Unmentionables.
By Beth Ann Fennelly.

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.

126 pages. $23.95 cloth.

Beth Ann Fennelly tells the truth straight and slant, too. Luckily for us, in her latest book she is willing to
do more than just mention the “unmentionables,” her deceptively light-hearted metaphor for what is underneath our various coverings of clothing, skin, or sod. This collection is stunning in its technical range and in its emotional complexity. She examines the relativity of memory, the genealogy of influence, the questionable authority of place, and the ruthless effects of biology on women and their art. She is tender without being sentimental; she puns, quips, quotes, and has the guts to stand at the graves of the fathers—Faulkner, Berryman, Yeats—saying “Save my spot.”

In “Souvenir,” she asks, “I wonder if we choose what we recall.” For Fennelly, memory is a deliberate possession, allowing her to see the danger in nostalgia, or “our bemused affection for our youthful cruelties.” Wryly examining her use of a girlhood “cow tipping” memory as a means of connecting with Southern storytellers, she recalls the protection of her innocence. “And no one ever harmed me” is the first lesson she offers to her listeners, who are looking for the assurance of a safe and homespun landscape. But the story takes another step as she sharply censures her childish flirtation with danger as a symptom of a nationalistic naiveté, an attitude that provokes murderous hatred in the world’s fanatics. She probes her pleasant but uncomfortable memory and finds a warning: we all eventually pay for our “youthful cruelties.” The poem immediately following, about discovering a lump in her breast the evening of a champagne celebration, has the same cautionary tone. While this lump proves harmless, Fennelly reminds us that a happy ending is not the end—beyond it is dark uncertainty.

Of the three well-defined sequences in the collection, “Berthe Morisot: Retrospective” is the most direct examination of the woman as artist. In the first poem, Morisot, who was an impressionist and a contemporary of Degas and Manet, speaks with
resigned control of her childhood memory of treading Proustian madeleines into her mother’s carpet while capturing sunlight in a pinhole pieced paper. In the final poem, Morisot describes the end of her life. Sick and old before her time, she examines “the crumbs of hours on the tea table, too many to brush away.” She turns “to reverie,” not to excuse any artistic blunders, but as an honest statement of what she has accomplished. Fennelly’s Berthe is very aware of her talent, and how the circumstance of her gender has blocked the complete validation of her work. She sees her friend and brother-in-law Edouard Manet as her equal and is appalled when, after her request for his professional opinion, he takes her brush from her hand and alters a painting of her mother, “Mama’s face now a stranger’s/ . . . Maneted into a glorious parody.”

After the birth of her only child, a daughter, she worries that she will fulfill the expectations of her mostly male artistic circle and drop her painting for motherhood. When she perseveres and paints within her new time constraints, she is praised for what appears to be a purposeful simplification of her style. She does not admit satisfaction in the praise, nor does she explain why the change has occurred: “(I do not say, I must paint rapidly)/ . . . (I do not say, I haven’t slept).” While she does not announce her artistic revelations, the change has happened—the baby is there—she can’t go back. She takes what she can from the experience and blends it with what she once was, just as she moistens and blends her paints with breast milk on a day when the inspiration is there, but water is not. Fennelly’s scrutiny of the effects of motherhood on her own art is a recurrent theme, most clearly expressed in the poems that detail how her children’s words can crowd out—or enhance—her own language. “Elegy for the Footie Pajamas” expresses the familiar surprise at how quickly children grow beyond babyhood. She recalls a game she and her daughter have played:

Mommy, I be the snake,
you be the dark. . . .
It’s been years but I haven’t
forgotten
Being the dark. It comes
right back. . . .

And in “The Mommy at the Zoo,” she voices her fear that maternity is sapping her store of words—limiting her ability to recall the exact term in which to compress a jumbled collection of less accurate language. Motherhood has changed her, and she hopes it has not negated that other self who confidently hoarded her word collection. While she hasn’t forgotten “being the dark . . ./ the word won’t answer . . . the word has slipped.” “The Mommy at the Zoo” ends with the doubt that her self before motherhood still exists:

if it’s true as they say

that I am now

that same she

the word I seek would come slithering

find a chink and wriggle in.

However, she overcomes her doubt in the following section, “The Kudzu Chronicles,” transforming memory’s snake into a persistent vine that can wriggle past any barrier.

In the brilliant sequence about Mississippi’s ubiquitous kudzu, Fennelly shows that like the Japanese vine, she’s a tough transplant. She finds power to cover, embrace, and, yes, control her new world, because she has been settled into the storied
South as a “belated cutting, here without my blights,/ without my pests, without the house or the histories/ or the headstones of my kin, here, a blank slate/ in this adopted cemetery.” As the local “blank slate,” although she embraces “the vernacular,” she also enjoys the benefits of the adventurer whose initial ignorance of the native customs allows her to say
what she feels. She describes being rebuffed by an elderly Mobile, Alabama, icon, a “sad sack doyenne” when she takes the woman at her word, rather than interpreting her ritual complaints as ploy for sympathy. The poem’s concluding retort, “Hey lady,/ where I’m from? They called me exuberant,” hits the target. Her straightforward liveliness, her honesty, and her refusal to back away from a landscape littered with literary idols are the elements that provoke her poetry. “Dancing with exhilaration” at the Neshoba County Fair, she exclaims, “I love Mississippi.” She is charmed by “kudzu tea, kudzu blossom jelly, kudzu vine wreaths,” the snaky vine converted into docile and beribboned merchandise. Later, when she tries to explain her affection for the trappings of the fair, her listeners don’t understand her present joy in a day when “nothing can go wrong.” She documents their question, “wasn’t that where the bodies of the civil rights activists were dumped?” acknowledging the ground’s violent and dark history, but she is not cowed (or tipped), because “like the kudzu [she’d] stroll away whistling,/ hands behind my back.” Fennelly’s the brave girl whistling past the graveyard— otherwise, how would she ever make it beyond the gate? She knows what’s underneath the dirt.

A final important theme in Unmentionables is the influence of the father. She asks, “How much can we fault our bad dead dads”? The answer is, as much as we choose to fault them, since we do choose what we recall. She says, “Again I step into the river that was my father,” implying that she can step backward when she is finished with the memory. As a result of this control, the images of her biological father’s laugh, his hidden bottles, and his slow suicide are sharp, but not maudlin. However, in this book her extended conversation is with John Berryman, a poetic father who inspired the third sequence, “Say You Waved: A Dream Cycle.” Recalling that Berryman waved as he jumped off a bridge to his death, she suspects his jaunty gesture was not for Paul, the invisible son he left behind. As much as she admires him, she knows Berryman “was copeless.”
Obviously, Fennelly is not, knowing she’d “better dump you soon,” because “too much time we’ve spent entwined” She is stronger than he was, and at the end of the cycle she puts him aside, rising and turning toward life, and the sound of her son’s laughter in the next room.

Fennelly’s poetry embraces and holds memory steady. The relentless and powerful progress of kudzu as it covers a  landscape’s broken ugliness is her image of healing and comfort. As she imagines her own final stone, she says fearlessly, “let the kudzu blanket me,/ for I always loved the heat,/ and let its hands rub out my name,/ for I always loved affection.” Don’t miss Beth Ann Fennelly’s most recent exuberant response to life and death.

BRIDGET PIESCHEL