<div class="line">Trying to speak, they are like the machine</div>
<div class="line">built for an opera—girders of steel</div>
<div class="line">and more than ninety thousand pounds of steel-</div>
<div class="line">on-steel, two towers on which planks machine</div>
<div class="line">thanks to hydraulics and redundant breaks,</div>
<div class="line">the whole contraption slowly grinding to</div>
<div class="line">a stop or winding up, between the two</div>
<div class="line">of them an axis just about to break.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Against this wall of metal can be screened</div>
<div class="line">all kinds of scenes. Night. Rivers of light.</div>
<div class="line">A pair of giant hands that bridge the air.</div>
<div class="line">Marriage, it seems, is a great blank screen.</div>
<div class="line">And what’s projected there—a ring, twilight</div>
<div class="line">of the gods—can barely fill the empty air.</div>


And Have I Loved You?

In a Black Tank Top

The Valhalla Machine

<p><em>Review by Kristin Berkey-Abbott<img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/dubrowfever.jpg" alt="From the Fever-World" align="right" /></em></p>
<p><small>Washington Writers’ Publishing House<br />
P.O. Box 15271<br />
Washington, D.C. 20003)<br />
ISBN 0-931846-91-9<br />
2009, 68 pp., $15.00<br />
www.washingtonwriters.org </small></p>
<p>We are living in a golden age of persona poems. Poets have always experimented with this form, which allows them to explore other characters, but rarely have we seen so many poets doing it so well. We have poets speaking in the voices of characters from fairy tales, from history, from myth, from religious traditions&#8211;and then there’s the more challenging feat of creating a persona from scratch, completely from the poet’s imagination.</p>
<p>Even during this golden age of persona poems, we rarely see a poet create a whole volume in the voice of one character&#8211;it takes a lot of talent to create a character so interesting that the character can sustain a whole book. Jehanne Dubrow pulls off this feat magnificently in her book <em>From the Fever-World</em>.</p>
<p>This book follows a narrative arc that depicts the life of Ida, a female poet living in Eastern Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. The book contains a translator’s note at the end, which reads: “After so many years spent in her company, I feel certain that Ida Lewin (or someone like her) existed in the imaginary Polish town of AlwaysWinter.” After reading <em>From the Fever-World</em> several times, I, too, feel like I have been in the company of a real presence, even if an imaginary one.</p>
<p>Dubrow covers much thematic ground with these poems. <em>From the Fever-World</em> shows a span of a woman’s life, from childhood to courtship to the early years of a marriage through motherhood and all the losses in between. Dubrow’s poems, all utilizing the first person voice, help us understand the happiness and the agony that come into one woman’s life, in part because she is a woman.</p>
<p>[In a Woman’s Life]* serves as an overture to the whole volume, although it comes near the end of the book. The poem shows a woman as a creative force in several areas: as a poet, as a baker of cakes, as a wife. Her work in her house takes on a sacramental quality. In these lines, Dubrow makes clear that women’s work is as valuable as any done by men:</p>
<blockquote><p>She is the psalmist David<br />
in her chores (sing hallelujah<br />
to the cotton sheets that flap<br />
the wind like pages of an open book)</p></blockquote>
<p>I love this view of housework as hymn, as song of praise, as hallelujah. I love the word play in cotton sheets (the sheets we sleep on, the sheets we write on).</p>
<p>Throughout the book, we see the imaginary poet using metaphors from writing and academic study to explore her life as a woman. Early in her marriage, she begs, “let him be / a scholar and I the text” ([To Be Studied, the Way]). There’s a physicality in these poems, whether Dubrow explores what it means to be a young wife or what it means to lose a child or what it’s like to be extremely sick. The body betrays us in so many ways at the same time we find joy&#8211;and these poems don’t shy away from those truths.</p>
<p>Through the life of this imaginary woman in an imaginary town in Poland, Dubrow also explores Judaism. Many of the poems revolve around Jewish holidays and rituals and the ways they were celebrated and observed in Eastern Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of the images and symbols come from Jewish life, at least Jewish life as it was lived a century ago. Yet even though some of these practices are alien to me, the emotions explored in the poems are universal.</p>
<p>I’m impressed with Dubrow’s ability to depict a world both imaginary and long gone, and yet to infuse these poems with such universal concerns that the poems should appeal to a wide range of readers. So, even if you’re not a woman, even if you’re not Jewish, even if you’re living in a different part of the world, make some time to spend with these poems. You’ll see your own world with different eyes after you do.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><small>*The poems in <em>From the Fever-World</em> have no titles. I’m following the model that Dubrow gives in the Acknowledgements section.</small></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
</blockquote>


Think of the Children!

from A Conversation with B.H. Fairchild

FROM THE FEVER-WORLD

<p class="author"><em style="font-size: revert; color: initial; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;">“New Steelworks,” the Socialist</em></p>
<p class="epil"><em>Realist city developed in the 1950s<br />
outside Kraków, Poland</em></p>
<p>In the model city, nothing seems to work, not the winch, the derrick, the coaldust men, not the foreman shouting <em>Get up, boys, go work</em>.</p>
<p>Our philosophy was made to work—chug chug the sleek machine, the chiseled men of the model city. Everything seemed to work</p>
<p>at first. Remember how the children worked at doing sums? The wives at pleasing men? The foreman shouting <em>Get up, boys, go work?</em></p>
<p>Even the sun was busy with its work of shining gold on all the marble men. Now in the model city, nothing seems to work.</p>
<p>The brick is crumbling, and the stonework turns to powder under hand. The men ignore the foreman who’s shouting <em>work,</em></p>
<p><em>you cogwheels, work.</em> Goddamn this heavy work we bang our heads against. Goddamn the men, the model city, where nothing comes of work. To hell the foreman shouting <em>workworkwork</em>.</p>


Last Words of Encouragement…

The Concerto I Composed…

Nowa Huta

<div class="line">Sometimes we were illegal dollar bills.</div>
<div class="line">We were the three-hour line for bread,</div>
<div class="line">the last pair of pantyhose in the shop,</div>
<div class="line">the hard potato. Or else, we were the town</div>
<div class="line">of industry where all machines had stopped,</div>
<div class="line">the stalled assembly line, the pneumatic drills.</div>
<div class="line">We were the wiretap, the rumor spread</div>
<div class="line">from room to room. We were the State crackdown.</div>
<div class="line">And yes, we were the act of making do—</div>
<div class="line">a soup of water, salt, a chicken bone.</div>
<div class="line">We were the vodka swigged against the chill,</div>
<div class="line">and the sad folk song that every soldier knew,</div>
<div class="line">and the ribbon in the yellow hair, and the stone</div>
<div class="line">that marked the fallen bodies on the hill.</div><p></p>

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June 22, 2010The Cold War, A RomanceJehanne Dubrow

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June 22, 2010The Cold War, A RomanceJehanne Dubrow

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