Jane Duran’s latest collection, Graceline, is a quiet book.
The poet returns to her childhood in an attempt to place herself in her personal and wider history by returning to her childhood journey from New York to Valparaiso in Chile on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. The poems move from childhood to adulthood when, in the final section, the poet relocates herself in relation not only to the Chile of her youth but to her own child in the present day, ‘My boy picks up the black and red/ volcanic stones. He plays on the slopes.’ (Lago Todos Los Santos) Along the way, Duran not so much confronts but creeps up sideways on two of the major traumas of South America: the building of the Panama Canal and the Pinochet regime in Chile.
Many poems are concerned with our need to impose shape on the formlessness of experience. The image of a squared exercise book is used to convey the security of form as the poet reflects on her long sea journey:
Everyday we are somewhere new along the grid.
I am so beautifully contained here, as if nothing bad could ever happen to me. (Grid) The same thought is found in the title poem, Graceline , based on Max Ernst’s painting, The Sea, which is on the cover of the book. She describes how the artist ‘scraped away the recent white/and oatmeal oils//to show at last the older blues and blacks’ to make ‘a restless/ pattern over the sea’. Duran recognises the subjectivity of our attempts to give our lives significance: ‘The ship creates the illusion of a path.’ Despite this uncertainty, she also explores the responsibility of the individual to ‘those countries that raised [her]’ (Coastline). In Panama Canal she moves from her experience of travelling through the canal to a consideration of the suffering of the labourers who built it. She imagines one of them receiving a letter from home, from ‘somewhere else// with no terror, no yellow fever,/ no sliding mud, broken boots’ and recognises the cost of this triumph of engineering, ‘the human wanted to join up// the two oceans with weeping/ and wailing’.
Much of the volume is taken up by Duran’s attempt to reconcile her childhood experience of Chile with later political and historical events. The sequence Invisible Ink addresses the horrors of the Pinochet regime. In these songs of innocence and experience the poet revisits childhood memories in the light of adult knowledge. In Calampas She writes about the shanty towns: ‘we see them at first/and then don’t see or want to/ in the glare.’ However, her approach avoids sensationalism.
Only in the poem, Street, Santiago 1973, does she directly evoke violence, ‘his eye is already pierced,/ her mouth broken’. Here and elsewhere, she shows us that the potential for conflict was there long before Pinochet’s coup and that the wounds which were created are still contained in the present: ‘But then the concrete side of a stadium/ looms up where you did things/and saw things you don’t want to say/or spell out (today on an outing/ with your grandchildren…’ (Soldier) This notion of the past being implicit in the present pervades the whole collection. The past is the mountain landscape the poet carries within her, which ‘still measures [her] progress’ and which by the end of the collection has become part of her own physical being. In Tuna, (here, a name for the prickly pear, not the fish), the poet presents a visionary moment of identification with the landscape: ‘My feet and my hands can just touch/ the two ends of Chile…’ This ambivalent relationship is not pain-free: ‘I meet its fleeting rigour/ with numbness and a variable pain.’ The pain is part of that difficult process of going back and down in order to come back up to the present which is characteristic of serious writing. The penultimate poems are oblique celebrations of motherhood and the present, but the final poem is much less certain. It returns again to the theme of travel, of displacement and loss of identity: must this reverie be at first, this casting off of all I own – (The Room and The Road) The presiding metaphor of the journey across the unmappable sea returns as, like Ulysses, the poet sets out once more, rejecting the possibility of any final homecoming. These poems do not need to shout; they have an unsettling power, which is all the more effective in its understatement. This strong and coherent collection seals Duran’s status as a significant contemporary poet.
Kathleen McPhilemy teaches English at Oxford FE College. Her latest poetry collection is The Lion in the Forest (Katabasis, London 2004)