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Roy Seeger, Third Coast, Fall 2003 "Tale," the first poem in Kathleen McGookey's Whatever Shines, begins: "I will not begin, Once there was a man who loved me." This strong line sets the stage for a collection of poetry that, by dismantling romantic preconceptions, examines our daily need to believe in fate. McGookey examines the historical sources of these preconceptions and redefines them, as in "Christmas 1960," in an attempt to "Shape the language into sentences she could live with." While she re-forms the language for herself, McGookey may address society's ability to perpetuate gender roles and expectations, but she never settles for them. It is the self reflection in her poetry that gives even her romantic and sentimental gestures poignancy. McGookey's poems appear, at first glance, to rely upon standard interpretations of standard symbols: a swan is a symbol for lasting love, a wedding ring means happily ever after, and so on. McGookey, however, acknowledges these cultural myths and symbols without resorting to cynicism or wallowing in post-modern angst. It is through her attention to detail and her powers of self-examination that she is able to peel away the false layers, the pretty layers, to examine their interior workings. This constant struggle for change and redefinition is evident in "Swans." The speaker writes, "I can't think of any substance I'd like transformed, straw into gold. But/ maybe that. Maybe myself slowly and secretly into a swan, for leaving." Readers can't help assigning romantic connotations to the swan: beauty, purity, monogamy. But if turning into a swan is an evocation of fidelity, it is a bittersweet one, as McGookey looks past the romantic trope, and the potential for loneliness, to suggest, against social convention, that we might even desire this leaving. In the middle of "Hands and Cameras" the speaker confesses, "I am/ being honest; remember, I like you," just before she examines her great-aunt Glady's photograph of women spilling over the caboose rail of a train, looking for husbands: "Girls smile and smile and silently add up their weights in journals, neat rows of numbers, their burden on the world." In these few lines McGookey makes connections between the cultural pressure on women to marry for a sense of identity, and very contemporary concerns among women about anorexia, bulimia, and distorted body image. McGookey acknowledges our cultural tendency to reduce women to a number, a measurement, a weight, bur she does it so candidly and precisely that she does not lose her intimacy with readers. In "September, Miner Lake," she confesses her desire to be tricked by romance: 'I’d like a love letter and too much light in my eyes. But I know better. “ It is this conflict between ideal and real worlds that makes McGookey's collection so intellectually and emotionally complex. Under her observation, weddings become microcosms of learned behavior and breeding grounds of mismatched destiny. In "Three Weddings in October," the speaker says the bride's bouquet "stains/ me; it bounces near me, it lands near my name." Thus McGookey tersely acknowledges the relationship between name and that historical sense of identity that many women lose through their marital name change. That the bouquet is bouncing pokes fun at the arbitrary movements and actions which we interpret as destiny. In McGookey's poetry, destiny constantly fails to comply with our own notions of what fate should deal us. In "Logansport River Story," she tells readers, "The wrong girl drowned, the wrong girl was saved." However, McGookey is able to find the beauty in this failure of the cosmic judiciary system, in the failure of "Altars and doves and a dumb hope carved! on the lost ring, a dumb hope in her chest rising." The beauty in these poems resides in this dumb hope, in struggling with the juxtaposition of marriage and disaster and loneliness, in the universality of suffering. In her examination of suffering, McGookey avoids the overly intimate mode of pure confession, bur neither does she lapse into sentimentality. By finding the images in emotional events, she devises a complex physical as well as psychological landscape that aces to both complicate and redefine our existing beliefs. McGookey nor only shows us that the human condition is to suffer loneliness and despair, but also that there is a beauty in this suffering if we are able to step outside of ourselves and see it. Although our lives are "too little to speak of," they are worthwhile in the derails, and in the small moments of the day we spend considering them. Roy Seeger received his MA in poetry from Ohio University and is currently in the MFA program at Western Michigan University, where he is an assistant poetry editor for Third Coast. |
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