Rosa Lane
Called Back
Tupelo Press
Reviewer: Frank Paino
If you’re anything like me, your introduction to Emily Dickinson came when you were still in grade school, and included “facts” about the poet’s life which painted her as a reclusive spinster whose failed heterosexual romances drove her to self-imposed imprisonment in her Amherst, Massachusetts bedroom – days spent, tight-laced, at a dimly lit desk where she penned cryptic poems.
This drab portrait of quiet misery hardly endeared me to Dickinson and her poetry. My curiosity about her work was, at best, minimal. I was familiar with her “greatest hits,” but that was as far as my interest and familiarity went.
All that changed when I learned that Rosa Lane, a poet whose work I very much admire, had written a new collection (her fourth), which presented alternative perspectives that would turn long-held beliefs about Dickinson and her work on their head.
Scrupulously researched over a five-year period, and initially not intended for public consumption, Called Back, the last two words Dickinson wrote, is the fruit of Lane’s long labor. The book gifts us, as readers, with a revealing portrait of Dickinson sans the tedious tropes to which we are accustomed.
Here is a collection of lyric persona poems wherein Lane undertakes a kind of literary neurosurgery on Dickinson’s poetry and letters during which she manages to take the top off Dickinson’s head and meld her own mind and muse to that of the 19th century poet. The result is not a newly-imagined, but rather a newly-understood Dickinson, whose otherness, had it been revealed (as queer, nonbinary, or, one might even convincingly argue, transgender) would have positioned her for ostracization and even legal consequences.
Perhaps Dickinson chose to write of her love for longtime friend, and later sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, in code that included references to her female paramour as: pearl, rose, Eden, Eve, Cleopatra, Vesuvius, etc., thus cleverly avoiding, per Lane’s lines, “the preacher’s monocle / scanning / for deviants all day.”
Employing language at times as enigmatic as that of her subject, Lane’s integration with and assimilation of Dickinson’s world are seamless. One might easily believe these poems were written in conversation with Emily herself. Indeed, on more than one occasion I had the sneaking suspicion that, like Merrill with The Changing Light at Sandover, Lane had used a Ouija board to channel Dickinson who, for her part, rewarded that bold pursuit by writing these forty-one exquisite poems, using Lane as her willing, and oh-so-capable, vessel.
Lane’s ear is among the most finely tuned in contemporary poetry, rendering Called Back a collection that possesses a wildly alluring music that is smart and sexy. It’s an erotic hymnal where flesh becomes both vehicle for pleasure and object of praise.
Take, for example, Lane’s “French Sardines,” where even the act of opening the tin, “the lid / of hunger’s fulcrum” foreshadows the delicious eroticism of the poem’s final stanzas:
Nights
behind each pearly eye, we swim
up the fish weir, we
spawn
in sandy silt along the odic
thighs of the Loire, we flutter
our little deaths.
You might also turn to these lines from “For Eve at the Evergreens:”
I hunt
your cloven path by way of lava heat
fevered in that trough between couplets
our breasts pique
ash — choking Vesuvian.
Then, too, there is “Clothesline,” where we observe the lovers’ washed nightgowns, pinned in the breeze, flying openly side by side as they “swell … frantic for embodiment.”
Or, as Lane expresses in “Dear Sir, No. 1” even more blatantly: “She comes with scent from her tuft / tortures me with musk.”
The lyric splendor of Called Back is inarguable. Here, excerpted from various poems, I offer a mere handful of what is gloriously overwhelming:
… bliss-blued drunk.
A wolf’s ravish.
Dusk releases Poet’s Jasmine / in its Persian summer.
… hexed / with the ambered fever / of bees honeycombed …
My sparrows wing / ahead with no care / for the blues left / in their tailwinds.
Among the most startling and refreshing aspects of Called Back is Lane’s treatment of Dickinson’s gender fluidity. Lane’s foray into this aspect of the poet’s identification is richly supported by Dickinson’s frequent allusions to herself in masculine terms, signing off her letters as “Brother Emily” or referring to herself as “the bearded pronoun” or, in her poems, the gender-switching of the I-speaker; i.e., to her “boyhood” or calling herself a “prince” or an “Earl.”
Taking this line of thought a step further, one might even feel positioned to argue that Dickinson felt herself imprisoned in a body that did not conform to her own self-image, though it might also have been the case she merely longed for a masculine form in order that her love for Susan not be deemed anathema. Regardless, it’s exceptionally compelling and brave that Dickinson made these exclamatory demands through her I-speaker in poem 1737 (Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson):
Amputate my freckled Bosom!
Make me bearded like a man!
These two provocative lines of Dickinson serve as the epigraph to Lane’s poem, “Paire de corps,” that embellishes and givies further voice to this ghostly Dickinson I-speaker. Lane propones breasts as “oddments” that “speak a primal language not mine … I want nothing of them,” she declares. And, later:
I am my beard, edged
along the jaw — tinted curls free-
fall, re-pronouned — plumed and prow.
Most wonderfully and explicitly, this gender fluidity is expressed in “Dear Divers, my Fellow Men—,” where Lane plays with Dickinson’s reference to men privileged by gender to dive for pearls. Clearly, there is an erotic element to this idea as well, including, most obviously, the metaphoric act of “diving” and the clitoris as a “pearl.”
… but I, her bearded bride-
groom, roll that pearl
between fingers, take
my ungiven right of way. The boy
of me riddled inside
Eden. Your bounty
hunters case the wrong field. Come
to my phantom
mead. I am here
in Sappho’s asphodels. See me?
Leontodon standing
there, the Earl
ruling on one tubular leg, my puffed
cowl aged white,
ready to blow my pistil and seed.
Conversely, however, there is a rejection of masculine intrusion into the world the two have constructed where role playing, be it as Antony and Cleopatra, Adam and Eve, or Romeo and Juliet, is summed up in the closing couplets of “For Eve at the Evergreens:”
Our sapphic love disallowed
by blueprint. You dissever. I belly-lock
& refuse to pass
the key to the inevitable buck
browsing our hungry fence
at dusk. Indelible, I marry my writing
table, give it my whole hand.
Other laudable aspects of Called Back come in the form of thoughtful enjambment, exquisite diction, and, always, attention to the lyric aspects of the work, which make Lane’s poems sing in a manner I only half-hyperbolically describe as angelic.
In Called Back, Lane successfully sounds the depths of Dickinson, one of the greatest American poets, who, while destined to remain inscrutable, is rendered more human, complex, and fascinating than the dreary history heretofore assigned her. By turns enigmatic and ineffable, this tour de force should be required reading for Dickinson scholars as well as anyone interested in the intersection of poetry, gender, and queer studies.
