Crashing the Confessional
2007; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2007.0041
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoHevicw Crashing the Confessional Tony Barnstone Black Box Erin Belieu Copper Canyon Press http://www.coppercanyonpress.org 80 pages; paper, $15.00 One could spin a metaphor for marriage as a first-class ticket flying you to paradise. You and your husband couple madly in the bathroom, and there is free champagne for all, great conversation, and no one kicking the back ofyour seat. But in Erin Belieu's new book of poems, all that is left is the black box of memory, which she replays again and again as she seeks to understand why the plane went down: I root through your remains looking for the black box. Nothing left but glossy chunks, a pimp's platinum tooth clanking inside the urn. Who crashed the plane? The scurrilous husband, presented in these poems as a relentless womanizer, "The Last of the Gentlemen Heartbreakers" with a "knack for self- / satisfaction" and "the cold kind of heart..."? The protagonist herself, addled on coke, pot, and booze, and practiced at the art of infidelity? Or the other women, the "plain chinless girl" and the vamp whom Belieu describes as "the wish you make for more / wishes, a vicuna-lined pussy / with extra slots for your credit cards"? Black Box is a sifting of the gruesome evidence, a hard look at the contradictory facts, and a confrontation with griefand culpability alter the marriage goes smash. What caused the disaster? The book opens with a nod toward self-blame, presenting the protagonist as a version of the blowup doll she and her roommate "'K." purchased to decorate their "dishabille apartment / a block downwind from the stockyards" in an era in which it seemed "Coke wasn't addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes / and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel / we foolishly hoped our Iives would become." When she finds Sandy, the blowup doll, "in a box [she] once marked 'The Past,'" she asks, "who'd want to forgive // a girl like that?" and we understand that she is presenting this puffed-up figure of a woman as a version of herself, hard to forgive and pathetic when the air is knocked out ofher by age and loss: "Deflated, you're simply the smile that surrounds a hole." However, despite the lacerating brutality ofthe narrator's description of herself, we quickly come to see that the true mode ofthe book is that ofjeremiad, not of self-mortification. Though as she says in "The Last of the Gentlemen Heartbreakers," "You know I don't mean this / as some girls say, in the bad way," the reader understands the opposite is the truth. The husband is the "Conceited boy," "irresistible, a waltz-step elegy / with a showy limp, the same / theme-park pirate in a soiled black /patch...." He is the "Assassin, asshole, fine craftsman of myth and malice," and though he is her "old friend of many years," he is also the betrayer, "lago." In her long sequence, "In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral," she continues the invective against her symbolically dead husband: My dear, even the worst despot in his leopard-skin fez will tell you: the truth doesn't win, but it makes an appearance, though it's a foreign cavalry famous for bad timing and half-assed horsemanship. History will barely remember that you were yellow and a cheat, a pixilated bivalve who consumed as randomly as the thunderheads pass, and yet, how strange, how many of us loved you well. If all this seems a bit familiar, just think of Sylvia Piath's "Daddy" and "'Lady Lazarus," or think of Anne Sexton's "'The Addict."' 1 do not think it unfair to say that Belieu is channeling Plath and Sexton's technique, attitude, diction, and tropes. She echoes Sexton's Transformations ( 1 97 1 ) with fairy-tale reference ("Once upon a time" and "you found a giant at your dinner table"). She echoes Piath's "Daddy" with monster movie allusion (though Belieu uses Bride ofFrankenstein in place of Piath's Dracula). These monster-movie and fairy-tale tropes, along with the intense and inventive invective, the blend of high and low diction, the relentless and...
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