The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

discuss frustrated attempts to discover the
source of violence, particularly of violence
in words. The authorial voices occasionally
speak undertones of WASP mea culpa as
both women write about language and
identity, power and self-esteem, individual
voice and confusion, balance and endurance,
in families and in larger social structures.
Without a self-conscious awareness of language,
"without the necessary cool edge to
the voice," says Murphy, "you lose your
objective understanding of the full range of
human degradation and cruelty and even
its counterpoint in the beauty of it all."
Murphy's prose is visual, full of color,
light, heat. Her voices, partially self-directed,
make complaints against wrongs perpetrated
by and against faceless far-away people.
Brandt's strongest images are tactile
and aural; physical ecstasy speaks through
masks of small silences so that her poems
are quiet, warm, intimate, her voice personal
and reassuringly sympathetic and
nurturing. Brandt writes close to home; she
addresses herself to daughters and friends,
to first-named people. She choreographs
for her readers and subjects an involuntary
but agreeable separation — what mothers
call "letting go."
Mother love, pride, sex, unanswerable
questions, subversiveness and subservience
step through Mother, not mother in heartbeat
couplets with an occasional skip like
caught breath. Punctuation is elegant and
mannerly; ampersands and lower case letters
speak both rebellion and humility.
Brandt's soft familiar rhythms settle readers
into intimacy. But a sweep of present participles
scrim the revelations of the mothernot-mother
interchange and maintain a
dignified measure of authorial privacy. The
collection reads like autobiography, yet
Brandt throws her voice into the third person,
tosses it to second, occasionally back
to first. Talking sometimes to herself, sometimes
to yesterday's "dear reader," she
addresses the problem of identifying one's
selves, simultaneously, by individual
essence and by place in the family.
Few poems in Mother, not mother complete
a sentence. The opening poem muses,
"why she can't put down simply, / i am the
mother, / & leave it like that," the thought
bitten off and the last line thrown away like
wadded paper. The poem "The time i didn't
know" is a long introductory phrase
with the unpredicated i covertly confessing
to pre-mourning of the self and of the self's
child. Brandt insists on generations of
recurring not-mother/mother/not-mother
images — on continuity: a new mother
wants to be held by "a woman ... / crooning
/ a child's lullaby."
Erin Mouré found mutually sustaining
opposites burning passionately in Brandt's
Agnes in the Sky, they burn again in Mother,
not mother, women, devour, subsume, or
sustain as they circle one another, the
hearth, and the altar. Mothering is dramatic
conflict, a self-destructive generative
drive: "your hands won't let them go," even
though they "slit open your belly, trampled
/ your sheets, / wanting to be gone." Failure
to transform the earth must be the mother's
fault: "... you / weren't big / or pure, or
beautiful / enough / to change things, you /
weren't / the perfect mother."
The women and children of Mother, not
mother question the basic borders of patriarchal
tenets. Searching for — and sometimes
finding — doors in the religious and
familial walls of identity, they move gracefully,
either eagerly or languidly, among
facets of themselves.
Susan Murphy's characters are less volitional
but more self-conscious than
Brandt's. The Deconstruction of Wesley
Smithson is peopled by physical, political,
and emotional victims who are devoured
when they would be nurtured. Exchanges
of identity claims — always emotionally
charged — generate violence. In her dedication,
Sarah Murphy describes the collection
(there are three pieces) as "untellings."