Kathleen Fraser Books

I turned once again to Kathleen Fraser's intriguing TRANSLATING THE UNSPEAKABLE after a long hiatus, for I had seen a recent essay by her and it struck me once again that the older essays, collected here in this handsome volume from Alabama, had real qualities of composition and inspiration, though they perhaps struggle here and there for what she can now employ effortlessly, like Alec Guinness, that assured mastery of the form. Plunging right in, I felt the top of my head coming off as from every corner of (nearly) every page a rainbow of arrows hurled themselves at my brain. "What's messing up my tidy defense system, about to leave me open for attack?"

We go to Fraser first off for the inquiring turn of her mind, then for the activist spirit she has displayed in so many contexts, both in writing and in life. Often she returns to her own history, a story of a woman who got very lucky very early (having Frank O'Hara as a friend!) and who was also dismissed, neglected and put on the shelf for gender reasons, and who managed to find a way to overcome this prejudice both theoretically and practically. Like Alex Haley's ROOTS, Fraser's TRANSLATING is a book of ancestor hunting, for like Haley she believes in the totemic power of those who came before, holding their lamps, shedding their light into out dim present and questionable future. In college she was taught a steady diet of marvelous male modernists, and it wasn't until later that she wondered why, except for Enily Dickinson, and a bit of Woolf, she was not introduced to any actual woman writers. The battle over the canon is just part of the texture of these essays, but it is always a stirring saga, one we return to with fascination like Civil War buffs.

Her studies of individual poets (Niedecker) are always to the point, and one essay here always catches my eye, her focus on the relationship between two very different writers, Mina Loy and Basil Bunting, which is among the best criticism I have seen of either poet. It is a book of keen observations, the poet Steve Benson for example sharing "the baffled seriousness of brilliant clowns like Stan Laurel." And a book of prophesy, for it ends with a consideration of Charles Olson's "Field" theory, embodied by feminist examples including Myung Mi Kim and Hannah Weiner, the page exploded a la Olson's poignant "Rose" poem. Today, with Fraser leading the way into further realms of typographical bewilderment and wonder, I read "Olson's Field" as perhaps her statement of intent, a map for what was to follow.

Alabama should have hired a copy editor long ago. It's a shame that the book misspells the names of Daisy Aldan and Michael Amnasan--and that's just the A's!

In this wonderful book of vibrant and challenging essays, Fraser questions the dominant forms of both poetry and culture without becoming overly polemical. So often, in claiming her own and women's territory, a writer will mow down everyone who even remotely strays from her standards; but Fraser's essays (the title one is a prime example) present and explain a number of varying forms, a number of ways of working through what is to be worked through, without privileging any of them. When she writes about finding her own voice in the sixties, or about starting the experimental journal HOW(ever), she manages to convey her struggle at that time without damning The Oppressor. It's a difficult stance to take -- one which could easily be tarnished by watching the celebrated poets of the world preen in the adulation of the academy -- and it filled me with a kind of buoyant hope for where literature might yet be going.

In Il Cuore, Kathleen Fraser's lovely poetry centers around the Italian landscape and Italian art. Two things that are, by their very nature, already infused with poetry, Fraser elaborates on these themes and exposes their underlying beauty.

She writes: The letter A is a plow/Was A/where/you made and/unmade your mind.../first hesitation/when you doubted/what you/thought you/were/looking for?

A highly stylized tool for observing and uncovering the world, language, in Fraser's hands, becomes poems of imagistic precision that uncover beauty and our own response to it. The twenty-five years of work in Il Cuore are poems of a disjunctive and fragmentary structure that still manage to convey a feeling of wholeness and completeness. The author makes use of mathematical diagrams, the shapes and shadings of letters as well as lyric odes to fashion lovely skeletal poetry whose dense pockets of energy and blank spaces create a palette of Impressionism, much in the way Debussy did with music. One example is Tree: One did hear/the flow of nearby branches/shear occasional and limp/yet this rawness/moves, is/moving/even sudden atrophy/of limb.

Fraser, who lives part time in Italy, knows her subject matter well and, with few words, manages to convey all the differences between what's seen, what's felt, what's said and most of all, what's only perceived. In one of Giotto's Arena chapel frescoes, Fraser sees: a salmon length of brick the same/as Virgin's gown, angel feathers/salmon flesh and roe/lifting one swift arc. She is a poet with the talent to perceive perception: motion (less leaves) blue sky/inlaid their branching/lightness/pale rose breadth/of shade/through intervals.

"The New," Fraser says, "comes forward in its edges in order to be itself." The poems in Il Cuore, so filled with lyric skeletal beauty, create impressions with their silences as much as they do with their carefully-chosen words. These are truly poems that cut deep and remain.

"Kathleen Burke tells this tale as a memoir, and it is possible much of it is true...based on her personal experiences as a teacher and counselor...how much and exactly what we'll never know for sure. She is a good writer and will grab and hold you throughout. ...check her out. You won't be disappointed and most likely pleasantly surprised by her style and the quality of writing."