Lemon squeezers and lavatories at the loneliness carnival

Abstract

Lemon squeezers and lavatories at the loneliness carnival Gabriel Dunsmith Elizabeth Morton. This is your real name. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2019. 72 pp. $18.00. ISBN: 9781988531922 The dedication to This is your real name says it all: "For people who wait and people who are alone." In the New Zealand poet Elizabeth Morton's second collection, one encounters poems that mirror the experience of loneliness itself: fierce in their longing, spangled with compassion, and—in rare moments—suffused with beauty. In that way, these are prescient poems, presaging two years of global pandemic and anticipating the needling fears and heightened anxieties of life under quarantine. Simultaneously, like so many of us snared by swift isolation, these poems are not quite sure where to turn. A sense of mourning is palpable from the start, whether for a planet flooded by rising seas or a friend whose death leaves you "hurt[ing] to open your eyes" (10). In some poems, such as "After" (10), it is both. "Ice caps melted in my hands," Morton cries, amid scenes of random violence and unexpected tenderness, until arriving at the profoundly personal: "We talk about you, like you are here. Like you never left" (10). One kind of grief bleeds into another, and the reader gets the sense that we are less ourselves when we lose the people and places that anchor us. The same poem, too, showcases a smoldering anger at the way the world so often dismisses or even celebrates the very forces that sicken it and in so doing furthers its own destruction: "Somebody said/Maybe it's not happening and there was a standing ovation/as our outdoor furniture floated down the street" (10). Yet it is not all "pesticides and flotsam" here (14). Morton is also a poet of wry humor, as evinced by such titles as "I shed kilos reading Cioran in the mall" and "How I hate Pokémon but I can show restraint and just talk about my adolescence." (When the copyright page tells us that, in the latter poem, "one line has been taken from the internet and repurposed," one gets the sense that it is "Is that a Sudowoodo in your pocket, or are you/just happy to see me?" [38].) These poems let you glimpse Bill Cosby "before he was a rapist" (15; in "You can't, always") and "astral travel/with a flannel on [your] head" (44; in "fever"). You are at once in an idealized TV universe and in the wilds of your own imagination. There are no limits. Still, such wit is routinely offset by melancholy. In "On hold," a supermarket daydream of "Radiohead/on ukulele" quickly turns nightmarish: "I'm like/can't you see/bitch/I'm trying to/kill myself/in aisle five/but I'm too/dizzy/even to grab/a lemon squeezer/from the middle shelf" (12–13). This is the dark side of loneliness: surrounded by bright lights, "woks/and waffle irons," you become like the hens that laid the "battery eggs": caged, desperate, thinking of the only way you know to get out. Too often, these poems are perplexing in their grand sweep, favoring sensory details and outlandish imagery over the very vulnerability that Morton seems to crave—as if a cauldron of metaphors is somehow stronger than a single sip straight from the bottle of experience. In "Away we go," we get "egg powder and BO," "a blindfold and [End Page 305] earplugs," "loose batteries and roadmaps," and "a gas station/… lavatory" before finally, at the end of the second stanza, arriving at these lines: "I don't need a dog's bark to register the doorbell./I don't need your face to tell me how you went away" (45). Ah, there it is. This is a poem about loss. Here, and elsewhere, the reader is left wondering what it would look like if Morton tried to write into hardship instead of around it. Her poems would surely be richer for it. Yet we are redeemed when This is your real name drifts suddenly, and surprisingly, toward what can only be described as the mystical. In "Export" (59...