in·ter·tex·tu·al·i·ty

Serpas, Martha.

The Dirty Side of the Storm.

Norton. 2006..c..96p.

ISBN 0-393-06266-X

$23.95,poetry.

“The Salvage”

Martha Serpas’ second work, The Dirty Side of the Storm, takes careful pleasure in the teasing out of mysteries and binaries; good and evil, life and death, destruction and construction, give way to the swirling, deeply gray, humane truth. Serpas, a devout Catholic, does not preach, but questions, finding these divisions to be imperceptible, incomprehensible, and untrue to suffering humanity. Her poetics achieve this original and honest grappling in the face of the clear legacies and boxed-up poetic movements to which her poetry may be superficially ascribed. Martha Serpas may be decried as a mystical poet, a nature poet, a Southern poet, a female poet, a religious poet, and (by default) a current events poet. Yet, none of these distinctions take into account the mastery of Serpas’ own desire to reach toward the incomprehensible, the shadowy in-betweens with which she is most intimate. The deeper she reaches into herself, and the topography of her life and location, the more we see into the muddied waters of our own life. What sustains us is also deadly, and the Divine is not a winged rescuer, but a figure as complex and paradoxical as His creation.

As a poet, Serpas stands powerfully upon her own gift of sound-work, pulsing and cyclical use of forms, and the originality and intimacy of her metaphoric landscape. Her base of a Catholic God and the Louisiana Bayou are not limitations on the scope of her work; rather, like any good poet, she uses what is at hand as a concrete base for transcendence. Her poetic landscape is focused by a steady hand, and self-consciously participates in traditional metaphors (chiefly, that of water), and formal traditions: couplets, tercets, quatrains, as well as episodic free-verse. Tracing the arch of the book as a whole, it is clear that the individual lyrics contain piece-meal narrative structure. But they are not so bound and ordered as to be a sequence. Rather, they constitute a shapely volume; many of the poems were published in literary journals individually.

The volume is haunting, in part because of its context. Serpas admits, in her acknowledgements, that “The origins of the poems in this volume preceded Hurricane Katrina’s landing in Plaquemines Parish on August 29, 2005, except ‘Poem Found,’ written in response to the subsequent levee breaches in New Orleans.” The book’s third lyric, “A Corollary,” begins with these chilling couplets: “Someone, you finally realize, has suffered/ your exact misfortune before you.// This one the steady vanishing/ of your birthplace before your eyes.” Serpas’ work centers on this startling universality: all that is forceful nature, metaphysical landscape, is definitively creative and destructive simultaneously.

The meta-image of this work is that of water, in the poem by that name, Serpas personifies the water as raping the landscape, “Intoxicating!// And then it is there, all gray length of it,// rich sex of it, it wants you so badly,/ it pounds at the door, let me take// your smallness, your jetties, your broad/ coasts, your loam[...]It is more certain than death or love./ It must have been conceived by death and love.”(20). This violence, stands alongside poems of coexistence, such as “Psalm at High Tide”: “water that glitters,/ water that hardly moves,/ its branches witness to trees,[...] the divine earth takes everything/ in its wounded side/ and gives back wholeness.”(44).

Serpas conscientiously rotates the forms of her poems; throughout, she alternates two or three poems in couplets, with a couple written in tercets. The couplets provide the tugging of binaries: God as distant witness, or salvation, water as life-source or rapist, etc. They tend toward overflowing, unrhymed and barely iambic lines of nine or ten syllables, such as in “Catching the Bridge.” Which, causes the substitution of extremely short, unpunctuated lines in the later poem, “Returning,” to draw extraordinary focus, ending with the line “Scale the wall. Get back in.,” this signifies the apex of destruction and the beginning of renewal in the book. “Returning” is followed by poems of normalcy, addressed to rituals, memories, repeated phrases, such as “Everything is Going to Be Alright.” In contrast to the couplet-poems, the poems of three-line stanzas feel tottering, overflowing; like the river itself, these lines breech the levees, the metaphorical, spiritual delineation between water and land, life and death. By placing couplet and tercet poems in alternation, Serpas shows again the way in which the destructive and nurturing roles of the river are cyclical. The floods repeat.

In fact, it is this meticulous sequencing, the mapping of creativity and destruction through the repeated metaphors of “ghost trees” (those bleached and killed by salt water, but not felled), and herons, birds which reappear as symbols of power, and the rejoining of things disrupted and torn apart, such as in the lines from “Fais Do-Do”: “A green heron pulls the sky behind it/ like a zipper. Sharp rows// of clouds fold into themselves, erasing/ the framed blue tide.”(29). The poems of restoration are not without symbols of destruction, which haunt the lines always, with the presence of unexpected and renewing rain (rather than ensuing flood from a hurricane), and a vision of “this river fixed with wooden weirs,/ radiant in misshapen glory.” from the poem “Psalm at High Tide,” one of the only free-verse poems of the volume. Interestingly, the second half of the book springs up quatrains from time to time, as though evenness is being restored, we are seeing the cyclical landscape from a place of higher understanding, broader scope. Similarly, Serpas’ use of assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, anaphora and the repetition of words builds throughout the volume. These are verbal, audible cues of the overall harmony and cyclicality of the Louisiana landscape, and existence, et al, in lines such as: “Regret rests well, like a dog that hogs the bed.”(”An Act of Mercy,” 69).

The volume’s final poem, “Found Poem,” was written in response to the breeching of the levees by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and is a retelling of the Christian creation story. Even here, Serpas’ God, like her Water, prove their dimensionality: “and God saw God’s own likeness in the shattered/ tiles and the sweltering heat and the polluted rain.// God saw everything and chose to make it good…”(87).