Marcia LeBeau
A Curious Hunger
Broadstone Books
Reviewer: Jeanne Julian
In A Curious Hunger, her first full-length collection, Marcia LeBeau often artfully shapes her poems around the unsaid, and that’s what tells the real stories. This is “a language of holes,” as she writes in “After Fagradalsfjall.”
The book is divided into four untitled sections, but a reader need not seek a rationale behind how the poems are organized. Instead, one is carried along by the freshness and honesty of LeBeau’s voice, her concise and compelling narratives, and her skill at melding form and meaning. It’s intriguing to flip through the book and note that the poems do not follow the same structure. “The Finding” is scattered and broken across two pages, in keeping with its subject of loss and trauma. The two “extra” lines in the third and final stanza of “Pianissimo” are like the two “miniature hospital bracelets” in the poem – those anonymous yet eloquent extras.
The opening poem, “If I Leave My Mind Before My Body,” is a love poem with no mention of either love or the beloved. Instead, the speaker offers a poignant catalogue of what to do should she be overtaken by dementia, also not specifically named. There’s a paradox here: the prospect of “unconnected words” described through words so gracefully connected. Carefully chosen details – a beautiful fusion of memories and visions – suggest life well lived, and an enviable partnership of affection and trust. The homely admonishment to “remind our boys / how I washed their oatmeal out of my hair” is juxtaposed with a dreamy fantasy of treatment by “a witch / doctor from the bayou who will lay me on a bed / of honeysuckle and pour tonic deep into my throat.”
Other poems also echo the resonance of the unsaid. “The Lost Yeses” are words “who long to tell you / what you want to hear, but can’t.” In “Pianissimo,” a child finds evidence of a sad secret hidden in her mother’s drawer. The child plays a waltz on her violin to stifle her silent realization. As suggested in the title of “What Can’t Be Learned from Cadavers,” a medical school autopsy can’t reveal the significance of a lost life: “Stiff fingers belie thousands // of scales articulated on viola strings.” We can learn the parts, but the story of the whole goes unsaid. How shallow are our forays into deep understanding: finally, LeBeau’s medical students leave the lab and, heading for a bar, “glance up at the teeming stars.”
That last line is just one among many finely crafted endings that effectively widen the scope and impact of LeBeau’s poems. The final line of “Toward the River” is packed, incorporating metaphors of dark and light, innocence and knowledge. The poem describes a mother’s naïveté about one of those all-too-familiar “family friends,” who coarsely attempts a sexual encounter with her teen daughter. The daughter later recalls how her mother used to click off the nightlight “to save us from seeing what was there, in case we woke up.” “After You Tell Me You and Your Wife Have ‘An Agreement’” ends with a curious twist on friendship, attraction, and fidelity. Memories of a love poem (“The Love Poem”) read by an old paramour seem to be consoling, until the last two lines: “He would be with her, / whether she wanted him or not.”
Yes, LeBeau’s poems provoke thought, wonder, and wistfulness. But they also offer humor and warmth, and are playful, leanings to be relished in our current climate of sociopolitical anxieties. LeBeau doesn’t ignore contemporary realities – “The Finding” deals with a child murdered on a football field – but she does counterbalance them. The first lines of the first poem, “If I Leave My Mind Before My Body,” made me smile, despite its implications: “Pretend my unconnected words are avant-garde / dialogue from a West Village play.” The title poem and “Just Add Water” riff on spoons and powdered food products, almost the way Jerry Seinfeld would, starting with the lines “I want to be as popular as a spoon” and “What exactly are powdered eggs?” Pop culture references are sprinkled throughout: references to The Big Lebowski, Gilligan’s Island, and a “Karen” give the book an all-American flippancy, even amid sobering subjects. New York City appears as a backdrop, sometimes comically, with the vision of a Macy’s Thanksgiving balloon going rogue (“This Ain’t No Mad Men Pencil-Skirt World”) and sometimes painfully, as when a young woman’s corpse is found in the East River.
That poem, “Three Weeks Later,” is part of a sequence about a woman mentoring a “teen mom.” Other aspects of womanhood are also explored, sensitively yet unsentimentally, including work, maternal and sisterly bonds, the emotional rollercoaster of hoping for pregnancy, and the graphic trials of new motherhood, as addressed in “The Survey”:
I just want to know how my reality has become
Tucks pads slapped down in underwear like slices
of bologna and a bra holding rock-hard porn-star tits
… and every two hours a gurgling stream
of milk shoots me awake.
“Training” (with two senses of that word) describes getting felt up by a smelly stranger on a subway. The grotesquerie of “he is running / his finger up the side of my thigh, light as meringue” contrasts so effectively with the clipped “I am ice … I tunnel inward.” LeBeau’s choice to use first person and present tense makes this account everywoman’s story.
A Curious Hunger serves up a smorgasbord of darkness and light, disappointments and pleasures, all seasoned with an intense awareness of life’s brevity. The concluding poem, “What I’ll Miss,” sums up sensory experiences that are the essence of life – what we’re hungry for and will miss (if possible!) when mortality catches up with us: “The tissue crinkle, / better than the gift.”
