Gillian Conoley
Works of Love & Terror (and space and time and art)
Donna de la Perrière is one of my favorite poets. For years her four well-thumbed books–– and now her most recent, Works of Love & Terror––have sat on my shelves like dear sisters, enjoying one another’s company, talking back and forth, sharing secrets, haunted by love, desire, life. Gothic, dark, candid, poignant, dear. To my mind, they formed a kind of suite, with something unwritten between them, something too dark, too terrible to tell. A ghost poem hovered over their pages, between the bindings. A kind of Mallarme-like absence that held its own beauty and power.
That unwritten poem, to paraphrase Mallarme, “the flower absent from all bouquets,” had its own kind of presence, strong and sure. And yet, selfishly, I yearned for it. In Works of Love & Terror, this poem arrived, clear, candid, sure, as if it had travelled a far, long way to tell itself, to join de la Perrière’s impressive oeuvre.
“First Love,” which you will find at the center of her new book, Works of Love & Terror, “details the chilling life and afterlife of a rape as does no other poem I know,” as Kevin Killian tells us. The poem is also a tour de force in repetition and the use of white space. Is what is not there: the large gaps on each page of the poem, a void, a room, an absence, a presence, a wall, a fortress, a portal, a truth? A refusal, an acceptance, a trauma, a reclamation?
I can’t pretend to know, only to believe that what is absent in the poem is proof of one of de la Perrière’s great poetic gifts: her faith in recalling, reframing, seeing clearly and bravely, and yet skeptical even of the surety of perception and memory. The repetition in the lines: the last line of one page is often the first line in the next, reads like it is spoken by another, by the traumatized, dissociated self who repeats what happened back to the other, as if to validate, to convince, to corroborate and collaborate. A friend who was also there, who saw, who heard what was long ago, now recast, etched deeply in memory and in psyche, and yet, like the violated body, both there and not there.
At the end of the poem, in which the rape is told, revealed, relived, Donna de la Perrière writes: “She can’t imagine how to impose narrative structure on this./ She can begin it but always finds herself doubling back––to/ provide context or background, to try to make things cohere.”
Next page: “And the truth is she probably won’t finish this time either. At/some point she’ll stop, tell herself she needs distance, will /come back to it later, do it right this time around.”
(big white space until we get to the end of the page)
“But she won’t come back to it, or she will but when she does, /she’ll just re-read it, not know what to do with it, then put it/ away”
On a literal level, we can read these final lines as a self-accusation of failure. Or a recognition of the formal failures of narrative. But as is so present in de la Perrière’s brilliant work, the hard-won, courageous, difficult, even impossible act of truth, and the victorious qualities that perception and consciousness have to carry us forward and through truth, remain.
Donna de la Perrière is one of my favorite poets. For years her four well-thumbed books–– and now her most recent, Works of Love & Terror––have sat on my shelves like dear sisters, enjoying one another’s company, talking back and forth, sharing secrets, haunted by love, desire, life. Gothic, dark, candid, poignant, dear. To my mind, they formed a kind of suite, with something unwritten between them, something too dark, too terrible to tell. A ghost poem hovered over their pages, between the bindings. A kind of Mallarme-like absence that held its own beauty and power.
That unwritten poem, to paraphrase Mallarme, “the flower absent from all bouquets,” had its own kind of presence, strong and sure. And yet, selfishly, I yearned for it. In Works of Love & Terror, this poem arrived, clear, candid, sure, as if it had travelled a far, long way to tell itself, to join de la Perrière’s impressive oeuvre.
“First Love,” which you will find at the center of her new book, Works of Love & Terror, “details the chilling life and afterlife of a rape as does no other poem I know,” as Kevin Killian tells us. The poem is also a tour de force in repetition and the use of white space. Is what is not there: the large gaps on each page of the poem, a void, a room, an absence, a presence, a wall, a fortress, a portal, a truth? A refusal, an acceptance, a trauma, a reclamation?
I can’t pretend to know, only to believe that what is absent in the poem is proof of one of de la Perrière’s great poetic gifts: her faith in recalling, reframing, seeing clearly and bravely, and yet skeptical even of the surety of perception and memory. The repetition in the lines: the last line of one page is often the first line in the next, reads like it is spoken by another, by the traumatized, dissociated self who repeats what happened back to the other, as if to validate, to convince, to corroborate and collaborate. A friend who was also there, who saw, who heard what was long ago, now recast, etched deeply in memory and in psyche, and yet, like the violated body, both there and not there.
At the end of the poem, in which the rape is told, revealed, relived, Donna de la Perrière writes: “She can’t imagine how to impose narrative structure on this./ She can begin it but always finds herself doubling back––to/ provide context or background, to try to make things cohere.”
Next page: “And the truth is she probably won’t finish this time either. At/some point she’ll stop, tell herself she needs distance, will /come back to it later, do it right this time around.”
(big white space until we get to the end of the page)
“But she won’t come back to it, or she will but when she does, /she’ll just re-read it, not know what to do with it, then put it/ away”
On a literal level, we can read these final lines as a self-accusation of failure. Or a recognition of the formal failures of narrative. But as is so present in de la Perrière’s brilliant work, the hard-won, courageous, difficult, even impossible act of truth, and the victorious qualities that perception and consciousness have to carry us forward and through truth, remain.