REVIEW OF ‘THE BOOK I NEVER READ’BY BOBBI LURIE

Bobbi Lurie’s collection of poems entitled ‘The Book I Never Read’ is the winner of the 2003 Custom Words Edges Prize. In and through the more than thirty poems collected here, Lurie gives us a graphic picture of the present world where market reigns supreme and the human being is but a prime consumer. In fact, the title of the first poem, ‘Perusing the Fall Catalogue and Dreaming of a Better Life’ sums it up and would have set the tone for the reader if it had been used as the title of the collection. The very idea that the dream for a better life is based on the fall catalogue at once underlines the consumerist culture that devours other dreams and insists on what ‘a better life’ should be based on. Also, this poem being full of the colors and textures of rich clothes brings out the feminine sensibilities of the poet and appeals to other women who read it, by creating a fantasy of opulence, an unreal world of vivid and heavy colors. The last lines, ‘Still, I want the fall catalogue to change me/ standing as I am beside a tree turning yellow/ My Oversized Stitched Leather Bag in my hand/ filled with nothing/But want/, has a pathos all its own. The unfulfilled desires and yearnings of a woman in the impersonal settings of the modern life, expressed solely through the medium of a fall catalogue sets the standards of Lurie’s poetry wherein the needs of the poem and the poet merge in the images created of color and texture.
Other poems, like ‘Cocktail party’, January Sales’, Bedouin Market’, ‘Island Sonnet’ etc also reflect this tendency of the poet to sublimate feminine desires into a want for the tangible, while letting those unexpressed be compressed into the text so tightly that the poem itself is the ‘want’.
In some other poems this want becomes expressed as failures in the life lived now. As in ‘The Book I Never Read’, where it goes thus, ‘Life slips past me like a pages in a book I never read/ because between what I said and what I felt/ between what I wanted and what I did/ Is a gap, an emptiness/And something in me cries for this. This theme is continued in ‘Devolution’ wherein a dog chewing in the corner becomes the centre fold image while the people are pushed into the background. ‘Double Espresso’ depicts the picture of a morning beginning as ‘The day opened like a language poem/ My to-do list soaked in spilled coffee/ The sun a closed envelope of glare/ Against my profile staring into the refrigerator hum/ and ending in the next four lines in the futility of the mundane, be it love or language. One has to plunge into the depths and find some thing else that crosses the boundaries of the daily life and is spiritually enriched.
‘Against Romanticism’ is a long poem that juxtaposes a woman and her son as representatives of the romantic and the practical, based on their taste for films. The mother is obsessed by the role enacted by ’Charlotte Rampling in the movie ‘Under The Sand’ whereas its obsolete romanticism disgusts the son who has to rent a video of ‘Fight Club’, “to watch the mind split into pieces” to make up for the mushy sentimentalism he was forced to sit with. Here Lurie cleverly brings in a continuous commentary on the relationships of the present day, where single mothers are bossed over by their children playing on their helplessness and guilt.
Another pet pre-occupation of Lurie seems to be “Variations on the Theme of Loneliness’. Though the poem thus titled deals with the distractions of an autistic child, beautifully ending on the note ‘he leans against the chain link fence, presses his body against it as he watches cars pass, telling stories to the tree, laughing at the tree’s response’, others such as ‘The window fills with pain’, ‘Cacophony of Grief; Then Nothing’, ‘Unborn’, ‘In the Bleak Neighbourhood’, etc Lurie powerfully projects the pain of alienation, lovelessness and lack of commitment in today’s relationships. The 9/11 tragedy also has twisted the vision of the ordinary citizen; underlining the despair and sense of doom fallen on everyday life.
There is a set of poems that portray a sick mother ensconced in a hospital or sanatorium with a perceptible lack of memory and a failing of the senses ending with the last one, ‘My Mother, 79’ which goes thus, ‘my mother is/ the disappearing field/she walks across’. How the mother’s slow backing out from the discord of present day living affects the daughter’s grasp on it and the sense of aloneness she is made to feel is brought out effectively in these mother- daughter confrontations.
Lurie’s poems use words and images to create and recreate desolate worlds of self introspection and so have a way of revealing and at the same time denying the self. This is aptly brought out in the very short poem ‘Burning’. ‘The arms of the trees open wide/
We are here for such a short time/ Do not imagine this dream is yours. How better to translate the transient nature of love, life and dreams?

Sulochana Ram Mohan

Sulochana RamMohan, poet, short story writer, film critic and whatnot, enjoys debates and discussions on feminist issues and media representation of women. Has published two books in Malayalam, a short story collection entitled' 'Malakhamar kadakkan Bhayakkumbol' (meaning when angela fear to tread) and a novel, 'Ozhivukalasamagamangal'. For poetry she uses both the mediums, English and Malayalam, and is more interested in the interplay of these two languages than in writing serious poems. Settled in Thiruvananthapuram with husband, RamMohan, a Chartered Accountant. Permanent Address is "Mochanam", Eswaravilasom Jn, Vazhuthacaud, TVM-695014.