Review: The Physics of Allowable Sway, by Marilyn Lerch

Sackville, NB: Devon Ave. Poetry Books, 2013.

Review by Kathy Mac and Ben Lord

“Allowable sway” usually refers to the amount of movement designed into the structure of a building or bridge. However, Marilyn Lerch uses the phrase to describe how “treetops, like keening women, bend and lift” (“Once I Dreamed” 32). This boundary-confounding slippage between natural and artificial marks many of the best moments in The Physics of Allowable Sway.

        The book includes a number of poems that grapple -- intellectually, emotionally and spiritually -- with problems of identity and mortality in our contemporary world. In “Paul,” Lerch explores what it means to know someone you never met; in this case a young man who killed himself, whose words she read years later. She became connected to Paul precisely because he removed himself from the web of connections: “When all was sick flux of love turning / you were fixed and pure, your act decisive” (28). Over and over in the poem she asks “How does one decide?”  -- to end your life, to remove yourself from knowability, to hasten the dissolution of your corporeal and memory identity and become fathomable only through your writing. To move from “one” to none, or all.

        Not everything in The Physics of Allowable Sway is so dire. Some of the most diverting poems treat serious subjects lightly. “Child, Child” exhorts someone “eye-level with no-nonsense knees” to “stay down there / as long as you can” only “occasionally tilting your head / up the long length of your future”  (58). Other poems here are pastoral, and pleasures to read in part because of Lerch’s articulate yet accessible diction. “Sunset at Cheticamp” ends with a description of the way

the molten globe slowly sinks

into its own lava sea while

birds skim the closing crease

and the small green light

on the point winces

on and off. (24)

        In “Leaving the Human Behind” Lerch takes up again to her quest to understand the limits and strengths of human interactions with nature, by returning to the cave walls at Pech-Merle,

to come upon that hand

splayed in red ochre on the rock,

like to like

across millennia.

She ends the poem, and the book, imagining a time when:

whoever finds this,

if you still can,

feel the feeling of

how much we loved

life.                                            

In this beautiful. self-published book -- produced using nineteenth-century letterpress technologies at Gaspereau Press -- Lerch clearly aspires to produce an artifact as compelling to her future readers as that ochre hand is to her. Like the images on the wall at Pech-Merle, The Physics of Allowable Sway is a palm-print not just of Lerch’s life, but of the cultures, experiences and histories which culminate in this book.

What is it about the writer's identity?

Re: "The World has a Mobile Size: My Canadian Passport is twice as Big"
by Kaziwa Salih
  

Kaziwa Salih raises some interesting notions about self- identity and how writing is part of the social web, whether it be the local or global community. Salih could have found examples in the theology of self-identity in work by Cooley and Nietzsche.

Cooley discusses a theory of “the looking glass,” which states that a person’s self grows out of society’s interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. It includes how as an individual one might appear to others, then imagining the judgement that people will place on that appearance, therefore creating a self-identity through the judgement of others.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, claimed that the individual crafts their own identity through self-realization and does so without relying on anything transcending that life—such as God or a soul.  

Salih's article expresses the strain of being an Kurdish in1991 in Iraq during the horrible dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Salih discusses how she went through a process of finding her identity by including herself along with those who led the uprising that deposed Hussein .  

In 10 years after the Fall of Saddam,JJ Gould quotes:

 “…Barham Salih, the former prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan's regional government and a former deputy prime minister of Iraq's federal government. "Iraq, today, 10 years on from the war, from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is not what the Iraqi people hoped for and expected. We hoped for an inclusive democracy, an Iraq that is at peace with itself and at peace with its neighbors," Salih said. "To be blunt, we are far from that."

"But," he added, "it's important to understand where we started from. ... Literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were sent to mass graves. Ten years on from the demise of Saddam Hussein, we're still discovering mass graves across Iraq. And Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein…”

I think Kaziwa Salih would agree with the former Iraqi prime minister, considering her father that was often arrested on unknown charges that were based on his being Kurdish. She tells us how alarming it was realize the marks on his body that she had at one time dismissed, were vidence of torture.

Under Hussein’s reign, she had to give up music and a sense of identity with her Kurdish nationality. The identity of a writer is meaningful, especially when in publishing one's novels, and not only due to the decrease in sales because of having to place the title under multiple pseudonyms.

Examples of a struggle for identity dog well-known authors as well as the lesser knowns. For instance, JK Rowling is known for having to publish under a pen name. Or for another example The Help is about a very sensitive subject in the United States. In both cases there’s the element of struggle that is seen through reception of both texts.

When it comes down to it, it no longer matters about having your name written in the corner of the cover. As many of the not-well-known Kurdish writers know, it is about the words that you have torn from the very pit of your existence and let splatter against the pale pages to bleed as they may.

Identity and Placing Yourself

In any story there's a baseline plot, correct? Whether it's a love story where firsts are experienced or a science fiction story focused on revenge, we can all spot some basic plot structures. We know the bad guys lose, the lovers get together, and that sometimes no one wins.

Even in the most fantastical of stories, we're able to identify with these basic plots and that lets us know subconsciously that we've seen this before - and we kind of like it.

What you may not know is that we can do this with characters as well. It's by following your characters that the reader becomes familiar with your story. In movies it might be that one guy thrust into the action and asks that question of "what the heck is going on?" that you yourself are thinking.

Here are four examples of characters that allow your audience to identify with:

1. Harry Potter: One of the best bits of the Harry Potter series is that we get to follow Harry from childhood. We get to see him experience the wizarding world and to be amazed by it. If Rowling had written the book from Ron Weasley's point of view (someone born to the wizard world), we wouldn't get the same experience of discovery at all.

2. Riley Poole (National Treasure): In the film National Treasure, it's obvious that the audience is caught having to rely on Riley Poole who has the role of sidekick. This means enduring the agony of hearing him complain about not knowing what's going on and repeatedly asking what Cage's character is talking about. Could his role as an identifying character be any more obvious?

3. The Joker (The Dark Knight): One of the best characters to let your audience identify with is the villain - in part for the reason that they don't want to. Take the Joker who talks about things as if we're all too caught up in them. What's wrong with a little chaos? Why do anything? He asks the fundamental questions of life and it's his job to make you want to choose bad. His role is a seduction.

So here's a suggestion to you. If your readers are confused, if they can't relate to your story, toss in that person they can identify with. But do be careful, this can be difficult. If your character is familiar with the situation, it would be arbitrary for them to just yell, "Hey, I'm about to put our shields up because they are force fields that can protect our ship!"

So please - spare us.