Review: Susan Paddon’s "Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths"

“When you could still speak, // the last thing you were able to ask me / was where all of your worry would go” (93). In her debut book of poetry, Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths, Susan Paddon shows us just where the worry goes; she provides readers with a poetic narrative that explores the links between the deaths of her mother and Russian writer Anton Chekhov. In this moving memoir of her mother’s life, Paddon sheds light on traumas affecting us all: death and loss.
            While Paddon clearly draws similarities between the two tragedies, what is most telling is the significant difference. In researching Chekhov, Paddon found that “no one made confetti of his personal life” (34). His sister and caretaker Maria was privy to the more private details, “stories she could never get clean” (39). On the other hand, Paddon struggles with her mother’s insistent editing of her own life in her refusal to share her stories and memories with her daughter. Poems such as “Albuquerque, New Mexico” emphasize this tension when Paddon discovers a photo of her mother in her 20’s in bed with an unidentified man:

            And there is a girl with you in the room. She is the one who has 

            captured you both in the shot. Her camera and reflection in the

            mirror. It wasn’t like you to get caught.

            It’s strange I care so much about who they are or whether or not you

            loved him, or if he was good to you, your twenty-something self.

            This photo doesn’t belong to me. I just happened to find it

            among your private things. (114)

            Paddon’s desire to make sense of her own tragedy through allusions is reminiscent of J.J. Steinfeld’s preoccupations in Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds. However, unlike Steinfeld—who remains stuck in his family’s trauma—Paddon anticipates how she is going to incorporate her suffering into her existence in a way that does justice to her mother’s memory, but allows her to move forward: “Yes, I will go on. Yes, I will get better/ and throw myself into things. I will, on occasion, take pills to breathe” (109).

            What is perhaps most impressive about this book is how well structured it is. By dividing the book into seven sections—the months of April through September and a final section entitled “After”—Paddon creates a linear chronology that allows the reader to navigate the complexity of her lengthy book. In contrast, the repeating epigraphs from Chekhov to Maria or his wife Olga, his letters from Yalta, and Paddon’s own “Unsent Letters” throughout the book, all demonstrate the cyclical nature of time, emphasizing the book’s themes of life and death, remembering and forgetting.  
            The poems in the book and in individual sections are very carefully placed, as each juxtaposition sheds light on the poems involved. We find an example of this in Paddon’s answer to her mother’s final question, “Where will all your worry go?” (93). In “The Minister’s Visit,” the neighbor Leona, upon discovering the death of Paddon's mother

                        …cries

            for everything bad that has ever been.

            Not because this loss

            is so great, but because loss

            is a reminder of other losses. (96)
This poem is immediately followed by a letter from Chekhov (but also Paddon) to Maria that repeats the phrase “I know where the worry goes” (97). Paired with “The Minister’s Visit,” this shows us that the tragedies of Paddon’s book are not just personal, but affect us all. The ability to evoke such strong reactions through the “reminder of other losses” (96) demonstrates Paddon’s storytelling abilities and is indicative of a strong, successful writing career to come for this debut poet.

Works Cited

Paddon, Susan. Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths. London: Brick Books, 2014. Print. 

Steinfeld, J. J. Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds. Victoria: Ekstatis Editions Canada Ltd., 2014. Print. 

by Sharisse LeBrun, with input from Monica Grasse, Ben Lord and Molly Strickland

             

Review: J.J. Steinfeld's Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds: Poetry New and Selected

               The son of survivors of the Holocaust, J.J. Steinfeld challenges what and why we remember in his 2014 collection, Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds: Poetry New and Selected. Steinfeld’s poetry captures how a past that he did not experience necessarily shapes him.

                With imagery that morphs fluidly, Steinfeld’s work places the reader in his dreams, where time constantly entraps, repeats, and telescopes. In “Sometimes I Dream in Yiddish” he imagines what he would have done to change what happened to his parents and their communities. This is just one of several poems—like “Identity Dreams”, “Preparing Your Cellar and Your Attic”, and “Dreaming the History of Tattooed Numbers” —  which  focus on dreams, creating a second-hand experience that demonstrates lasting effects of the Holocaust and which encapsulates how Steinfeld feels as the son of survivors rather than as a survivor himself. The theme of being entrenched in, yet separate from, the past arises throughout the book, as evidenced in “The Inadequacy of Language and the Insufficiency of Silence” where he notes that trying to understand the Holocaust by statistics is to “bleed falsely” (54).

                In the opening piece “The Memory Travellers/ Two Photographs and Two Poems” Steinfeld questions why we “attempt to forget and remember/ in the same indispensable breath”. Steinfeld fights to convey an understanding of the indelibility of history, and acknowledge the despair he feels when others try to ignore what should not, and cannot, ever be forgotten. In this, he evokes the ideas of Theodor Adorno, arguing that to deny that culture helped produce Auschwitz is to become complicit in the reproduction of that culture (Adorno. See also Oard). Steinfeld comments on how memories change over time, consequently changing a person’s identity. His poems acknowledge how the past and present intermingle, as our memories of the past affect how we perceive the present, and our present experiences affect how we choose to remember the past.

Author J.J. Steinfeld (Photo: Brenda Whiteway)

                Steinfeld’s work is both similar and starkly different to that of other authors who discuss similar cultural atrocities, such as author Silvia Hamilton and her work on the history of slavery in Atlantic Canada. Both authors are removed from the initial traumas, but still deal with the cultural prejudices and historical amnesias surrounding the Holocaust and the Black Diaspora. However, Hamilton’s work focuses on community identity, and so looks outward and upward to the future. In contrast, Steinfeld focuses on individual identity, memory and dreams, looking inward and creating a sense of claustrophobic entrapment.

                Moving between tenderness and terror, JJ Steinfeld's Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds eloquently demonstrates the confusion the Holocaust creates in his present, and his impossible yet inevitable desire to undo pain by undoing the past.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society”. Prism. Trans. S. and S. Weber. Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press. 34-5. Print.

Oard, Brian A. “Poetry After Auschwitz: What Adorno Really Said, and Where He Said It.” Mindful Pleasures: A Literary Blog. Blogspot, 12 March 2011. Web. 05 February 2015.  

Steinfeld, J. J. Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds: Poetry New and Selected. Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2014.

-by Molly Strickland, with input from Monica Grasse, Sharisse LeBrun, and Benjamin Lord.