Bone Pagoda

Susan Tichy

Reviews of the book.

 

“The book, which takes its title from an ossuary at the Vietnamese-Cambodian border containing the remains of 3,000 people massacred by the Khmer Rouge in 1978, is also an elegy to Tichy’s late husband, a Vietnam vet who served in the Mekong Delta. Tichy has written that a reader should be able to feel the bumps and rough places in a poem, where ‘one piece of language meets another, where texture and temperature change.’ She succeeds in this pursuit by ‘mutter mutter toil and stutter,’ as she writes in one poem.

“This stuttering and muttering, the associative bumps from voice to voice, the unexpected rhymes and off rhymes imbue the poems with a tone that is archaically contemporary, if that makes sense. You hear and see echoes of the Scottish ballads that informed her childhood ear. But the images and associations are contemporary. Here’s an excerpt from the poem, ‘Desk and Chair.’

“O the cover of night is a wonderful thing
Jiggery-pokery preterit shebeen

My precious collection of English words
‘Till the bridge brak and we fell in the mire’

Cryptograms and all known plants
What happened that day and to whom it happened

What happened that day and to whom it happened
A rocket went through his neck

Handbook of omens, melos, love
Sliced in half like a flatfish

Sliced in half consummated
But not on the last page”

—from the review by Pamela Hart at Galatea Resurrects

 

“The last line [the ‘Absolute violence of our language’] appears in the final, title poem, which begins with a line from Robert Browning and ends with Emily Dickinson; the ‘He’ and ‘She’ that mark four of its five sections (with a section significantly titled and addressed to ‘Gaze’ interrupting) suggest not so much the poet and her husband as the presence of male poets such as Donne and Hopkins on the one hand, and on the other Emily Dickinson, who is both quoted and (in the word from ‘Street’) ‘disjuncted’ in the book’s final stanzas, which also reprise the line from ‘Desk and Chair’:

O dear collection of English words
Expended to accommodate

From Slack to Slave on a single page
‘War seems to me an oblique place’

Made Flesh
And tremblingly

In a book so filled with wounded flesh, the juxtaposition of the line about war and the line that follows is startling and disturbing, like so much that precedes it. But the beauty of language, reflected partly in the rhythms, rhymes and near-rhymes, as well as in the glimpses of poetry of the past and images of present Vietnam, also permeates Bone Pagoda. In the haunting Dickinsonian lines, and in the book itself, it is partly the ‘oblique place’ of war that is ‘Made flesh / And tremblingly’; but it is also the ‘dear collection of English words’—a collection that must include the profoundly disturbing yet wonderfully made place that is Susan Tichy's book.” —from the review by Martha Collins in Field

 

“What I encountered with Susan Tichy’s two part collection, Bone Pagoda, was page after page of pirouetting lines and phrases, collaged from a spectrum of documentary and anecdotal sources that lent the collection expansive, intelligent and, in many ways, playfully crafted qualities. . . . It’s about the process of writing and the use of language. . . . It’s about loyalty and exposure. It's about humanity and inhumanity. It’s about individual struggle and collective responsibility. It’s about the personal and public.

“It’s really about everything.

“Yet, it’s much more than being about anything. It’s a journey through rhythms that mesmerise, language that blinds and emotions that are real and raw. It’s pure poetry.

And my Willy Peter burns to the bone he

Sticks like shit to a blanket is
What they say they say as they

Descend the planes
Almost low enough to see my

Aine William sweet and true
My Willy sweet my only sweet and

True Willy true Willy my my-my my
Sweet my true my sweet my true

Distended and dis sended you
To baseness, yeah to business
[from ‘Persephone’]

Cat in a cage dying
Monkey in a cage dying

Toy jeeps toy tanks toy trees toy planes
And one shoots down the other
[from ‘Desk and Chair’]

Midnight at a desk
Where poems turn unbeseemingly

Traditional, traditionally
They say that art consoles.
[from ‘Versari’]

“It’s one woman’s survival plan laid bare, but so much more than simple catharsis. It’s a response to the irony of having endured, shared and emerged, only then to have tragically lost.” —from the review by John Mingay (© 2007, “From Thrilling to Thrilled”) in Stride Magazine (read the entire review here).

 

 “Strong poems about war often come decades after wars end, when poets have finally wrestled from their psyches a way to speak of their experience and when history has provided its perspectives. Bone Pagoda is a collection of such poems. . . .  Twisting from self-reflective composition to reportage to eloquent sarcasm to literary allusion, the poet grapples with the unwitting collusion of poets, including herself, in the imperialist enterprise, in the erotics of violence. . . . Tichy’s reading of world literature becomes one of her strategies for conveying ‘the true size of the 20th century and the vast, shifting nature of political insight in poetry.’ In section after section of this poem she insistently and bitterly challenges herself and other poets to watch, to see with ‘an outward soul’ so that we ‘get it right.’ I know no other poetry so rigorous in disciplining its language, its syntax, its very music to honor ‘the first and final location of every war: the body.’” —from the review by Marion Stocking in Beloit Poetry Journal.

 

“[Tichy] explores the stark and horrifying realities of war and its aftermath through a fierce lyricism, an insistent and bodily music that urges the reader to say these poems aloud.

“It is impossible not to read Bone Pagoda as both a poetic/personal/historical narrative and, while the US government wages another distant war, as a reminder that we are inevitably implicated in atrocities committed on our behalf. There can be no doubt at all, this book tells us, about the complex, lasting, devastating affect of American occupation on both the occupied and the occupiers; through obvious social, political, and economic links and through subtle, lasting marks in our imaginations, the two, in fact, become inextricably linked. In Bone Pagoda, Susan Tichy transforms the heroic war story, a ‘genre devoted to praise or blame,’ and re-presents as an assembly of fragments, becoming a ‘Museum devoted to catalogue / To fracture.’ The manipulated linear narrative of history books and of the day’s news reports are inadequate, false, flawed, incomplete, the poet reminds us: “The glass case is not very clean / Lean closer.’” —from the review by Nancy Kuhl in Rain Taxi Online (read the entire review here).