Book Review 2
鈥淧oetry with a Plot鈥�: a Review of Olive Senior鈥檚 Gardening in the Tropics
By J. Michael Dash
Originally published in Caribbean Week (16-19 August, 1994): 50
Gardening in the Tropics is a new book of poems by Olive Senior who is perhaps best known as a short story writer. The strength of these poems is related, curiously enough, to Senior鈥檚 skills as a short story writer. The short story hovers somewhere between the novel form and the prose poem. As much as any poem, it depends on surprise and occasional fantasy in order to achieve its effect. Nevertheless, it retains a plainness and an unexceptional form readily associated with prose.
Gardening in the Tropics has nothing to do with the usual trappings of poetic utterance. The muse, inspiration, catharsis and poetic vision are all quietly put aside for a subdued evocation of the ordinary, the familiar and the homely. This note is struck from the very first poem which invokes the gourd, a humble, dried out and not particularly beautiful container as an ideal form. Into this container words can be put like stones, bones, or beans. The poem-calabash can then be gently shaken in order to summon gods, heal the wounded or merely entertain.
It is a gourd-like plainness that dominates in these poems. The pitch is not confessional but conversational. 鈥淗urricane Story 1951鈥�, for example, is essentially a short story stripped down with a disturbing twist for a d茅noument. Perhaps the real meaning of the apparently predictable poem on Columbus, 鈥淢editation on Yellow鈥�, is that the reader should not, like Columbus, look for brilliant or flashy effects in these 鈥淣ew World鈥� poems. If you did, you too would be doomed to disappointment. In Senior鈥檚 world, the effects are secretive and fleeting like the gold of macca and weeds.
The strategic mutedness of Gardening in the Tropics suggests a kinship with other writers who have cultivated reticence, such as Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bishop. In the case of the latter, we sense a similar unflappable poise in Senior even when dealing with the most disturbing subjects. Senior also uses, like Bishop, a plain style even to the point of retaining full sentences in her verse. Her debt to Rhys is made explicit in the poem 鈥淢editation on Red鈥�. It is this writer鈥檚 hesitant perfectionism that attracts Senior. With Rhys she shares a feeling of doubt regarding the craft of writing which is never thought worthy. A clue to Senior鈥檚 own poetic sensibility can be discerned in the lines . . .
how cunningly
you masked
your pain
how carefully
you honed
your craft
how tightly
you held
your pen . . .
The masking, the perfectionism, the tension are everywhere present in these poems. While dealing with the turbulent Tropics, these poems are written from a distance. They betray the clarity and quiet sanity that can come from distance and solitude. This perspective is certainly suggested in the poem 鈥淏amboo鈥� with its reference to a view from 鈥渕y high window,鈥� perhaps, giving nod to Philip Larkin, also renowned for a studied mutedness in his poetry. This turning away from a direct venting of emotion does not, by any means, suggest that the reality being described is pleasant or bland. Senior鈥檚 travellers include deportees, stowaways, displaced persons and even Haitian boatpeople in her ironically entitled 鈥淐aribbean Basin Initiative鈥�. Her garden is as much a cemetery for brief lives as it is a longed for ideal or elusive refuge for runaway slaves.
As in all poetry dealing with landscape, the imaginative geography is not an end in itself but points to something beyond itself. It is the symbolic force of the tropical garden that forms the intellectual centre of this book of poems. This is not 痴辞濒迟补颈谤别鈥檚 garden where reason holds sway against the encroachment of the disorder of the bush. This is not a neatly ordered world where all is predictable but one where . . .
you鈥檒l find things that don鈥檛
belong together often intertwine
all mixed up in this amazing fecundity.
We grow as convoluted as the vine . . .
This is a garden where surprise is ever present and 鈥測ou never know what you鈥檒l turn up.鈥� Such surprises are not restricted to the world of plants. In 鈥淗urricane Story 1903鈥�, a sensay fowl and a leghorn rooster spend the night together during the terrible storm. The poem ends with the promise of a new possibility born out of turbulence. The poet hints at the creole reality of the Caribbean as the people of the region can be likened to 鈥渁 strange bird fated to be born out of that great storm.鈥�
This is a garden of metamorphosis, of creative and dynamic instability. One can say that Senior has moved away from Talking of Trees, the title of her first poems, to concentrate on more precarious and adventurous plants that devise ingenious ways of surviving. The mangrove and the bamboo are the clearest examples of this tenacity and adaptability. The mangrove is described as 鈥渙n the march, roots in the air, clinging tendrils anchoring themselves everywhere.鈥� Similar features are apparent in Senior鈥檚 evocation of the bamboo, valued for its resilience . . .
humbly bending
while secretly sending deep into
cliff or mire
roots that are grasping and strong
to spread . . .
With no unnecessary posturing, Senior quietly signals a movement from the old ideal of rootedness and belonging to a view of roots as branching in the air, of spreading rather than anchoring.
Perhaps, in Gardening in the Tropics, Senior marks a shift from the childlike narrator of her earlier work to that of the experienced gardener confident in her knowledge of things 鈥� whose 鈥渁dvice is never explain鈥� and whose ear allows her to 鈥渉ear poetry in unexpected places鈥�. Not surprisingly, the final Section is entitled 鈥淢测蝉迟别谤测鈥�, suggesting the Haitian Creole word myst猫re鈥攎eaning the gods of vaudou. The poems end with the sign of the crossroads as, indeed, the book began, with the sign of the cross in 鈥済ourd鈥�, suggesting god. Crossroads, crosses, crossings鈥攖hese ideas haunt this book of poems. They are all the more powerful because they seem to emerge naturally from the muted, colloquial and magical world of the tropical garden.