Poetry for Students

224 Poetry for Students

Nor is there any in what is unquestionably San-

tos’s finest poetic achievement to date, “Elegy for

My Sister,” which is less about suicide and its af-

termath than about the alien presence we inherit

from the moment death’s will is read and the mys-

teries such presences weave about our lives:

... But I begin this for another reason as well,
a more urgent and perhaps more selfish reason,
to answer that question which day by day
I fear I’m growing less able to answer:
Who was she whose death now made her
A stranger to me? As though the problem
Were not that she had died, and how was I
To mourn her, but that some stalled memory
Now kept her from existing, and that she
Could only begin to exist, to take her place
In the future, when all of our presuppositions
About her, all of those things that identified
The woman we’d buried, were finally swept aside...
But more than incidentally Santos’s poem di-
agrams the haphazard “phaseology” of madness
and its symmetrically disturbing observation by a
sibling who cannot help reading her whole life
backwards as an epiphany whose unpacking yields
up knots of randomness but no loose ends to tie to-
gether. For madness never lacks for order, being
steeped in its own dehydrated dreams of drowning,
its own deep-sea soundings of heaven’s gate. And
when it is finally overtaken by the darkness it has
courted for so long, it gathers up (in a parody of
posterity) whatever remains might have been left
behind in the form of materia poeticato be seized
upon by anyone who, like the poet, is intent on
stripping the stranger in his midst of all disquiet-
ing Unheimlichkeit.Sometimes these turn up un-
bidden and posthumously in the shape of personal
oddments, even bits of cosmetic detritus:
... Shortly after her death,
we discovered in her closet a large box containing
countless bottles of lotions, powders, lipsticks,
and oils. Many of them had never been opened,
still others had barely been used at all.
Sorting through the contents it occurred to me
The box contained some version of herself,
Some representation of who she was—
A stronger, more serene, more independent self?—
That she’d never had the chance to become...
His sister, he tells us, never believed her own
name to be designative of anything real or self-
authorizing. Not able ever to feel at home on the
ground of being she had difficulty grasping just
who it was that could claim squatter’s rights to a
name, or what agency of mulled delirium could as-
sure a proper noun of its propriety:
Thus all her life she felt her name referred to a
presence
outside herself, a presence which sought to enclose

that self which separated her from who they were.

Thus all her life she was never quite sure who it

was

people summoned whenever they called her by her

name.

The quest for the means to sustain a narrative

whereby his sister’s long encystment of dying

might be acceptably familiarized—or at least made

divinable as a spelling of sibyline leaves—persists

to the very exhaustion of memory, at which point

it subsides into the valedictory terminalizing of ital-

ics. All energy thus spent, memorability circles

back on itself and the subject of the poet’s elegy is

free to enter the golden promise of her journey of

journeys—

A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open

window.

Beneath the sill: a girl’s hushed voice exhorting it-

self in whispers.

One morning, she leaves the house before dawn.

She doesn’t take the car.

By noon she finds herself in the business district of

the city

a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and

she sees that now,

after all these years, she’s about to take the great

journey of her life.

Sherod Santos’s The Pilot Star Elegiesis, at

the very least, an astonishing book.

Source:James Rother, “A Star to Pilot By,” in http://www

.cprw.com/members/Rother/star.htm, 2001, pp. 1–5.

Sherod Santos and

James Rother

In the following interview from the online web-

site Contemporary Poetry Review, Santos com-

ments on his collections and their relation to each

other, and the lyric quality of his poetry.

Poet and essayist Sherod Santos is the author

of four books of poetry, Accidental Weather(Dou-

bleday, 1982), The Southern Reaches(Wesleyan,

1989), The City of Women(W. W. Norton, 1993),

and, most recently, The Pilot Star Elegies(W. W.

Norton, 1999), which was both a National Book

Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The

New YorkerBook Award. Mr. Santos’ poems ap-

pear regularly in such journals as The New Yorker,

The Paris Review,The Nation, Poetry,and The Yale

Review.His essays have appeared in American Po-

etry Review,The New York Times Book Review,The

Kenyon Reviewand Parnassus,and a collection of

those essays, A Poetry of Two Minds,has just been

released (University of Georgia Press, 2000). His

awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial

Award, the Discovery/The NationAward, the Oscar

Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End