Spoke the Dark Matter by Michelle Whittaker – Reviewed by Cheryl Passanisi


Music is a refuge throughout Spoke the Dark Matter.  Music from Philip Glass to Bach is referenced and becomes a means of protection and coping, a process of gaining courage and support.  The writer is a musician and instructor in music; her electronic piano is a companion in the dismal, poorly maintained one room apartments and converted garages where she lives on an affluent island, Long Island, that is frequently battered by rain, the elements intruding into her living space.  She also refers to her heritage and family escaping from another island, Jamaica, and the cultural contrasts.  She speaks of the precarious nature of life that is tenuous and threatened from many directions: a cancer diagnosis, political upheaval, super storms and landlords who do little to maintain their property.  

Navigating the complexities of life, managing poverty and illness, is reflected in the language and observation: “this polyphonic Earth  where there’s no/one who exists to save us.”  It is a stark realization and yet “polyphonic” conjures the sounds and musical score that compose a life rich in the realm of the arts, creating music and writing that enriches and contributes to the sonic life of the inhabitants of these precariously placed islands.

In “Opening for Philip Glass” one of the first poems in the collection, it is hard not to imagine a red box mounted on a wall with the words: “Break glass in case of emergency”.  The music of Philip Glass is used as a shield to protect against arguing heard through thin walls and to cover the sound of gun shots:

“Opening Glass is good for tuning the volume,

Every nine minutes when the landlords bicker  or

Yell hellish rants as you place a brown ear

To their pipes, decoding smash & cuts, questioning: Should

I call for help?  Should I respond to faint cries behind the

Fridges where the wasps hold up?

Opening Glass is good for the quick jump of

What sounded like a gunshot”

Music is heard throughout and blended in with the surround noises heard through “pipes, decoding smash & cuts” and “gunshot”.  She goes on to say: “Imagine opening Glass as a coroner/at the edge of our mascara//conducting scene notes about the tumbling sky:/We know it was not a bird or a drone or a plane.//It was not Superman...It was not caped... We know it was not a savior of any kind.”  In the middle of the poem is the phrase “Let us pray”.

This sort of unique urban isolation, of being in close quarters with a cacophony of sound and yet so alone, singular, and the resulting vulnerability is acutely detailed by Whittaker. 

“A Quiet Surge of Dystopia” is the title of a series of different poems throughout the collection and specifically highlight the community and substandard living conditions.  The first one recounts how the community she grew up in changed over the years: “You were surrounded by resplendent pitch pine barrens, a string of mom&/pop shops, a movie theater, a Handy Pantry, local farms, rocky northern beaches...Over time, the waning greenery/shifted into a nostalgic dream...displaced by homogenous/homeownerships who floated white boats and monster-tire trucks as the new/garden view...”  A changing demographic, gentrification, and transformation occurred from the quaint community of neighbors she knew and “grew to love” to “The new vinyl-siding houses stood proud like hybrid flowers” and the “grand acres of forest at the/deadend of the lane were swiftly chopped by contractors, as you congregated with the last of your childhood friends on banana bikes to watch the tragic/felling.”  She ends this first dystopia with “you learned that the presence of weeds teaches us which nutrients are missing/from the soil.”  It seems like the vinyl-sided houses and the monster trucks are the real weeds and lack of aesthetic sense the missing nutrient. 

Health matters are explored throughout the book.  In “First Generation Eclipsed” she describes her mothers folk remedy: “whenever I/was sick with elegies, my mother made me drink//boiled garlic until I vomited...I/suppose a good purge is necessary for arriving//at the blustering truth...”  In “Frequently Axed Answers” she recounts: “My oncologist outlines a group of disorganized nodules that/mirror the grassplots of a Bahamian graveyard...day//drinking & night drinking masks ovarian grief.”  

Whittaker describes the financial stress of illness in “Strange and Merciful Days”: “I ate from cans of albacore &/skipjack to afford my gyno/appointments with a nurse/practitioner & shiny medical/instruments.// Before and after my biopsy, I considered bashing/tambourines for insurance money.//After the anesthesiologist asked me/to count myself away inside my/bedhead, the cervical view waltzed/out & dropped dead, God also/dropped dead after the last /Seraphim forgot    my request/& toppled.” 

In “The Labor of Counterpoint after J.S. Bach” the author uses “The last movement/of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto//for Two Violins, Strings and Continuo works for/ memorizing the center of d minor” and “It works for stippling gestures or shaving/the bottoms of hairs curling in//before Getting Ready./Bravery.”  She listens to it for courage while preparing for a procedure: “Ways to subvert./Ways of the Breath.//Ways of the mouth...Intravenous to tense...like an Operatic trill/holding its metallic turn,/downside & for the Opening./Oh, that Opening.” 

In a similar way “Freedom from Fear after Shostakovich” courage and resilience in music, specifically naming: “Shostakovich’s Piano Trio/No.2 works for staring at his picture taped above my/headboard like the oasis of a father safely home every/night.  It’s good for remembering your kin crawling in/scores under floorboards, under ships wrecked, and in/and out of bureau drawers.”  The music is an oasis and good for remembering kin.  Perhaps these kin are those ancestors forced to come across the ocean as slaves; perhaps the bureau is a piece of furniture handed down from previous generations.  In either case, there is a palpable sense of the “kin” inhabiting her space which, in other poems, is revealed as insufficiently weatherproofed and not safe from the elements.  The harsh reality of “headboard”, “floorboards”, and “drawers” is softened by the inhabiting spirits, warmed by the “scores” of kin evoked by music.  She notes: “This teaches me about bravery.”  The simple direct sentence speaks to the foundation truth of the sentiment. 

“In Preparation for Ascendance Kingston, Jamaica, 1993” the author recalls a visit to her family’s home: “Granma haggled with higglers for oxtail & saltfish as/elders grabbed my hands, naming me granddaughta.”  And: “In the market square, the men dem/constantly grabbed my upper arms,//held my wrists and harassed my hips, when/Granma stepped away to haggle.”  She captures a culture shock juxtaposed to a sense of belonging as she follows her Granma throughout the open market.   However, where the men grabbed her, they: “...had already left their marks.//No amount of sea bathing or mineral baths could/rid me of their touch.”  Her Granma shares her folksy advise about a errant gray hair: “no, nuh pluck it or yu guan get bad luck.” Or about fruit: “dem nuh ripe//–it wi kill yu if harvested too soon.”

The scene of walking behind her Granma through the market stalls is dreamy and colorful.  There is a sense of stepping into an ancestral myth, some sort of testing or trial and surviving it: “Often, I sat toilet-sick in the bathroom,//needing a wash-out, as my father would say. He/was right in that I wanted purification.”

In “Dada” she talks about her grandfather: “no matter/where we stand an american an/african  a panamanian an irish-/scot  jamaican spinning ices/under a metal veranda  where i/have not visited in the longest...”  There is “an almost shame/shame for not navigating/back home.”  Her memories of this ancestral home are mixed but her emotional connection with the people, her relatives, is tender and celebratory.  She says of her grandfather: “look at his quiet face a repertory/of reversions an avid reader  like/how i imagine a clockmaker/binging delicately about small/inspections of allspice    popping tropical collars  from under a/sweater  before heading to work/at a d&g red strip factory for/decades...”   

These family centered homey scenes from Jamaica are juxtaposed with Long Island scenes.  Both places have their dangers but the “Quiet Surge of Dystopia” series about the living conditions in her small studio apartments on Long Island is dispiriting and depersonalizing requiring a hefty dose of music to mediate and create a safe, habitable space.  Spoke the Dark Matter describes triumph over serious illness and displacement; a triumph in which music and art create courage and safe harbor.