Natasha Saje
Natasha Sajé’s
first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh,
1994, 2nd printing 1996, 3rd printing
2004), was chosen from over 900 manuscripts to win the Agnes
Lynch Starrett prize, and was later awarded the Towson State
Prize in Literature.
Her second
collection of poems, Bend, was published by Tupelo Press
in 2004 and awarded the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Sajé was
born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in New York City and
Northern New Jersey. She earned a B.A. from the University of
Virginia, an M.A. from Johns Hopkins, and a Ph.D. from the
University of Maryland at College Park, for a study titled,
"'Artful Artlessness': Reading the Coquette in the Novel,
1724-1913." Her honors include the Bannister
Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, the Robert Winner
Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2002 Campbell
Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, and
grants from the states of Maryland and Utah and Baltimore City;
Sajé was a Maryland poet-in-the-schools 1989-1998.
Her poems,
reviews, and essays appear in many journals, including The
Henry James Review; Essays in Literature; Kenyon Review; New
Republic; Paris Review; Parnassus; Chelsea; Gettysburg Review;
Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers; Ploughshares;
Shenandoah; and The Writers Chronicle. Sajé is an
associate professor of English at Westminster College in Salt
Lake City, where she administers the Weeks Poetry Series, and
also teaches in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program.
Bend by
Natasha Sajé (Dorset, Vermont: Tupelo Press, 2004).Reviewed by
Madeleine Mysko
A Good Distance: Natasha
Sajé’s Bend
Is the title of Natasha
Sajé’s second collection of poems—Bend—a noun or a verb?
And if bend is a verb, is it a simple imperative, or is
there a suggestion of the transitive (Bend this or that)?
In poetry, of course, the answer to such questions may be “All
of the above,” and that is the case here. Sajé is a poet who
delights the reader with a gusto for language to match her
apparent gusto for good food. She takes delight not only in the
unusual word (bilbo, alewife, festinate, catamenia,
felly) but also in the seemingly ordinary word, which she
will press for every drop of essence from its root to its
current usage.
A
reader who savors piquant language will not be disappointed upon
turning to “A Minor Riot at the Mint,” the poem Sajé has placed
pointedly as prologue to her collection. The word-riot here is
incited by the Ben Jonson epigraph comparing language to
“current money” and warning that “we must not be too frequent
with the mint, every day coyning.” The poet responds by making
much of the “current money” metaphor: “Into my pocket slips a
folded note, creased/ like labia, cached with private promise.”
Playfully, the note in the pocket works both as paper money and
as a “missive” to be cached (as opposed to cashed). The lines
that follow are recklessly set a-sail on Jonson’s “current”:
The
ship rolls through open water,
dirty
in the bay around Rio
I'm a
crazy sailor on the gravy boat,
a
woman of means.
How
delightful—that coining of “gravy boat.” The term embarks from
Jonson’s archaic “current money” and rides on the slang “gravy,”
at the same time abandoning the common “gravy train” for the
more felicitous “gravy boat.” But there is more to Sajé’s riot
against constraint (“O my mackintosh/ my bilbo, my cistern, my
confiture”) than clever play, more than a crazy waving about of
word-wealth “where any frigate bird can snatch it.” Sajé’s
gravy boat “rolls through open water” into other poems that
explore how language bent on desire can be as useful as it is
delightful.
Within the collection, the title word is lodged as the first
line of “In the Garden.” Here it is indeed the imperative:
Bend
and make the horizon disappear
Desire's a hardy trifoliate
orange with thorns
It’s a quirky poem, in shape
and in argument, but a careful reader will take up the challenge
to catch the poet’s drift. True to the task, a good number of
Sajé’s poems provide the paradigm for bending in order to make
the horizons—the limits—disappear. Moreover, this collection is
so intelligently assembled that sometimes the very horizons
between individual poems seem to waver. The ship, for example,
seen earlier as the crazy gravy boat, reappears poignantly in
“Wave.” In this poem addressing the struggle to remember, the
backward glance takes an ominous dip: childhood pictured as
“swallowed, the way the ocean absorbs/ debris, even the
occasional ship.” From the last line of this poem, one can look
to the title and read it as an imperative to wave goodbye.
Later, the ship sails amusingly into the poem “Heaven,” as an
ocean liner now, a floating writers’ colony of an afterlife,
where the poet travels with those she has loved “or might have
loved.”
In a
like pattern down the pages, fruit and letters and cats and
coins keep appearing—with import. The flat of sour cherries
squeezed between the fingers in the sensuous prose poem,
“Fruit,” is echoed in the letter poem, “Heloise to Abelard”:
If
you were here, my love,
I
would tear the pages of my books
pleat
them into baskets for collecting cherries
the
kind that do not bleed.
One
appreciates a book in which the poems inform each other across
the pages, and in Bend, there is the added delight in
discovery. In “I See,” the glee of the cats “playing with a
rose fallen/ from a wreath: a stiff silvery stem/ topped by a
dark pink ball” makes the poet “bend,” and in so doing see that
the rose is actually a “long dried tail and entrails of a rat.”
So too the poet’s glee in the roam and play of language is what
makes the reader bend, and in so doing see that the
limits—of our language, of the world as we might have seen it at
any one moment in time—have disappeared.
In an
affectionate address to Henry Fowler, author of Modern
English Usage, the poet contemplates Fowler’s “scrupulous
care in life as well as work,” and takes on the mantle of that
same care in her own work: “If you were here, Henry,/ you’d
advise exactitude.” Exactitude in language requires the poet
to “love/ the narrow distance” between words, such as the
distance between “broad” and “wide”:
A
distance that separates
the
limits, an amplitude of what
connects them. Some words refuse wide,
admit
broad: blade, spearhead, daylight.
And
some allow them both: A wide door
open
to miles of snowy peaks
The emphasis on distance in the intimate direct address—“If you
were here, Henry”—will return in other poems, as it does only a
few pages later in “Heloise to Abelard” (“If you were here, my
love . . .”), and again near the end of the collection in “Dear
One”:
Between us a city of monuments
flitting roof to roof.
High above the street I write to bring you near,
or rather to find the best distance between us.
Fowler’s imagined advice to “love/ the narrow distance,” is key
to understanding the work of these poems. Although Sajé
provides the reader with a range of tones—wry, contemplative,
arch, sensuous, humorous—the poems channel into each other, and
thus Bend seems all of a piece, the work ultimately being
that of narrowing the distance. For in the end, the moment of a
good poem is indeed “the best distance” between the one who
writes and the other who reads.
Also addressed in these poems is the distance between the poet
and those she has read herself. In addition to Ben Jonson and
Fowler, we find Cotton Mather, Nietzsche, and Proust, among
others. “Channel,” a poem patterned after Henry Vaughan’s “The
Water-fall,” is a sly exercise, in that Vaughan himself is known
as a great borrower from other poets. Like its seventeenth
century model, this poem begins with an address to Water—“you
are, not were nor will be—/ as cataracts & creeks, as river
brown as trout,/ as kidney and as skin.” But whereas Vaughan’s
“Water-fall” ends with a statement of religious conviction
(“Thou art the channel my soul seeks”), Sajé makes a turn on the
question: “What channel does my soul seek?” Striking
images—snow melting on trees and “salt desert water swollen with
birds feasting/ on brine flies feasting on algae,” and water
“siphoned through sulfurous rock, glacier/ old as
amaranth”—cascade to the answer in the last line: “To be useful,
to be clear—”.
The
final dash is worth the attention it demands. The careful
reader will have noted the same device in an earlier poem, “Open
That Door,” wherein the final dash wraps the last line around to
the title, concluding what would otherwise be an interrupted
thought. “Channel” would appear to end in the same way, the
dash again providing a channel back to the start, so that the
concluding thought becomes an imperative: “To be useful, to be
clear—Channel.” And perhaps, because this is the last
poem in the collection, it is not carrying it too far to read
the dash as returning to the title of book.
There are poems
in Bend
that delight on first read, such
as the sparkling and zestful “Song of the Cook.”
The other poems—those which may require some work on the part of
the reader—are seldom coolly intellectual, for one senses the
presence of the poet herself, working hard to narrow that
distance. On subsequent reads, the channels begin to
appear—equally delightful, clearly useful.
* * * * *
Madeleine Mysko’s work, both poetry and fiction, has appeared
in journals, including The Hudson Review, River Styx and
Shenandoah. Presently she divides her time among
teaching, writing, and working as a registered nurse in a
retirement community in Baltimore.
REDACTIONS POETRY
& POETICS Issue 4/5 Spring/Summer 2005
Saje, Natasha. Bend. Dorset, VT:
Tupelo P, 2004.
A certain poet lamenting about his newest
collection of poems—it not having enough good poems—shared his
uncertainty about the book with Ezra Pound. Pound, trying to put
the new collection of poems & the poet into perspective,
commented something like, "If you are lucky enough to have one
or two good poems in a book, then you have a good book." Saje's
book has more than a couple of good poems, & one great poem—thus
a great book, if we extend Pound's line of thinking. "I See" is
a poem I keep returning to. It is an intelligent poem that
"bends" Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose." But the
poem itself is not heavy-intellectual, like Stein can be; it's
the reverberations that create this intelligent poem—& so far
the reverberations have sustained themselves for over a year
with the reader. This poem, among others, shows how the lens of
language can "bend" perception, can bend what isn't into what
is, so as to realize "then what can't be mistaken / for
something that it's not?" This poem also succeeds because the
poem makes us experience what the speaker experienced & in the
same manner, & I suspect in the same amount of time. The
experience traveled to the page & all the way over to this
reader, which is what a great poem does. I'd love to quote more
of the poem, but the experience needs to be had in full.
Nonetheless, Bend is filled with more intriguing
stories/experiences that bend unexpectedly, more lyrics that
twist freshness from the mundane or anticipated, & more
dialogues between language & perception, but all the while the
poems stay clear & inviting. The language is always fresh,
always moving, & always bending. TH
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