House of Poured-Out Waters
Jane Mead
University of Illinois Press / April
2001
$14.95 / 114 pages / ISBN 0-252-06944-7
Violence in action movies is typically set
against a similarly violent background of
flashes, smoke, and explosions with accompanying
grunts and yells. This background violence
mediates the human and physical violence
that we watch unfold; we witness violence
in an ultraviolent, and therefore alien,
world. In House of Poured-Out Waters,
Jane Mead's latest collection of poems,
violence—both physical and mental—is
taken out of the fantastical, alien world
of action movies and brought chillingly,
quietly into a world that is much like the
one we move through daily. We watch the
narrator of these poems reexamine memories
of violence and—like the swallow in
the collection's first poem, "To Break
the Spell Is to Invite Chaos into the Universe"—make
a home from the mud and feathers.
In many of these poems, the memories the
speaker revisits are approached through
pastoral images or rivers and trees. Mead
uses a narrative about the collapse of a
tree, in "But What If, As Is,"
to question how we are brought into being.
She asks, "what if we really / aren't
the center of / our spectacularly uncentered
// universe but, rather, the tree, / the
sound of it falling is what calls us forth."
As the narrator waits for the tree to fall,
she imagines her life erased, and as she
imagines the tree falling, the crack of
the trunk becomes the memory of a report
from a .22:
and it takes me
back to the guns of my childhood—
and what if I want that to count,
that little crack, so that the memory
now, and therefore the childhood,
are called with me into existence,
meaning back into existence
As the trauma of the tree falling gives
existence to people in general, the trauma
associated with the memory of the guns gives
the narrator a focal point for her existence.
The narrator accepts these painful memories
and uses them as proof of her permanence.
Mead's longer pieces—such as "Several
Scenes in Search of the Same Explosion,"
"House of Poured-Out Waters,"
and "The Prairie as Valid Provider"—allow
her to create a nebula of repeating words
and images that spark with collisions. In
"House of Poured-Out Waters" the
narrator urgently tries to give the reader
some understanding of the suffering of victims
of child abuse, while at the same time seeking
to heal her own pain. Healing for the narrator,
however, is not a process of forgetting
as much as it is a process of remembering,
repeating, and passing on. She writes, "I
may be landing, / I may be taking off—
/ all I want is to / give you something
// before it happens, something / a person
could live by." The narrator's experiences
spin in and out among several other stories
of abuse, creating a picture of pervasive
suffering and trauma. While the healing
process is a violent catharsis, the narrator
does not ennoble this suffering. The title
of the poem is a translation of Bethesda—the
pool where Jesus healed a man who had been
sick for 38 years. Ultimately in this poem,
however, there is no miracle cure. The speaker
realizes "you do not destroy the ones
/ you hate, you only change them // into
something you can do / without, something
you think / you can do without." As
in "But What If, As Is," the suffering
and pain the narrator examines are an inseparable
part of her identity. In the end, she returns
to the story of abuse that begins the poem
and says of the victim "I / hand him
back now, and I // take him with me."
The shapes of these poems complement Mead's
spare, fragmented style. Generally, she
follows a regular stanza pattern, often
triplets and quatrains. She manipulates
the line breaks against these traditionally
lyric forms, however. In "The Animal
Messenger," she writes
of a chosen landscape,
purples and greens against
the tans and grays of fall
These short lines and lengthy sentences create a breathless pace
that amplifies the urgency of her subject.
The redemption found in House of Poured-Out Waters is not that
of erasure. The damage and pain of abuse are not pushed into a closet
in these poems. Instead, Mead transforms the violence into healing,
identity, and strength. The narrator of these poems is, as Mead writes,
healed "not with water / only, but with the water / and with
the blood." These are the poems of someone who has not just survived,
but someone who feels impelled to thrive.
