Bathwater Wine
Wanda Coleman
publisher: Black Sparrow Press, 1998
isbn: 1-574230-64-6
price: $15
Coleman's seventh book with Black Sparrow is an encyclopedic, moment-by-moment accounting of rage, witness and transcendence that moves agilely from a tragic but comedic resignation -- a seductive blues or be-bop style -- through fecund rambling hijinks that show off her verbal acuity, through postmodern collage and pastiche mimicking of traditional genres (such as the newspaper account), on to direct, sixties- and rap-inspired in-your-face declarations of resistance and anger.
The strong opening sequence, "Dreamwalk," is a poignant, quasi-confessional, free associative account of the author's adolescence:
ugly and more ugly. you are a card carrying
member of the FBI (Fat Black Idiots) and you arrest and
jail them in your mind for crimes against your heart.
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Later in the sequence, the need to escape inspires a fecund, but suspicious, alternate reality for the young poet:
you become a shadow in pursuit of shadows. you
smoke imaginary imported German fags while sipping
imaginary English sherry barely clad in blood red
silken fantasies while straddling a rattan chair on
the balcony of a Cuban bordello.
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Primarily a collection of disparate shorter poems, the volume is punctuated by longer sequences. "The Ron Narrative Reconstructions" wavers between poetry and prose, and between modes of rhapsody, philosophical discourse, fiction and documentary, demonstrating in microcosm the range of Coleman's style.
It opens with a pastoral couplet -- "a half hour before the advance of sun / the red-winged sparrow begins its song" -- that invokes an ideal "poetic" setting, but, as if to emphasize the absence of such an organic unity of nature in her native Los Angeles (and in the mode of the pastoral itself), it jarringly cuts to a haunting, very contemporary, set of images:
helicopters whirl around, claim this lesser heaven, wolf-eyed pilots with an infrared snoop, scope for
a collar. coal-colored mountains of thunderhead, gather. there's rumbling in the recesses of distant western
panorama.
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Matching, and hence countering, the power of the panoptic gaze of the police helicopter (and other forms of technological control, including that of normative syntax), "The Ron Narrative Reconstructions," with their vignettes ("in the midcity laundromat, we two-step to a piped-in salsa..."), wry theoretical musings (a digression on "poetoerotic rape": "the plundering and transmogrification of another's form... a physical release akin to sexual orgasm"), and reliance on the eternal powers of language and the basic need everyone has to be a part of another's life, succeeds in mapping the activity of a poet's mind where the less generous and attentive have failed.
The poem is emblematic of the best qualities of this large, somewhat sprawling, formally diverse yet occasionally loose, book of poetry.
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