The Flesh Procession: Raising Hairs
Review by Janet I. Buck
Effective poetry is often unsettling. The Flesh Procession by Pushcart Nominee Suzanne Burns is certainly no exception. The outsider in all of us can be an elegant and promiscuous spirit that rattles the world just enough to render positive change and understanding. In Burns's work there is a little Poe, a little Faulkner, a little Oates, a little Nabokov. Tender noir informs the opening poem, "Conjoined:"
Four pockets of ginger and peppermints
And silt darkening the bottom
Of our future wishing wells like cataracts.
Everything is filmy in the end.
The tunnel--a caravan of faulty design.
The light--a strobed watt flicking
Like the lashes of a Siamese concubine.
Burns's purpose as a poet appears to be an investigation of darkness as a precursor of light and acceptance. In "The Elephant Man Models," she explores the beauty of difference: here perfection comprising/Miniature stately rooms/Pushes back the gouts,/Starves the cancers,/Consecrates the English noons/Dappled with imperfect mist.
As a poet who has explored disability from the personal experience of amputation and congenital deformity, I could only embrace her poignant and honest portrayal of limping bodies at war with thoughts of a "perfect carnal world," a pipe dream if ever one sat on the ashtray of earth. In poems such as "In My Giant's Reach," Burns brilliantly captures the self-doubt that drives difference toward its quest for a more full-blown and balanced sense of beauty: Not that you might believe/In my appetite to live against/The measures of my height,/To feast on the galactic apples of Yeats,/Silver-gold shining in my giant's reach.
Suzanne Burns gets gory when she talks about what becomes of lust and amour as defined by soapy and misleading paperbacks: In "Henry:" Love did not come on satin sheets/But rattled in doorways ripe with piss. In "Viva Frida:" Your vagina folded in on itself,/Not politely as a dying flower,/But undeniable as a government/Of inner cities, inner canyons,/ Pink walls, pink mountains,/Thrown-over, discovered,/Overthrown again in revolution. Her deft use of adjectives is nearly always a rainbow of four different shades of blood, and body parts are described in unique and lyrical ways. She also has the power to get down and blunt when it comes to message. In one of my favorite poems, "Silhouette," Burn deftly modernizes the death of Marie Antoinette, calling her fate the beheaded mess. Alliteration makes most of the poem musical--then she zings the reader with the raw truth.
The Flesh Procession is divided into five coherent and distinct parts that pave a road toward a liberation of sorts with deep respect for the knotted bobbins of the path. She looks straight at the bulging thighs beneath our petticoats of fairy tales and tells us the grim and naked truth of what she sees; Burns has a savvy eye that travels the world. There are times in the harbor of history, World War II precisely, that she discovers some amazing utterances that stick like runny bubble gum: How cancer and old age burn/More than any gas. These simple but penetrating observances are what offer her brilliant descriptors the dimensions of an obelisk at the mercy of light. There are times, in her travel poems, when Burns captures the animal side of the American experience. Pop stars and princes of the film industry all have their "castles" leveled by her pen. She is fascinated by the topics of suicide and murder and disfigurement, but beneath the surface of curiosity lies an astounding meter of individual humanity, a true poet's sensitivity to grief.
The Flesh Procession is an engaging, well-crafted commentary on the evolution of the human spirit. Suzanne Burns takes you through a tunnel you will never forget. As Burns professes, there are daggers of doubt and dark blood in all of our veins; every family has its freak show and its circus tent; normalcy, she seems to say, is the real myth. As a poet, she shows us how to crawl out of the dark: Until my hair constructs a ladder/Carrying me--by giving appropriate attention to the shadows. I imagine the woman herself wearing a sharp Gaugin chin, a lady in waiting with her wounds in view.
Three poems by Suzanne Burns' have previously appeared in Facets (Volume I, Issue No. 3), "Lady Olga," "Living Doll," and "The Second Coming."Janet Buck, Ph.D., is a three-time Pushcart Nominee and the author four collections of poetry. In 2002-2003, her work is forthcoming in The Montserrat Review, Facets, The Foliate Oak, Southern Ocean Review, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Artemis, Recursive Angel, The Pedestal Magazine, Coelacanth, Cordite, CrossConnect, and The Oklahoma Review. The October 2002 issue of The Pedestal Magazine is currently featuring Buck's recent interview with Maxine Kumin.