As a defined term, heritage may be considered archaic, but it does triple duty as the title for Paisley Rekdal’s new poetry collection. Unlike the limited meanings attributed to inheritance, the poems in Heritance offer wide-ranging narratives of cultural, legacy, and racial significance.
To say I relished these long poems with their syntactically surprising long sentences, each poem grounded in some sort of realism, layered tightly with associations, and often embracing death, is to not say enough. There's no sentimentality here, but the poignancy in these poems brought me to tears at times. Even on a second read. These labyrinthine poems juggled death, race, and memory throughout; in many poems, all three characters played a role.
Death is a visitor, a ghost at times, a symbol of loneliness, floating throughout the book. She writes that death is “the absence/ each of us promises to become.” Rekdal has a keen awareness of how deaths change us, particularly the deaths of family. Deaths engender a personal understanding of mortality.
I want a brother to walk with me now
through the woods: to stare with me
into Death’s eyes, those glassy,
winking flames. So familiar,
so full of pity, I could believe
our parents never abandoned us.
Race is also omnipresent here, weaving its way through many of the poems in all its messy, complex ways. Rekdal has a way of easing into a story; in “Lake Effects,” a trace of weather arrives metaphorically, and then enters a manic man, shot by cops. Lest we dare be surprised by this gambit, she reminds us that she is not telling us anything we can’t find out for ourselves. We should know better than to be triggered by what is front and center. In another poem, the poet steals a cast-iron Aunt Jemima doll from the trunk of a friend’s car, while recalling the Japanese dolls gifted to her by her white grandmother, that violently upset her Chinese grandmother, and which she hid from her white friends when they brought their blond dolls to play with her. Without edification, we are thrust into the messiness of race and ethnicity where there is often competition for suffering and sorrow. Of Bob and Carol, a mixed-race couple who never had children, she wonders if they simply decided “against further difficulty.”
“There's no sentimentality here, but the poignancy in these poems brought me to tears at times.”
Memory carves family into poems, and many poems reflect struggles with memory: she asks if her Chinese mother’s memory lives in rose or thorn. Knowing she is alive in a world given to her by her white father, she notes it too, will be taken from her, bit by bit, into the dark. A poem is titled “When my father died, I was glad.” But memory survives death, described as the negation of always, as when the poet watches a magnolia tree she has always loved being destroyed, and thinks how the word always cannot be used about anything in the world. The poet allows the tree to travel from the earth into her memory, and resolves to see it flower every year in her mind. There is familial inheritance: a father who cites Pericles and gives her history, and a stunning remark by the poet’s mother bequeathing her daughter the gift of dying before having to live with her. An elegy that sadly notes, “this is not the country I wanted to love.”
Another narrative line running through the book is an attempt to define art and beauty. Clearly Rekdal is an artist, has an artist’s eye, and creates art from what is real to her. Among these poems, several mention visits to art galleries with vivid descriptions of works of art. She asks if she would know beauty at all if she didn’t know death, adding the challenge, “what is the point/ of telling you all this anyway?” These excursions of addressing the reader feel like an admonition (but to us or to herself?) that the answers to life’s questions should be as self-evident as they are unanswerable.
In next-door poems, “The Brace,” and “Dulce and Decorum,” Rekdal tells the story of her cover art. I’ll admit that I had been confounded by the cover of a young boy with dark hair and a plaid sweater. I learn it is a Grant Wood painting, viewed at a New Deal art show. Rekdal notices what I would have missed or perhaps misconstrued: the boy wears a truss, suggesting the brace her father wore while healing from a car accident, and further back, his immobilizing bout with polio when he was 12, close to the age of the boy on her cover. She muses that her father absorbed the body of that boy. Next to the portrait of the boy in the gallery are portraits of laid-off workers; male legs marching down a street; and a Dorothea Lange photo of an American flag twisting in the desert dust of Topaz. In another gallery, and later in another Rekdal book, there are pictures of funeral wreaths for James Wakasa, a Japanese prisoner who was shot by a military guard while he was walking his dog near the fence surrounding the Topaz internment camp. Elsewhere in the poem she circles back to polio.
Where does history end and art begin
in the great sweep of our forgetting, preserved
inside a handful of facts, the number of bombs
our country exported, and their dead, the first
female polio scientist testing out her vaccine
by injecting herself?
Rekdal is an artist and historian. A previous poet laureate of Utah, she is the current director of the American West Center at the University of Utah, where she is a professor. Rekdal authored, West: A Translation, which was commissioned as a poem to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The book is an extraordinary collection of photos, translations, poems, and essays that centers on the role of Chinese men, who were ninety percent of railroad workers, and whose lives were shattered by the Chinese Exclusion Act, enacted after the completion of the railroad. Reading Heritance shortly after reading West, gave me a deep appreciation for Rekdal’s varied body of work, and her consummate ability to reveal and translate truth in myriad genres.
