Susan Wood. The Book of Ten. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
Reviewed by Mary Shepard
Susan Wood's fourth book of poetry, The Book of Ten, is a meaningful sojourn through the uneasy territory of grief, death, and the ambiguous scorn of an angry-father God. Equipped with disarming wit and a ruthless analysis of her own flaws, Wood's collection exhibits a confessional style intermixed with cinema, blues music, and the West Texas prairie, making this collection a testament to the universal characteristics of grief, rather than a personal reflection. The Book of Ten wrestles with Wood's own roles—mother, daughter, ex-wife— effectively and with a relatable, easy style of prose that will leave readers with the hope that their own self-examination could be as wryly humorous and illuminating.
Ten poems, entitled The Decalogue, are woven seamlessly throughout The Book of Ten. This sequence is an homage Krzysztof Kieslowski's series of ten short films, Dekalog, which discuss the ten commandments. The Decalogue poems steep the collection with a sense of personal spirituality rather than dogmatic religion, which Wood questions in lines such as "She was forty. I don't think she believed that / High Church Episcopal God her parents buried her by, / but I don't know what she believed exactly."
In "Decalogue: Thin Ice" a father miscalculates the depth of the ice that his son is skating upon, an image used to contemplate Wood's perceived failures as a parent: "It's the break in the ice we all fear most and secretly / believe we deserve, that if God were just / he would rain down punishment on us/ for all our little failures of attention." The Decalogue grapples with the relationships that mean the most to us—parent and child, husband and wife, siblings—with an authenticity to the mythical power and trappings of these relationships. In "Decalogue: Husbands and Wives," Woods references the filmic Dekalog directly to contrast her own failed attempt at marriage with the "redemptive power of love" in the film characters, Roman and Hanka. She laments, "I put on his right hand instead of his left, the album / of wedding pictures lost in our first move. But that doesn't explain / anything, really." Such small missteps in the face of a cinematic caliber of idealized love are painfully bittersweet and authentic.
Outside of The Decalogue, Wood spins the threads of a world fascinated with the intersection of the everyday and the legendary. "I Got a Mind to Ramble" invokes the great Blues singer Alberta Hunter, knitting lyrics from the song into Wood's larger narrative of false liberation from love. This poem leaves the reader knowing the highs can never last, focusing on the final depiction of Hunter, "this old woman / who'd spent one of her lifetimes mastering a kind of Braille, / emptying the bedpans of the dying, thumbing shut the dumb eyes of the dead."
"A Short History of Women in the Nineteenth Century" is brilliantly ghoulish; the forgotten skulls from Philadelphia's Mutter Museum whisper their stories to the reader, such as the Vienna courtesan who quips "A swelling in the brain / got me before some swell did." The last skull who philosophically wonders at her admirers in the museum, "all of them exclaiming over my poor, hurt head, these people, / I swear, they just don't know anything yet."
Wood relates "we all have our little gods, of course" and these recur throughout her work—the loss of a pet, the suffering of a child watching their parent die, the historical journey of the ivory-billed woodpecker. In the last poem, "Elegy for My Pug Cosmo," a cathartic purging of these little griefs is suggested: "I think I'd like to let them go now, just float away, scattered like ashes, ashes / slowly sifting through my fingers onto the blue, translucent surface of the water." Whether Wood can let them go or not, The Book of Ten is an engaging practice in cataloguing these little gods.
Susan Wood is the author of four books of poetry. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and won the Pushcart Prize for her poem, "Diary." Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Callaloo, and many more. She is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University.
Mary Shepard is a master's student in literature at Florida State University. She is a regular contributor to SEROnline.
Reviewed by Mary Shepard
Susan Wood's fourth book of poetry, The Book of Ten, is a meaningful sojourn through the uneasy territory of grief, death, and the ambiguous scorn of an angry-father God. Equipped with disarming wit and a ruthless analysis of her own flaws, Wood's collection exhibits a confessional style intermixed with cinema, blues music, and the West Texas prairie, making this collection a testament to the universal characteristics of grief, rather than a personal reflection. The Book of Ten wrestles with Wood's own roles—mother, daughter, ex-wife— effectively and with a relatable, easy style of prose that will leave readers with the hope that their own self-examination could be as wryly humorous and illuminating.
Ten poems, entitled The Decalogue, are woven seamlessly throughout The Book of Ten. This sequence is an homage Krzysztof Kieslowski's series of ten short films, Dekalog, which discuss the ten commandments. The Decalogue poems steep the collection with a sense of personal spirituality rather than dogmatic religion, which Wood questions in lines such as "She was forty. I don't think she believed that / High Church Episcopal God her parents buried her by, / but I don't know what she believed exactly."
In "Decalogue: Thin Ice" a father miscalculates the depth of the ice that his son is skating upon, an image used to contemplate Wood's perceived failures as a parent: "It's the break in the ice we all fear most and secretly / believe we deserve, that if God were just / he would rain down punishment on us/ for all our little failures of attention." The Decalogue grapples with the relationships that mean the most to us—parent and child, husband and wife, siblings—with an authenticity to the mythical power and trappings of these relationships. In "Decalogue: Husbands and Wives," Woods references the filmic Dekalog directly to contrast her own failed attempt at marriage with the "redemptive power of love" in the film characters, Roman and Hanka. She laments, "I put on his right hand instead of his left, the album / of wedding pictures lost in our first move. But that doesn't explain / anything, really." Such small missteps in the face of a cinematic caliber of idealized love are painfully bittersweet and authentic.
Outside of The Decalogue, Wood spins the threads of a world fascinated with the intersection of the everyday and the legendary. "I Got a Mind to Ramble" invokes the great Blues singer Alberta Hunter, knitting lyrics from the song into Wood's larger narrative of false liberation from love. This poem leaves the reader knowing the highs can never last, focusing on the final depiction of Hunter, "this old woman / who'd spent one of her lifetimes mastering a kind of Braille, / emptying the bedpans of the dying, thumbing shut the dumb eyes of the dead."
"A Short History of Women in the Nineteenth Century" is brilliantly ghoulish; the forgotten skulls from Philadelphia's Mutter Museum whisper their stories to the reader, such as the Vienna courtesan who quips "A swelling in the brain / got me before some swell did." The last skull who philosophically wonders at her admirers in the museum, "all of them exclaiming over my poor, hurt head, these people, / I swear, they just don't know anything yet."
Wood relates "we all have our little gods, of course" and these recur throughout her work—the loss of a pet, the suffering of a child watching their parent die, the historical journey of the ivory-billed woodpecker. In the last poem, "Elegy for My Pug Cosmo," a cathartic purging of these little griefs is suggested: "I think I'd like to let them go now, just float away, scattered like ashes, ashes / slowly sifting through my fingers onto the blue, translucent surface of the water." Whether Wood can let them go or not, The Book of Ten is an engaging practice in cataloguing these little gods.
Susan Wood is the author of four books of poetry. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and won the Pushcart Prize for her poem, "Diary." Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Callaloo, and many more. She is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University.
Mary Shepard is a master's student in literature at Florida State University. She is a regular contributor to SEROnline.