Martha McCollough’s newest book of poems, Trash Witch, strewn with magical debris, overshadowed by death, and fraught with the lure of the difficult, remains buoyant with turns of wry humor. Instead of offering an earnest ode to wisteria, she says, “I like…. wisteria, the way / it’ll tear your house down.” Destruction and deconstruction are met with awe. Wryness tempers every enthusiasm. Surreal juxtapositions shock us into paying attention to the all too familiar world, “smelling of cake and bones.” Essential human questions such as who are we, why are we in this world and not some other world, lie at the heart of Trash Witch. Transformations happen, but always with the caveat: things may go wrong, or change may not take place as hoped for.
Trash Witch begins as though in the middle of a conversation about possible worlds,perhaps even reincarnation. The first poem is titled “As far as this world goes.” Things perish, “everything almost not here / a bubble / burst to mist.” And still the speaker goes to work for decades, perhaps not having considered her own death, until it is brought to her attention. As life continues, the body is a structure that “gives way” and “reverts to a prior condition as pile of sticks.” How can the fact of death co-exist with an ordinary life spent working for a living? This question burns throughout the pages, though never answered.
In the book’s title poem, leavings and trash both come from and create the life of a person. Haircut shreds, a scrap of suit, “layers of drugstore sci-fi old nests and bent orreries,” “black fingernails,” and “crumbs on velvet” create materials for a stage of landfill-decomposing, perhaps like compost, perhaps toxic, a transformation as spell, or fecund matrix for renewal of some kind. “Her mournful planet—something digging out from the ashes // trying to get born.” After destruction, planet debris and personal effects reassemble and transform into moments of recognition. This is a process described in the lines, but also embedded in their utterance. A droll doubt undermines a fondness for the things.
The poem speaker, like a child, builds a word structure, then dismantles it, or suddenly knocks it down, and leaves us with the beauty of ruins and the freshly laid open possibility of a new creation to come. Knowledge is gained in the disassembly, it is not random destruction. This is a kind of optimism that lurks behind the poems and between linked words.
Death shakes out its wings in the image of a condor, scavenger of the dead. “(the condor) knows the one thing: everyone // living wants to keep on and cannot.” The poem “Pink moon” is a slant-spoken ode to death, poking a little fun, taunting, an attitude maintained throughout the book.
“Oh death come purr in my lap. Tonight you can steal my breath.” ” You have so many places to be sad santa / the whole earth is yours.”
In the last poem of the book, “Between Lives,” McCollough returns to the first poem’s (“As far as this world goes,”) idea of possible multiple lives. When we arrive here, “this world” has already been deftly trounced and transformed throughout the collection. Death is necessarily the subject, dealing with transitions after death. The image of crossing a busy rotary situates the speaker waking to a new life. The question
“Who am I this time ? / what damage can I do? // Once I was a rat. I gnawed / the foundations of everything. // now you say let life be one long party / always your day. // Later you’ll remember death and all that. “
In these poems, myth and image conspire to illuminate “the difficult,” which the speaker embraces, not all willingly. Difficult personal relationships are hinted at, never with specifics, but rather in objective correlatives and traditional tales. This allows for a non-sentimental presentation. Because of the poet’s skill with voice and imagery in the details, the poems affect us deeply:
A mythic flood is subverted: “one of everything bobs past.” No cozy two by two on an ark. “All the trees in the forest are Daphne’s grandchildren.” A Persephone lives in a trailer park where
“she lounges on creaking Naugahyde // his black throne of bad moods.” “spring abandoned me // and so like everything, / I was a disappointment.” The speaker’s winter will never end. “Not here, / parked in his withered garden / while his snarling dog patrols / the invisible fence. ” Consolation comes in a “handful of bright seeds / not for hunger / but their red translucent gleam.”
Hope is complicated. The colorful seeds do not merely console; they are also a powerful symbol of fertility and rebirth.
“What about apollo and dionysus / and the sadness of things, the difficult / people I loved for being difficult, / puzzles with a missing final piece.”
The poem “Difficulty” begins with the loaded images: “call it a slammed door / a monotonous hallway // eye parched by implacable rhythms / page: a thorny orchard.” Using an Erik Satie composition, and the fairytale of “The Swan Brothers,” McCollough conjures this difficult world.: In “Gnossienne No.1 : “tell me / ghost hand / strolling the keyboard // a way out / of the underworld.” And an image from “The Weaver:” “order drawn / from a nest of nettles.”
Light is never taken for granted, darkness and maybe starlight are sometimes more comforting. “All night earth faces // outward turning // its back on the fire.” “Light hides so much.” “Light you // came so far // to be swallowed by my black dress.” Light and stars are often a stand-in for hope. Here yes, starlight, but of course in a dark place. “Let’s go somewhere dark / and look at the stars.” ‘Glory of the heavens’ is undermined in a poem title: “Baleful star.” The poem begins with breaking all the thin bone china, ending with a house being swept away by a flood.
Throughout the collection strange but totally familiar-strange lines in the aha! sense comment on being and existence, in a tone of disbelief yet matter-of-fact. : “we are // in spite of // everything.” The expert line breaks widen the meanings of this simple phrase. Another gem: “like a dream: this happens, // then this, then this. Then time to go.” And the wry voice, addressing the reader intimately, as though the book were a long existential argument: “I can’t explain / the tendency to exist / things arise, okay //” Then almost laugh-out-loud: “of all the sins / my favorite is sloth.”
The theme of disarray in the universe is sometimes directly stated, or suggested. In “My solitude,” the self is getting ready to leave the house:
“I need some things: / 1. spokesperson / 2. less haplessness / 3. (Nevermind / I’m not going.)”
From “Solstice:” “behind all order / or appearance of order / chaos mutters and coughs.”
Through all the marvelous evocations of debris, death, and difficulty, might we expect some turn toward transformation and hope? Yes, and no. The most affecting transformation takes place in the poem “Imago:” “What if I wake up changing / ….what if the hour doesn’t arrive or what if // the veil lifted, reveals // another veil. ” This is a transformation on a journey, perhaps without resolution. Not mere futility and doubt, or even fear, the veils lifting and new ones possibly appearing move in a process big enough to include death and afterlife. Perhaps this journey is the reason for existence. Hope lies within each dark phrase that is turned toward a qualified affection. Humor, though understated, lifts the veil to a place of mirth, almost. Haha you are fooled again. With inspired imagination and wit, these poems make the resisting world that much more bearable.