A Red Thought in a Green Shade
My Girl’s Green Jacket
by Mary Meriam
Headmistress Press, 2018
Mary Meriam, the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket and earlier books, has kept passionately busy in recent years. Besides writing her own poetry, she is also the co-founder of Headmistress Press, and that press’s web page sets out a very specific mission: “to promote and market lesbian-identified poetry by publishing books of poetry by LBT poets.” Her bio opens with the statement that she “advocates for the right of women to love each other in their poetry and art. . . .” She also edits Lavender Review, a magazine with similar aims. Both of Meriam’s previous full-length poetry collections (Girlie Calendar and Conjuring My Leafy Muse) were published by Headmistress, as were a chapbook and The Lilian Trilogy, a collected reissue of her three previous books. The hard-working founders and editors at the press have published an array of books for a lesbian audience, and at least one aimed more widely. (Full disclosure here: straight though I am, I’ve had a poem in Lavender Review and a sonnet in a Headmistress anthology.)
My Girl’s Green Jacket largely continues to do well what Meriam has been doing well in all her other books. She writes nearly always in formal verse, favoring especially sonnets—the book includes two extended sonnet sequences—ghazals, and sapphic stanzas; she branches out in this book to prose poetry in “Silver Necklace” and free verse in several poems, including “Map.” She has fun with her craft: with devices of sound like alliteration, and with tricks of enjambment that have us reading one meaning into a word at the end of a line and flipping it to a different meaning at the beginning of the next. She believes in meter and observes it strictly.
The ghazal “Alone in Love” is a good example not only of Meriam’s ability with that specific form, but of her allusive, tell-it-slant approach:
She isn’t mine. I am alone in love.
Inside my mind and soul, I moan in love.
The sound is pearly shell. The sound is slight,
only a cell of sound, a stone in love.
My flower bed so lavishly in bloom,
my elm tree’s swelling leaves, my own in love.
Those fragile fantasies of love I drew
erased in anguish, overthrown in love.
She hasn’t ears and eyes for this, old fool.
Impossible, your monotone in love.
Just face it, Mary, time is running short.
Love less, or you will die alone in love.
Not love satisfied, but love unrequited, lonely, and in pain is the typical subject of a poem in this book. Fragments, allusions, and suggestions are more common than narratives; stories tantalize rather than tell. There’s often a piling up of phrases for effects of sound and pressure of emotion, even in the absence of clear syntax, as in “Leibegott”:
The hell it is, a hell I said,
a monster swamped in plastic bags,
and on the shore, the waves of dead.
Look hot on me and turn me red.
Untie my clothes or rather rags,
the hell it is, a hell I said. . . .
This high-intensity use of pounding tetrameter works especially well in the arch, never-quite-clear narrative (whose story is it?) of “She Rose”:
Born dancing like a bloody fool
in utero in tap-dance school,
she’s a baby you can see
will reap a heap of tragedy.
Dip and switch, around she goes
and throws her audience a rose
it fails to catch; . . .
Most painfully, there are a number of poems in the book that continue to explore the themes, treated in the earlier books, of a desperately unhappy childhood and continuing estrangement from a sister. “Ars Poetica” and “The Sad Palace of Ill Effects” are two such poems. There’s an intense bitterness to some of these that makes for uncomfortable reading, as in “Pepper Mill”:
. . .then the piggy baby pooping and peeing,
or the mountain of ground black pepper
on my mother’s mashed potatoes
and my father’s bacon sandwiches.
Then the years of screwing the children,
not screwing like sex, but screwing out of,
not unscrewing the turn of the screw,
but the deeper screwing of the lid on the jar,
shouted damns in the hallway, damn it,
screwing out of the ordinary nursery . . . .
(One of the book’s blurbs uses the phrase “horrifyingly impassioned,” which seems right to me.)
By contrast, the book’s most satisfying and comforting current is its use of the beauties and challenges of the rural landscape, the small-town farming locale where Meriam lives.
A lake figures in many of the poems, “a moving jewel at dusk”—the title of one of the book’s sections. The world’s beauties nearly always link to the beauties of some beloved—
This evening’s weight of beauty drags me under
to silence, seaweed, chests of sunken plunder.
A million pearls. Tongue them to me, make them
become your voice, your lips, your breath, your eyes,
the treasure of your arms, your hands, your thighs.
—though whether there is one beloved, or whether there have been many, is left for us to wonder. Nature and the beloved come close to being identified; the “green jacket” of the title sometimes seems to be the green of the natural world.
There is plenty of frank lesbian desire in these poems (see “Sapphic Palette” and “In the Sierra Nevadas”); that’s to be expected. What is more likely to feel over-the-top is Meriam’s occasional use of a high vatic mode that includes a lot of “Oh” and “O” and inversions like “O flaming yellow / am I” and “in my house confined.” Meriam seems determined to reject any impulse to hold back or moderate any emotion, though she shapes it for effect. She stares down the criticism of excess sentiment in some of her titles, like the sonnet sequence “Sentimentality” and “A Political Poem with Emotional Parts.”
There is also plenty in the book that fastens onto feelings unrelated to desire. There are passages that speak to anyone who is mortal—
I can’t bear growing old like this, my hand
won’t write the thought, my eyes won’t see the print.
I only want to sing and play and dance. . . .
—as well as passages that speak to anyone who ever felt misunderstood:
The crows are girls that no one listened to,
whose rituals and wishes no one knew.
Meriam is good at conveying all these emotions, and at harnessing the emotional whirlwind into the dynamo of form, producing a passionate energy.