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Number
285
May June 2000
Crimes Within
Crimes
ROSEMARY CATACALOS
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
CRIMINAL SONNETS, by Phyllis Koestenbaum,
1998, Jacaranda Press/Writer's Center Editions, San
Jose, California, $12.00 paper. This book was a
nominee for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in
Poetry in 1999. Available from Small Press
Distribution, Berkeley; www.spdbooks.org.
The sixty-six poems in Phyllis Koestenbaum's
Criminal Sonnets methodically haunt the
worst of the human predicament to arrive at a
striking combination of ars poetica and
heroic talisman for the species.
It is not an easy journey, for the poet or the
reader. In these poems we visit every kind of crime
scene---public, private, historic, contemporary,
local, global---compelled by an obsessive voice all
the more powerful because it is seldom raised. It
is a voice simultaneously desperate and precisely
measured which often complicates with a wickedly
understated sense of humor.
As we move through the poems, immersing
ourselves in their world view and the prodigious
craft used to convey it, we are shown how this
complexly distanced tone can be an eminently worthy
response to the enormities at hand.
Infant twins die in their cribs suddenly;
twenty-seven crosses are cut in a nun
by her rapist; an Iranian girl seen
over the fence in a bathing suit is sen-
tenced to sixty lashes: thirty kill her;
a judge rules an eleven-year-old can't
have an abortion; beheadings; gas for
the minor who knifed his crippled parent.
Disorder's the order and I can't keep the beat.
These five can be six since I said seven.
What would it be like to break a rule be-
fore I made it. The reason for exceptions
is rules. No exception to this rule:
at Auschwitz all the children gassed were Jews.
(from "V," page 9)
Also here are scenes with friends and family,
offered in the same tensely controlled voice. We
understand that the speaker of the poems is
experiencing the dissolution of her family through
a painful divorce, and as we read, a carefully
articulated correspondence develops between crimes
in the larger world and more subtle family
crimes.
My neighbor's grown daughter is comatose
after a crash. Warmhearted Rose would light
a candle if my daughter were almost
dead. My daughter, Rose's daughter's childhood
friend, watched us eat dinner at Chez Panisse
her twenty-first birthday and would partake
of naught: how come we have money for fancy
dining and not for therapy. After
that fizzle, her dad drove me to my parked
car and he drove to where he can't be reached.
A French Jew, whose eyes were gradually
burned, little by little, would have Barbie
experience her progressive torture ---
little by little, she'd starve the Butcher.
("XL," page 44)
We also learn that the writer's vocation has
been difficult, for years even impossible, to
exercise, and this, too, becomes a crime to be
confronted.
…Bly says good art takes the thirty
years he's had. Helen says my art, avant-
garde, was ahead of life---you had to stop.
(Thirty years, art waited.) Helen read
Locke.…
(from "XV," page 19)
Koestenbaum's choice of sonnet
form---decasyllabic lines and an enormous range of
sly rhyming strategies---both contains and explodes
the subject matter, escalating the poems' tensions
and ironies. The form joins the voice, as well, in
becoming part of the subject, underscoring the
inevitability of form and content, consciousness
and responsiblity.
…Walesa
defies house arrest to meet the pontiff.
I try to mean what I say in sonnets.
(from "XLVIII," page 52)
In less skillful hands, these often trancelike
juxtapositions of public and private pain might
have emerged flaccidly self-indulgent, even
numbing. Instead we are treated to a charged
manipulation of received form for the purpose of
speaking the unspeakable, and the result is an
inspiring and principled work of witness. These
are, finally, poems against silence, all kinds of
silence, and they open us to the power that
breaking silence can confer.
Rosemary Catacalos is currently an Affiliated
Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and
Gender at Stanford University. She is a former
director of The Poetry Center/American Poetry
Archives at San Francisco State University.
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