"The Haunted" and "Haunting" are the titles of two of the poems in Holly Day's powerful new collection, Ugly Girl. Indeed, this is the concept that drives this book, the recurrence of ghosts, memories that inhabit the mind, color the consciousness of the protagonists of these poems. ("What Keeps You Going": "All around you / is the end of the world, just beyond the darkness // of your eyelids... the things that will haunt you past death.")
"Crazy" and "dream" are words that likewise reappear consistently, as people and events from the past create unease, regret and even panic by their continual presence or their frequent recurrence in the speakers' lives. What is life, after all, but an accumulation of regrets, of coulda–woulda–shouldas?
The ugly girl in the title comes from the poem, "Reverberations," which begins:
Though children may outgrow, forget
cruelty of youth, I will not forget
the Ugly Girl, the ugly, horrible names
I've had, christened not by Mom and Dad but faces
whose names slip my mind but
stick in my mind.
Children can be horribly cruel, attacking like sharks at the first smell of blood, the first hint of vulnerability. The effect can be long-lasting, reverberating, indeed, down the years, coming back again and again in dreams, the humiliation and pain. She writes in the third stanza:
Though children bloom into cautious adults
and find new ways to express their hate, as adults
I find it hard to believe
they've banished the Ugly Girl from their dreams,
the names that jabber in my sleep.
Some events can haunt for a lifetime, the nightmares caused by killing, certainly, even when it is "legitimate," as in wartime. We've all become familiar with PTSD over the past dozen years of non-stop war. In "Boots XV," Holly Day writes about a soldier who is haunted by the image of the child he killed, his arms "around the waist of his mother's dress."
Most of the poems focus on very intimate situations: lovers, husbands, babies, children, the experiences of being a wife and a mother. "The Arrogant Imposter" is a weird, scarring poem from the point of view of a child (a grown woman remembering a scene from childhood) — her mother's lover coming to family dinner when her father is away. "Grandma and Grandpa at Home" deals with the moribund sex life of older people. "Grieving for a Lost Child" focuses on a husband and wife who've lost a child through miscarriage, the husband's resentments. "Disappointed" is about a husband who goes off the rails. ("Ten // years later, I'm sitting in court, telling / stories of how things went from bad to worse.") Over and over these poems conjure nightmares, baggy–eyed insomniac men and women disturbed by the horrific events life has thrown their way. ("Too many voices screaming in my / head..." she writes in the poem "Sunshine.")
Some of the poems are downright gothic. "The Last Note" begins:
If Houdini could not make it back
from the afterlife
to let his waiting wife know he'd crossed over
that there was a heaven
or that he was in hell
or nothing at all
then you should not expect to hear from me
after I'm gone.
"Midnight Caller":
At night the
the angry thud of the
dishwasher
sounds like monsters.
The groan
of the house quietly settling sounds like
prowlers.
I can almost see the deranged face
of my family's murderer pressed against
the glass
sliding doors.
But these poems are not without humor, as well. The grotesque always has its comic side. Think of Diane Arbus' photographs of freaks. Take the poem, "Love Stinks." ("Love" is in the title of three of Ugly Girl's poems and another word, like "dream" and "crazy," that recurs throughout.) Shaped like a parabola on the page, the lines lengthening as they approach the midway point and then getting symmetrically shorter (like a pregnant woman?) as the poem ends, "Love Stinks" is a surreal story of a disembodied hand crawling toward a woman and then between her legs as she sits on the bathroom floor "...in a / self-destructive / hypnotic stupor reflecting / on her lower-than-usual feelings / of self-worth..." A metaphor, of course, but she does ask herself, "Is this what it's like to be crazy?" And the poem ends:
There's gotta be a
moral around
here some—
where.
The moral is, to quote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Thus, to quote Day from the two poems we noted at the start of this review, "The Haunted": "I can't seem to get rid of your voice / constant in my ear..." And from "Haunting": "I close my eyes and pretend / that you're not it my / head..." "Our last conversation still floats through my dreams." Nuff said.
