be created nor destroyed.  It is applicable here. “Mother, turn on the breathing light, turn on/the mother machine, oh god, Mother!” the daughter pleads in “In Case, Since You Left, You’ve Been  Wondering.” There is, of course, no such thing as a mother machine, but Road Scatter gives consoling proof that the energy of love between mother and daughter is conserved even in death.  Road Scatter is a fierce and wonderful book, which
attests not just to the radical  contingency of one mother and one daughter, but of us all.


Ann Neelon is the author of Easter Vigil, which won both the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and the RPCV Writers and Readers  Award. Her poems and translations have appeared in many magazines,  including The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Manoa. She is Director of the Low-Residency M.F.A. Program at Murray State University and Editor of
New Madrid.

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