In previous collections, Jane Duran has explored aspects of her past and in this new book, American Sampler, she rediscovers and celebrates her roots in America, and particularly New England. Some poems are based on paintings and photographs and their immediate effect is to send the reader in search of these works, which are astonishing and confirm and expand understanding of the writing. In ‘John White’s Paintings of the New World’ she describes how ‘he painted the wife of the Timucuan/chief of Florida…carrying maize in her right hand/and a bowl of fruit in her left’. The last lines of the poem subtly create the perspective of the present through everything they do not say: ‘everything that would seem//welcoming and hospitable and gentle.’ This acknowledgement of wrong done, is echoed in ‘The Way We Look at You’, a poem which responds to the photograph of an Apache resistance group: ‘the way we look out at you/from a far place, from the wrong place.’ This is not simply liberal, post-colonial breast-beating but part of the larger project of the collection, which is to bring the past into the present through language and to create in the poem a place where past and present can coexist.
Twice the poet mentions ‘my boy’, presumably her son. Once a retelling of an underground railroad memory ends with a disconcerting juxtaposition of past and present:
...broken breath of a horse dragging the empty wagon home, stumbling whispers, my boy on your doorstep, shucking corn in the sun
In the final poem ‘my boy’ reappears, this time playing basketball in Central Park. The ‘vector’ of the collection leads ‘to this bench in Central Park’ and because it is a poem, the writer is able to stop time in a perfect moment:
My boy took a last shot at the basket – he did a layup with his left hand and the ball held still in the air – it stopped just higher than the hoop, slightly to one side, and stayed there permanently.
It could be said that the entire book is a gift of heritage to ‘my boy’, packaged through the art of poetry. The role of art in American experience, and perhaps especially in the colonial experience of New England, is one theme of the central long poem, ‘American Sampler’, a sequence which illuminates and gives coherence to the rest of the collection. There is an Emersonian dimension to this poem, as Hannah Snow, a thirteen-year-old girl, describes how she distils the natural world and the seasons into the art of her sampler. As she stitches, she reflects on her grief for her brother: ‘Nathan Snow was born February 12th 1804./Nathan Snow died August 19th 1806.’ This bleak summary is embroidered on the sampler, but her other concerns, even if they are not represented pictorially, are still present:
As I sew I hear a woodpecker at his bark. He is not in my sampler, but is the way I sew
She reflects on the passage of time around her, on her family, on the creatures of the wild and even on the disappeared but imagined native Americans; all find their way into her work:
and this linen with my imaginings borrows and restrains a course of light shattering among the birch trees.
She records her own passage towards womanhood, noting: ‘Under my woollen frock/my small breasts are growing’, lines I found slightly jarring, as they seem more likely to be the perception of an observer than the girl herself. Another quibble was the link to the present, which, although interesting, seemed forced:
Someone will brush this sampler almost with her fingers one day, to admire? To recognise, girl to girl, how we are one and the same? A timidity, but then a definite caress and connection, flesh and blood, and I flinch.
I also wish it had ended less conclusively. The poem is about so much more than the death of and grief for two-year-old Nathan; it seems a shame that it closes with such solid monosyllables and a final rhyme: ‘for his earth and time, for a place to be/near this house, this fence, this tree.’ The lines are skilful but somehow they seem to be the wrong lines, especially in a poem and a book where the past is intended to open into the present. Nevertheless, ‘American Sampler’ has both beauty and gravity and lends its weight to this very impressive collection.
Kathleen McPhilemy’s poetry collections include A Tented Peace (Katabasis, London 1995) and The Lion in the Forest (Katabasis, 2004).
Jane Duran. Enitharmon (London 2014). Pbk. 64 pages. £9.99.