Cold Comfort (review)

Abstract

mythical and everyday events are melded to form the poetic history of a place the author knows well, her grandmother's Brasstown. Though most of the thirty-seven poems include a focus on women, perhaps the strongest are those that form two suites following a birth-marked man named Enoch from ill-starred conception through his unsettling influence as an embittered preacher. Incest and adultery, familial warrings and jealousy, fratricide and somnambulance are only a few of the human situations that are subject matter, while the simple, constrained routines of daily life and chores with the mountains as backdrop, reflect the Appalachian character of the setting. Powerful titles—"No Balm In Gilead," "Don't Send Me Off Like Some ThreeLegged Dog"—abound, as do fine and quotable lines: "the chilling press/ of Corn Creek's water even in the heat/ of August"; "She watches from the open door the man/ long-legged, tall and straight, his hair aflame/ like foxes"; and, from "Isaiah Treed," "The rough bark moves beneath his skin;/ leaves flicker toward his head like flames." —Bennie Lee Sinclair Anderson, Maggie. Cold Comfort. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 1986. Hardbound, $15.95; paperback, $7.95. Cold Comfort, Maggie Anderson's second book of poems, is, as the title suggests, a study in contrasts. Like her first book, Years That Answer (Harper/Colophon Books, 1980) and her chapbook, The Great Horned Owl (Icasus Press, 1979), Cold Comfort is beautifully crafted, rich, and thoughtful; but these poems are more intense , too, and the poet's sure handling of pentameter and hexameter matches the deeper reflection and the broader scope of more mature work. Here are poems to read and read again, to read aloud and to read with friends, poems to think about and to savour; these are poems to live with. Anderson has set out before us the irreconcilables that we all struggle to bring into balance—absence and presence, silence and speech, history and intimacy. She asks us to move with her through mostly autumnal, mostly Appalachian landscapes, to range in our thoughts from Waiden to Hiroshima, to ponder the oldest and the newest questions of survival, to turn our eyes from photographs and nostalgic images to the sharper, more precise, more intensely "real" pictures of memory and dream, thought and imagination. Above all, Anderson urges us to an awareness, she calls us to wake up to our kinship with all living things. The relationship of the artist to her material, that is, to the worlds we all, and we each, must or might inhabit, claims much of Maggie Anderson's attention in the poems of Cold Comfort. In "Palimpsest," the second poem in the collection, the central vision is in the subjunctive, an answer to the hypothetical question posed in the first line: "What if you were to live somewhere far from here?" Not randomly, the answer suggests Alliance, Ohio: "You might live there for years and talk only with friends./ You might die there and be buried on the only hill around,/ the hill that stands above the field of pumpkins in October/ like the protector of orange. You might become/ the protector of orange...." This possibility of a deep connection of alliance with the natural world, is a major energy in Cold Comfort. As often in the pages of CoW Comfort, the image reappears, picked up as if by another voice in a fugue, and we find pumpkins again, in a poem entitled "Art in 63 America": "Three of us, two poets and one painter" out at roadside stands, choosing pumpkins, "arguing a bit,/ ...saying how we think we might/ believe in the perfection/ of communities of artists,/ the common work among us./ What one of us does not get said,/ the others will." These are the final words of the central section of the book, "Dream Vegetables," a section that opened with "The Artist," a portrait of Patty Reed, a child survivor of the ill-fated Donner party. When rescued, Patty took with her from the snow-filled pass, in a satchel hidden from the "practical men" under her clothes, "...three things:/ a small glass saltcellar, her black-eyed doll,/ a...