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.

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.