“The house we bought clings to the edge / of the irrigation ditch,” writes Sheila Black in “Oasis,” the first poem in House of Bone. It’s an apt beginning to this collection, for the canal that feeds the garden is also a gaping maw, a chasm. And in referring to “the beauty which is next to terror,” an allusion to Rilke, Black introduces a theme running throughout this first book of her poems. In “Palomas,” right under the speaker’s feet “glass splits into leaves /and blades. A can flashes like a wound.” In the long poem “Bitterroot,” the pain of childbirth is interwoven with a past involving drug use; the poem ends with “the red-gilled salmon, / the blue-speckled trout, / rising for the hooks dressed as flies / in feathers of yellow, sparks of green, beads of amber.” How to avoid a beautiful but lethal lure?
The subject of the difficulty of achieving and even defining health continues in the book’s second section, which opens with “Reconstruction,” where the speaker is lying in a hospital or recovery facility after corrective surgery, as her bones are “knitting themselves / into a new shape.” But the poet’s attitude toward the healing traced in the poems of this section takes a surprising turn, for, in “What You Mourn,” she feels “imprisoned in a foreign body,” missing the one that, although labeled “crippled” when she was young, “was simply mine.”
And yet, as painful as many of these poems are, tracing with unblinking honesty and courage a life lived close to the bone, these are also poems rich with the fruits of a vigorous life with a husband and young children. “Married Sex” traces a wife’s initial ambivalence toward physical intimacy that at first seemed mechanical and stale, followed by the sharp surprise of a new ecstasy. In “Tomato,” though the poet remembers once wishing her baby had never been born as he lay “blindfolded with a tube down / his throat,” she now rejoices in her healthy boy’s chomping on a ripe garden tomato “big as a heart.” In “Pasture,” the horses do not want to come in, but “hold the sweet grass smell forever in their nostrils.”
Although Black’s free-verse lines are not always as taut as one might wish, and although the language is not always as original as it might be, this is a first collection filled with “the unpredictability that makes / a thing alive.” “This is how I try to love the world,” Black writes in “Pearl,” and love it she does, throughout these often haunting, often luscious poems.
reviewed by Wendy Barker, University of Texas at San Antonio
Sheila Black. House of Bone. Cincinnati: CustomWords, 2007. ISBN 978-1-933456-62-1.