SISTER, BLOOD AND BONE by PAULA CARY

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Sister, Blood and Bone by Paula Cary

(Blood Pudding Press, Ohio, 2013)

Oh I really really like Paula Cary’s chap, Sister, Blood and Bone!  Its poems contain the paradox of garnets—stones for, say, jewelry but ever evoking blood. Jewels that should be pretty but end up with other significances besides decorativeness.

Cary dedicates the collection to her “one and only sister, Lisa Cary, [her] muse.”  So the poems could be autobiographical but what’s more of a concern to the reader who doesn’t know the Cary sisters is that the narrator references a sister. Still, one pays attention to how the dedication mentions that the poet has only “one and only sister.”  One wonders about that relationship—the implied closeness and what might grow from such—because part of what makes these poems so effective are the dualities they offer.  Like the little matchboxes that contain both “death, [and] rebirth” in “Bone Collector.”  Or the last stanza of “Sacrificial Breakfast”:

The platter of pig meat, wrinkled and red

The eyes of eggs mixed into white

The plate of sustenance

Provided by the death of harmless animals

I also love how some poems, while loving, are not sentimental.  That’s a good enough combo, except that Cary ups the juice to actually end up in nothing less than rapture! Like this poem with its absolutely killer concluding stanza that testifies to a humongous sisterly and protective love as mere “street” becomes the more dangerous “rushing creeks / Mountainous, slippery terrain / … jagged, deep ravines”:

The Pinky

You hate to look both ways

Before crossing the street

And you don’t want

To hold my hand for safety

So I offer you a hooked pinky

And you, already knowing the full value

Of the “pinky swear,”

Take hold with your own pinky

We cross rushing creeks

Mountainous, slippery terrain

Jump jagged, deep ravines

With pinkies the only safety latch between us

And I love how other poems make my bones wince (yes, bones, not merely flesh as the effect goes deep)—except that I’m wincing with delight.  It’s that paradoxical effect—you know, you’re thinking: that’s a tad perverse and yet being highly amused.  Like this

After the Dive in Troy Springs

You are bloodless white

From the frigid depths

Your lips a literal blue

They match your eyes

And I think of sugar skulls

Dressed in colored frosting

That could match your face

And I wonder

Should I bring a blanket

To warm you

And risk losing those colors?

Beauty costs, eh?

Also worth noting is that the cover features a reproduction of a skeleton in make-up, hat, some voluminous dress—evoking the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos.  Less than six degrees of Googling surfaces that the image is one of La Calavera Catrina (“Dapper Skeleton”), which the ubiquitous Wikipedia notes is “ a 1910–1913 zinc etching by famous Mexican printmaker, cartoon illustrator and lithographer Jose Guadalupe Posada. The image depicts a female skeleton dressed only in a hat befitting the upper class outfit of a European of her time. Her chapeau originally is related to French and European styles of the early 20th century. She is meant to portray a satirization of those Mexican natives who Posada felt were over embracing European traditions of the aristocracy in the pre-revolutionary era. She in particular, has become an icon of the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.”

Referencing Day of the Dead is apt, for me, because I’ve often found charming the skeleton figurines in various outfits used to celebrate this holiday.  I find them cute, and yet they’re skeletons, something that would normally scare or repel someone (okay, me).  But I don’t find myself repelled by these dressed-up skeletons. Similarly, I don’t find myself repelled by various details in some of Cary’s poems. 

Instead, I am attracted to these poems for their beauty and charm, notwithstanding—or maybe, in addition to—their rather eerie facets.  Like how the collection’s last poem, “My One and Only Lisa” (there’s that reference again to “one and only” sister) ends with this line:

The lava is always flowing just behind her feet.

Ultimately, these poems (I sense) can only be written by someone who can look at the world in unique ways.  Here, for instance, is the chap’s first poem:

Advice For A Sister Going to College

For Lisa Cary

Bring something to remind you

Of who you are

Beginning to end,

Top to bottom.

For you, these will be skeletons

Not of Dia de Los Muertos

But brown and brittle bones,

Fragments, shells of birds, tortoises

Reminders of how futile

And fleeting life is

For a cave diver.

Photos? No.

Instead, a wetsuit

Placed among the party dresses

A black seal-skinned hood

Amongst the cotton hooded sweatshirts.

Now, that is not the typical advice one would give to someone going to college, but it is sagacious for not just school but also all of life—that, too, is poetry.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor. But she is also pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books.  Her 2013 book, THE AWAKENING was reviewed by Aileen Ibardaloza at OurOwnVoice; and her 2004 book MENAGE A TROIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, was reviewed (along with Joi Barrios' poetry) through the essay "The Self Revolution of Radical Love--Externalizing Internal Worlds of Freedon in Filipina Poetry" by Michaela Spangenburg at OurOwnVoice.  Eileen invites you to her new blog, EILEEN VERBS BOOKS; poets are invited to participate in three of its features: "Poetry and Money," "What Are You Reading?" and "What Do You Re-Read?"