Volume 24 173
It is perhaps this sense of haunting that gives
Zychlinsky’s voice such testimonial purity, an in-
tensity of perception that verges at times on the sur-
real, or at any rate the uncanny. One senses, reading
her verse, that the experience of war and flight
along with the trauma of the Holocaust itself have
so radically defamiliarized the quotidian that even
the most ordinary objects she encounters must in-
evitably take on strange, often frightening mean-
ings. “At night my shoes look at me / with my
mother’s tired eyes—/the same goals unachieved /
and happiness missed,” she writes in “My Mother’s
Shoes”; while elsewhere she observes “the eleva-
tor operator / drowning in his cage,” sorrows for
“the wooden leg / that walked around all day in the
rain, / and no one said to the wooden leg: / Go
home, go home, / enough walking in the rain” and
hears “the clocks in Times square / ring[ing] the
message of death.”
In material settings of such fearful resonance,
the human world too takes on a terrifying cast:
He who has not felt a knife in his back does not know
what a knife is—says the taxi driver who takes me
to the train.
In one of the most remarkable moments in this
remarkable collection, even “The Unborn Are
Feverish” with terrible knowledge:
The unborn are feverish in the branches of
September—do not wake us, let us rest in our blue,
transparent shirts. Between the ashes of yesterday and
the smoke of tomorrow let us sleep here, concealed,
hidden, without hands, without eyes, without lips,
without years, sinking, drowning in no one’s memory.
As it does for Ponsot, then—but very
differently—age brings Zychlinsky into a “new
country” where she funds herself, as Wallace
Stevens once put it, “more truly and more strange.”
On the one hand, the “dresses you have seen me
wear—/they never get old,” but on the other hand,
what might have been her “real” self has been se-
verely fragmented and fantastically transformed:
I looked on a street into a mirror—was it me I saw
in the mirror? Or was it a woman I had seen some-
where and don’t remember where? When? Do you
know her? I turned my head—a woman was stand-
ing near me and pointed a finger at the mirror. She
asked again—do you know her? Before I could an-
swer a word, she disappeared. I stood a long time be-
fore the mirror, which looked at me—empty.
This tension between the familiar dress and the
unfamiliar image is one that has traditionally
shaped much poetry of old age. But what gives spe-
cial force to God Hid His Faceis a further tension,
a tension between the particular and the universal.
Zychlinsky speaks for and of the overwhelming
pain of a specific historical moment that has been
ineradicably fixed in her memory. Yet at the same
time, as a survivor who has aged in predictable hu-
man ways, she speaks for and of a common (if un-
commonly moving) experience. “The Grass Has
Grown Pale” dramatizes her relationship to the ter-
rible history of our century:
The grass has grown pale, the sky is cold my
brother, Duvid, I am no longer looking for you on
the earth.
I will now follow the clouds a long time with my
eyes. I will look for you, my brother, in the autumn
silence.
I walk with my son over the clay field, on the Pol-
ish roads—O let them come, the autumn nights,
over the bloody roads.
There is, quite rightly of course, no acceptance
here—though there is ironic resignation to what has
long since, and calamitously, happened.
More serene in its recording of the inexorable
transformations inherent in the human condition,
the monitory and Whitmanesque “My Story Is
Your Story” moves (as many of Ponsot’s poems
do) from the particular to the general:
My story is your story, neighbor across from me in
the subway. What you are thinking about I have long
since forgotten. What will happen to you happened
to me long ago. What you hope for I smile about with
closed lips. My fate is shown in the blue veins on
your hand, yours, you can read in the deep wrinkles
on my face.
Source:Sandra M. Gilbert, Review of The Bird Catcher:
Poems, in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 1, Oc-
tober 1998, pp. 11–12.Suzanne Keen
In the following review of The Bird Catcher,
Keen praises the meaningfulness of the last lines
of Ponsot’s poems, describing how Ponsot “uses
demanding forms without making the reader feel
the strain of artfulness.”Read over time, a journal like Commonweal
begins to feel like a friend, known well enough to
be praised and abused, missed when it goes away
over the summer vacation, relied upon to recom-
mend its favorite books. Marie Ponsot’s The Bird
Catcherbegs to be pressed into the hands of a
friend. I know I will not be alone among Com-
monwealreaders to recognize Marie Ponsot’s name
and poems from these pages, and I hope I will be
forgiven for quoting at length, in case anyone out
there has missed her. Take a gulp of this poem,
“Underbutter”
This house has three entrance-ways. Water flushes
its hidden places.One Is One