I’m beginning to think the chapbook might be just the right size for a book a poetry, enough to tug at something below the muscle before the arrow kills the reader dead. Maybe. But so many of these little books are built around themes, monotonous themes that bury themselves by the third or fourth poem. (I should mention that I love the idea of the focused, themed chapbook as much as I hate it.) Karen Rigby’s Savage Machinery, however, reads more like a mini-collection than a chapbook. I’m not sure how to tease out the distinction, but I think it has to do with range and resonance. (Note: I’ve recently come to the conclusion that nothing matters in poetry except its ability to punch the reader in the gut. It’s a sentimental idea, but maybe form and perfect word choice and pitch and line breaks, etc. etc. don’t matter so much as what the poem does to the reader. Maybe.) That said, the themed chapbook pretty often feels like a hammer on the head, the same hammer on the same head over and over, while a mini-collection, if the term exists, might be more interested in swirling around a cluster of connected ideas or images or whatevers to present poems that both resonate on their own and as a multifaceted but unified whole. The distinction doesn’t matter really, except to say that Rigby’s chapbook is complex and engaging and surprising in all the ways the best full-length collections are while also sustaining, even building, a central emotional resonance, a feature more common to the shorter form.
Flipping through Savage Machinery, my above assessment might be quickly disregarded. On the surface, Rigby’s collection can be divided into three separate parts: ekphrastic poems using paintings, photography and film as inspiration; food poems; and religious poems. That’s on the surface.
The book begins with the image of a woman “Bathing in the Burned House.” But it’s the perspective of the outsiders, those who pass by, envious and dreaming, that drives the poem, as evidenced by these middle lines:
Drivers touch the ceilings of their cars
when they pass. They think it’s lucky
water runs in a burned house.
Women envy her freedom.
Tease their husbands, saying church drives
and dry cleaning trips are white lies.
Maybe the neighborhood wives
take turns bathing yards
from the road, someone new each week.
Men linger at the curb. Breathe
Milled soap, long to be
the sky above the woman’s head.
The poem doesn’t end here. In fact, Rigby leaves us with infinite possibilities in this world in which “any miracle could surface,” even “Mary’s image graven in the road’s peeled tar.” The bathing woman is something of a ghost, an apparition. More importantly, she, like the Virgin Mary, is an ideal created by the onlookers. And the opening piece points to what’s to come in the collection: poems inhabited by shape shifters, illusive characters ready to challenge our understanding of who and what they are.
For example, the figure peering out the window of O’Keeffe’s Cebolla Church in Rigby’s poem of the same name might be “the sexton. A thief’ or perhaps “the soul itself/ gazing out of the Santo Niño church.” Sunset Boulevard’s murderess admits the false image she presents in “Nora Desmond Descending the Staircase as Salome,” explaining: “The script/ would have you believe grief muscled/ into me: asked for, and given/ the head of a saint.” Even Rigby’s onion, in “Song for the Onion,” is both a “lioness” and “the lily’s doppelgänger” with the ability to “telescope/ multiple selves.” And the poet urges readers to see the controversial image in the “Shroud of Turin” as “the body of someone/ you once loved: an arabesque/ of skin.”
Perhaps character is too strong a description for those who inhabit Rigby’s chapbook; her poems are hardly narrative. And still, these individuals illuminate the chapbook’s central thematic concerns through moments that feel as real as the worlds depicted in the photographs and paintings that inspired many of the poems.
At its core, Savage Machinery is an exploration of the anti-human and, more, the anti-humane. The autoerotic in “Photo of an Autoerotic” is described with “His face/ concealing his member,/ his thumb/ and forefinger/ hooking his head/ to his own lip like a snake charmer.” His image is as ominous as the serpent “snaking/ down a tree” in “The Story of Adam and Eve.” In the short series of food poems that begin the second half of the chapbook, Rigby’s “Borscht” is more than soup—it is bloody with history, the “crimson” beets “blood from the mink farms,/ hands riveting bolts/ to the gunwale of a ship./ Public beatings in Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar.”
These images stand in stark contrast to the time “before the savage machinery,” the time of innocence and creation so eloquently described in “The Story of Adam and Eve,” the first of the poems dealing with religion. According to Rigby, Eve “sprung from bone facing her husband,/ his body inside her, his body a wing/ in thickened amber.” The creation and the promise of procreation depicted here are gorgeous, pure. But Savage Machinery contains poems of the world after The Fall; it is the book the poet herself describes: “the book revealing/ what bereft means.”
Rigby teaches the reader exactly what bereft means, making us feel that we are “Edward Hopper’s Women” with “no face. No hands” and caught in “the window’s crosshairs,” marked for death much like the “faceless man, an X/ across his chest” in “Design for a Flying Machine.” But we are also the onlookers of “Bathing in the Burned House,” the dreamers who long for freedom and love, for moments, like the one in “Bread,” in which the speaker confesses: “The first time a man/ fed me bread, the pockets of air/ were shutters opening.”
(a note: this was written by guest reviewer Carrie Meadows, who last wrote about Cecily Parks’ Field Folly Snow)
