Review

Miroslav Penkov. East of the West: A Country in Stories. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Hardcover, 240 pp., $24.00.

Miroslav Penkov’s literary debut, East of the West: A Country in Stories, is a beautifully written, at times sentimental, and almost-always tragicomic story collection that worries itself with much more than the author’s place of origin, Bulgaria. Much can be made of the suggestive subtitle, A Country in Stories, but Penkov’s narratives do more than simply explore his eastern European roots, their mythologies and personal histories. They also confront the American immigrant experience, address notions of transience, and illuminate the restlessness of a modern, global life.

However, the tales in this collection wish to specifically not be about one place or another, but instead delve into the gray area between locales. The story “Buying Lenin,” which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008 (originally published in The Southern Review), attempts just that as it charts the biting relationship between a grandfather and grandson, the former staunchly pro-communist, the latter happily headed for school in capitalist America. In this piece Penkov achieves a emotional tug-of-war between the past and present, between the old and the young, between here and there. The result is a transatlantic dialogue that highlights Sinko’s complex sense of guilt and freedom. He does not understand his grandfather’s adherence to outdated communist ideals, but even still, “blood,” the patriarch hopes, “is thicker than the ocean,” and so the young man, despite his international relocation, is pulled toward home and family. Hopelessly out of place in America, he wants more than anything for “the old man to promise he’d wait for [him] out in the yard, under the black grapes of the trellised vine.” Yet the story ends without Sinko heeding his grandfather’s call to come back to Bulgaria, which subtly asserts the notion that home is not a place that can be lost and found again. Rather, once abandoned, our homelands disappear forever, leaving the rest of the world dim and gray since no destination, no future country or land, can ever replace the draw of one’s first community, a force Penkov imagines as a “collective consciousness.” “Buying Lenin” ends with laughter, but a reader cannot forget that Sinko remains alone in United States still yearning to become “a part of [the collective consciousness],” still “want[ing] in,” and still wishing “to dream the dreams of other people.”

East of the West also proves to be a gorgeous primer on Bulgarian history, or at least Bulgarian folklore: “Makedonija” pairs military record with the plight of a seventy-one year-old husband struggling to care for a wife who’s barely survived two strokes; the title story, “East of the West,” draws a romantic note from the dangerous border between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1970; “Cross Thieves” pokes fun at the political instability of Penkov’s homeland in the late nineteen-nineties via the perspective of a wunderkind with photographic memory; and “Devshirmeh” demonstrates how people are both sustained and revealed through the stories they tell, this final piece in the collection employing an ancient tale that the narrator says, “begins with blood…And with blood it ends.”

In that sense A Country in Stories reads not so far from the truth, though in reality Penkov’s ability to balance private sentiment against political and cultural upheaval is what affords this collection its emotional as well as its geographic scope. As a storyteller Penkov concerns himself with the distance between people instead of the distance between nations, such that even tales like the title story “East of the West,” which rely heavily upon place-particular conflict, are memorable not just in their portrayal of provincial circumstance, but also in their depiction of personal longing. The aforementioned story concerns romantic love across a gun-guarded river boundary, and what’s gripping is not the threat of death, but the threat of love lost. In a very striking manner, these stories use people to illuminate place as much as they use place to explain people. The uncanny and reciprocal relationship Penkov constructs between his characters and the worlds they inhabit is, without a doubt, the real triumph of this debut.

To all that one must finally add Penkov’s writing, which is light and liquid; it spills across the page with ease. Some of this comes from the author’s dominant use of the first person perspective, which allows his narrators at-will opportunities for insight and close, emotional explication. Yet Penkov’s real talent lies in his ability to speak with equal authority about both history and character. Steady, striking voices tell these stories, and they relay with confidence and empathy not only the tumultuous Bulgarian past, but also the tumultuous decisions and events of each protagonist’s life. Penkov gives due weight to both the macro and the micro, the final product being a collection which illuminates the universal themes of war, exile and immigration while also paying deference to the nuances of each Bulgarian protagonist’s particular plight. East of the West proves a marvelous debut from a writer with talent and heart, and readers everywhere would do well to trek with Penkov across his beloved eastern European landscape and then follow him to wherever he goes next.

Sarah Gorham. Bad Daughter. New York: Four Way Books, 2011. Paper, 80 pp., $15.95.

Reading Sarah Gorham’s poetry brings to mind perhaps the most memorable and oft-quoted lines from Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to but they do.” That analogy, of course, is a humorous oversimplification. Gorham’s work deals with family dynamics and the fact of human imperfection without Larkin’s ironic snideness, but with the wisdom, mature playfulness, and genuine pathos of Larkin’s most compelling work. In her previous collection The Cure (Four Way Books, 2003), Sarah Gorham told us the story of a family bowing under the weight of the father’s alcoholism. Her new offering, Bad Daughter, explores the complex and often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. In “Homesickness,” the speaker tells us, “Genes are a kind of blue letter from a mother / to her daughter: Good news, bad news.” These are indeed poems of “bad news” and “good news”—of pain and joy—and, as in the best work of many poets, the two work together to form the powerful emotional landscape of this collection.

In Bad Daughter, that landscape is never an easy one—never black and white. There is an exhilarating darkness in poems like “Immortality,” in which the speaker says of a baby, “Remember when the names for little things weren’t sickening? // Touch that fantastic little foot. The baby is an implant, a fresh cutting. / She will take. She will take you away.” The play of violence and wonder in these skillful lines makes plain the irony in them without veering into sarcasm. Even darker is the poem “Barbecue,” which employs a less subtle violence in one of the collection’s most evocative metaphors. Here, the speaker compares four sisters to the four tines of a fork:

    […] Sisters—they were that close,
  jockeying for love in a cage
  with silver bars. The origin of the fork

  was a spear in an animal’s heart.
  You’ve heard of knife scars
  on a plate? Blame it on the knife,

  though the fork held the weakling down.

The metaphor is complicated. The knife here is not the parents, as one might expect, for the speaker will “mind / her parents’ appeal for peace” and “place her knife back on the table.” There is no easy, moralistic reading for poems such as this, and that is the power of Gorham’s work; she investigates the difficult, often unsettling nature of family dynamics without self-pity and without pointing fingers. Bad Daughter reminds us that family is not static but, rather, an ever-evolving relationship: “To my child I become my mother,” Gorham says (in “Accommodation”), “and her mother, and hers.”

The joys of Bad Daughter are not to be found only in these questions of family. Gorham, with the skill and confidence of a master artisan, crafts poems in an array of styles and forms that never impose themselves on the work, but seem always necessary: from prose poems like “After Pindar” and “Bob White” to rhyming, shortened-lined sonnets like “Compost” and “Pond in Winter” to the free verse of “Our House” and “The Sacrifice,” whose lines move elegantly around the middle of the page. Each poem, whether directly addressing the complexities of daughterhood announced in the title or not, plays an integral part in constructing Bad Daughter, a collection that is gracefully made, challenging, moving, and unquestionably whole.

David Rigsbee. The Red Tower: New and Selected Poems. NewSouth Books, 2010. $24.95

David Rigsbee has the kind of enviable journal and magazine credits that might suggest a high national profile. The acknowledgments page of The Red Tower: New and Selected Poems lists such prestigious and widely distributed venues as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry, as well as such highly respected university-sponsored publications as The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and The Journal. However, his many books have generally been published by small presses, which, given their limited resources for advertising and distribution, tend to find readers fit but few. He may be more widely known for his co-editorship of Invited Guest, a valuable University of Virginia Press anthology of twentieth-century Southern poetry, than for his own poems.

The Red Tower is Rigsbee’s first publication with NewSouth Books, which, though another small press, seems more interested in publicizing its releases than do many others. The Red Tower thus seems likely to bring Rigsbee something more like the recognition he deserves. The book offers a substantial overview of his work: sixty-five previously collected poems and excerpts from two long sequences join sixteen new poems, providing a substantial overview of his forty-year career.

The new poems come first; taken together, the opening three make a good introduction to the whole collection. “Harp” cinematically invites us into “a room / not mine”—a room in which the poet is “sitting by a wooden harp”—and shares the room’s view of a woman across the street hanging wash on her balcony. As the poet watches, he is “thinking of hot, loser towns / where I am no longer, of years imagined / when I never was,” then fastens our attention on a particular item in that load of laundry:

One child’s dress, an ever-
serviceable blue cotton smock, says it all,
hanging four-square from the balcony rail,
as if in the absence of its little owner, billowing,
it took that absence on a journey.
Pointless speculation, says a contrapuntal voice,
and yet that is what I did with my life.

So the poem concludes. “Harp,” like much of The Red Tower, offers an attractive combination of precision and mystery: the language is deft, economical, and evocative, but the relationship between image and idea can be elusive. (The dress says what all, exactly?) But Rigsbee connects far more dots than he doesn’t. He’s no John Ashbery, relentlessly pulling the rug out from under our feet; he’s an occasionally elliptical artist whose ellipses seem designed to draw in rather than shut out his readers. In those final two lines, “Harp” also articulates a modesty that pervades this book. Though Rigsbee often inserts himself into his poems, he hardly writes in the self-aggrandizing vein of much recent American poetry. Indeed, the image of him sitting next to a harp (a laughable exaggeration of the traditional lyre), and moreover a harp that stands silent, suggests nothing so much as the poet’s sense of his own uselessness, a sense only reinforced by the poem’s ending. It’s a poignant but also appealingly self-critical sentiment with which to open a retrospective.

Next comes the shorter and more startling “After Reading.” Reading someone’s work (but whose, he doesn’t say), Rigsbee thinks “how purity is a curse, how it / puts us off the human,” distracting us from the real world we live in—or, as he puts it, from “the garbage and the grief.” This leads him to recall standing in St. Peter’s, gazing at the Pietà, and having a surprising thought about the 1972 attack on that masterpiece: he found himself “secretly admiring / the madman whose hammer / chipped the same marble that made / Michelangelo such a monster.” Several poems in The Red Tower demonstrate a value of “impurity” over “purity,” some by indulging in the grotesque (“Spaghetti,” “Hosanna,” “The Exploding Man”), some by engaging in the kind of ellipsis discussed above (“A Life Preserver,” “Autobiography,” “Almost You”), and some by partly adopting and partly resisting the strictures of traditional verse form (“Sonnet,” Cloud Journal, Sonnets to Hamlet).

The third new poem, “The Red Tower,” sounds a recurring theme: the poet’s anguish over his younger brother’s death, which we eventually learn was a suicide. Rigsbee writes, “Yeats was wrong when he wrote / that God talked to those long dead”; he offers “a blinking tower / on a mountain” as an image of such communication, noting that its pulsing red light “raised no one.” He closes with a rhetorical question, repeated as if in despair: “Because even if / God talked to the dead, what could / He possibly say to them? / What could He possibly say?” Several of the poems dealing with his brother’s life and death are very strong (“In Ohio,” “The Mermaid,” “Safe Box,” “Linking Light”), but one is particularly remarkable: “Four Last Songs,” a virtuosic four-part, eighteen-page poem based on Richard Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder. Strauss’s songs, settings of poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, encourage an acceptance of death; Rigsbee integrates them, passage by passage, into this long meditation on his brother’s last act, setting off the borrowings by printing them in all caps. The result is a powerful counterpoint between turmoil and peace that Rigsbee finally resolves: “let us not lose our way / but move along the wall of silence // and cling, as he has done, to the wall of silence.”

The Red Tower is a very rich book, one difficult to do justice in a short review, but at least two more aspects need to be noted, if only briefly. First is the frequency with which Rigsbee honors other artists and thinkers. In addition to all the masters already mentioned above, these poems memorialize or otherwise invoke Richard Rorty, Allen Tate, Gil Scott-Heron, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, Wolfgang Mozart, Randall Jarrell, and Joseph Brodsky. Second is the inclusion here of several lovely poems restoring us to a relationship with nonhuman nature, poems such as “The Mountaintop,” “Crickets,” “Heat,” “Wild Strawberries,” and “Vespers.” “Vespers” appears below, so Rigsbee’s gifts can speak for themselves in closing:

Wind carries off the slighter
birds, after which a purling of doves
adjusts the evening. An owl stands
quiet as a pine cone when a blade of light
breaches the hilltop and is gone. Behind me,
a compact car carries compact profiles
to town. Only a cloud, like a lipstick kiss
left on a mirror, offers
its supplemental farewell to the unbroken haze.
This is the final atmosphere
of a work day, not great bindings
but the modest affinities: bread
crossing the table,
as the jet engine overcomes the dove.

Caitlin Horrocks. This is Not Your City. Sarabande Books. July, 1 2011. Paperback, 168 pp., $15.95

Make the familiar strange, the strange familiar. One of the primary struggles the fiction writer undertakes is to bring “true surprise” to the page – an element of plot or character or a particular voice that on the one hand is unexpected, and on the other hand is completely honest to the world the author has created. Caitlin Horrocks is clearly a writer who takes this struggle seriously. Every story in her debut collection This Is Not Your City aims to startle. From the bizarre premise of a reincarnated bank worker in Des Moines encountering characters that she remembers from her one hundred twenty-six past lives to the subverted expectations in the story of a young teacher punishing her students in creative and perverse ways, Horrocks throws her readers off balance from story to story, page to page.

Overall, this endeavor pays out with dividends. “This Is Not Your City,” the eponymous tale in the collection, stakes out dramatic ground in what is to the majority of readers––and, one might assume, to Horrocks as well––unfamiliar territory: a Russian mail-order bride living in Finland discovers that her fifteen-year old daughter has gone missing after a camping trip with her boyfriend. The first two-thirds of the story offers very little in the way of dramatic action; the main character, Daria, occupies herself with desultory cooking and cleaning while we learn through exposition the events that have led up to the present. And yet the slow pacing does no harm here. On the contrary, it allows us to plumb the depths of Daria’s loneliness in a “marriage [that] is a gaping hush, an unraveling hole that cannot be darned” (139) and to stare mutely at the walls separating her from her daughter, her husband, and the society outside the home in which she lives as a stranger. Having clearly outlined the contours of her character’s world, Horrocks delivers a plot twist in the last third of the story that is deeply satisfying for feeling both unexpected and inevitable.

Three other stories take place outside the United States, and indeed, these are among the strongest in the collection. Horrocks seems to strike the perfect balance between the outwardly unfamiliar and the emotionally honest when she takes her characters abroad. Daria’s isolation as a Russian bride in Finland harkens back to the book’s third story, “Going to Estonia.” In that tale, a young woman moves from the backcountry of northern Finland to the bright lights of Helsinki where, displaced and lonely, she succumbs to the charms of her rakish downstairs neighbor. Horrocks’ talent for combining simple, direct statements with fresh, evocative description is apparent on the very first page, depicting Ursula’s interaction with her seatmate on the bus ride down to the city:

“…At a highway rest stop outside Kemi, the boy stood outside the men’s
toilets puffing out great gouts of air, trying to step forward into the clouds before they disappeared. He had a strange, flat face, and as Ursula watched him choke with laughter at his own breath she thought there was something wrong with him…Back on the bus, the boy introduced himself.

She told him her name and he wrote it unevenly in the moisture on the window, with the R pointed backward. ‘You’re pretty, Ursula,’ he said.

She looked away; it wasn’t true” (33).

As the title suggests, the story features a trip to Estonia, but it is Ursula’s discomfort in her own skin––as reflected in her estrangement from her new home in the capital––that is at its heart.

The two other stories in the book that take place overseas, “The Lion Gate” and “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui,” feature Americans trying to escape troubles back home. The main character in “The Lion Gate” is burdened by a deep, long-growing desperation that has rendered her numb long before we encounter her; taken out of her normal environment, this numbness ebbs and the pain becomes suddenly focused. The emotional territory explored here may be familiar to many readers––Renee, a single woman approaching middle age, struggles with the fact that her chance to have children is rapidly slipping away––and yet the story is in no way a cliché. Rather, the strength of Horrocks’ prose and the depth of her vision ensures that Renee’s tale affects us as if we have never heard anything like it.

The final tale in the book portrays the deep-seeded desperation of its characters to very different effect. When Somali pirates take the cruise ship on which Wil and Lucy Voorhuis are taking a vacation from caring for their severely disabled son, the event is drained of its terror for Lucy:

“If there was to be at some point a separation of sheep and lambs, wheat and chaff, the passengers who would be spared and those who would be executed, she thought she and Wil should volunteer themselves. They were qualified hostages, years of experience. They wouldn’t protest. They could be shuttled and shuffled and they would do it with, if not love, a numb contentment” (161).

Such a direct statement of metaphor is potentially risky, but Horrocks very wisely places it late in the text, at which point we’ve spent enough time with the characters to believe not only the feeling, but their awareness of the feeling. In this way, the moment in which Horrocks shows her hand becomes an organic epiphany for her main character. The story as a whole, meanwhile, reflects the intention behind every tale in This Is Not Your City: to reach beyond the mundane, to cast the line into those deeper waters of the imagination far out from the shore, and to find there the true thing that makes this strange place so familiar.