Conchitina Cruz: Dark
Hours
(University of the Philippines Press, Manila, 2005; paperback,
67pp, US$7.95; isbn 9715424953)
This is a strong collection of prose poems, firmly in the European lyric
tradition. Mostly short-length (less than a page) passages of heightened
lyric prose, that often begin with a focussed image and develop that
image through repetition, variation, furtherance and other rhetorical
and poetic devices. The poems work in the traditional mode of 'circling' an
idea, or spiralling around a set of images that are revisited and altered
with each return, developing the prose in an otherworldly, oneiric fashion,
as in:
"Next to herself, the body was all that mattered to her. It was
the opposite of her greatest fear: the city where streets sprouted overnight
like weeds and snaked their way into each other's aimlessness […]
The body was a different matter. She drew her scalpel across
its skin like a lover tracing the distance from this city to a beloved's
across a map" (from 'What is it about tenderness').
Cities, habitations, the natural world, relationships – these
are the main themes – as in the following (précis'd)
version, which circles around a central image, and the central action
of leaning, with a beautiful languidness and lyric melancholy
that I find quite beguiling:
"Inside the story is a garden with a pear tree, the view of a
house with a staircase and mahogany desks. Inside the house is a woman
with her back against the windows, her body bent over her child inside
a crib, her body leaning against a table as she fixes the fruit in a
bowl […] Inside the story is a dinner party the woman hosts, the
idle talk of guests, the moment her husband leans toward the body of
another woman […] Inside the story there is a woman, a house,
a man, a pear tree. Inside the story is a house, a bowl of fruit […]
the woman leans the sadness of her body against the window, tries
to look beyond the pear tree. Inside the story she sees nothing but
darkness. She is ungrateful for the luxury of despair" (from 'Geography
Lesson').
Suffering and forgiveness also feature strongly, as do images of healing
and caring. There is a subtle and insightful humour at work in places
too, as in the hospital scene of the poem 'Smile' where "The
man who thinks he is God" mistakes the nurse for the Virgin Mary
who, herself, has her own possible delusion about "a date with
the man she believes she will marry". The poem ends "…flooded
with the radiance of the moment, a man and a woman in the middle of a
sweet misunderstanding" (from 'Smile'). This very real
moment is metonymic of many of the relationships in the collection and,
perhaps, each of these relationships becomes metonymic of the larger
philosophic moment of our 'being' here at all, caught in
such sweet misunderstandings.
The inhabitants of cities populate these
fine prose poems with their small dream-like narratives: a girl who has
lost her mother; "the
boy tugging at my purse"; a man with "too many keys in his
hand and not enough doors to open"; a lady "dancing on a
cracked blue plate"; a tattooed woman: "Her mother tending
pebbles like plants. Mouth hung open, a hook grazing her lips.
Eyes without urgency. The fish a shadow on her wrist, a token, a warning" (from
'The gist of it'). The characters are real enough to maintain empathy;
surreal enough to allow the prose poem its permutational tricks.
We suspend our disbelief, as when watching an intriguing animation. Troublingly
real is 'The dead woman in the laboratory' who 'has
lost her heart'. In a development 'the heart shivers and
jumps inside the backpack of a woman who is on her way home'. In
a beautifully quotidian twist, it is 'wrapped like a sandwich'.
The poem develops to a poignant point, focusing on a disused dictionary
where: 'the remnants of flowers from a man long gone, mark the
pages of her favourite words'. A lover, a father, a brother? Where
such male/female relationships are a central theme, mothers and
daughters also figure strongly, most effectively in the wonderful sequence
'Disappear' which develops the paired images of 'shadows' and 'puddles'
to resonant ends:
"You stand in the puddle of your mother's shadow,
twisting your body so your own vanishes inside the darkness. I'm invisible,
you shout, counting the three shadows left, then blowing me a stiff kiss. It's
cooler here too. Is it possible for this not to be a story of
disappearance? […] I fall into a puddle on my way to catch a bus, and unlike
a dog, I can't sit around and lick my wounds, I have to walk away
like nothing has happened […] If I keep still enough inside
this shadow, it is as if I am not here. If I keep still enough, there
is no proof you are not here with me" (from 'Disappear').
There are, however, a couple of passages
in the book that I found far less engaging. A second sequence called
'Geography Lesson;' is written out as miniscule footnotes at the bottom
of a blank page. The 8 sections of this presumably refer back to the
8 paragraphs of the earlier excellent poem 'Geography Lesson' (quoted
above), but these footnotes contain little of interest and actually appear
precious and pretentious on the (mostly) blank page. A second sequence
of footnotes 'News of the Train' repeats the same trick some 10
pages later and, whilst it presents some more engaging moments
of love and loss, it does not at all match up to the very pleasing
work to be found elsewhere in this book. In a 67-page book, 14 pages
of slight footnotes on blank pages (plus the 15 blank sides of dividing
pages) is an awful lot of white space. Cruz is a decent writer whose
prose poems I shall certainly be re-reading for their understated finesse,
and whom I can fully recommend – I
only wish she had had the wherewithal to give us a whole book of
prose poems here and cut these unadventurous footnotes.
Copyright © Andy Brown, 2006. All
quotations are copyright © Conchitina
Cruz, 2005.
