It is common to call the poetry of women otherworldly, delicate, elegant. Women, after all, are the delicate sex, the elegantly-souled, otherworldly because we occupy, quite literally in the minds of half the world, another universe full of unguessable motives, muted desires, undecipherable codes. Women who write, most particularly those who write poetry and prose that dances with poetry at the town hall every Friday night, are often critically caged in that pretty prison of otherworldly, delicate, elegant.
And yet, even knowing this, knowing all the power of such words to suffocate in a blanket of analytical lace, when I read Theodora Goss’s poems, I keep returning to them. For the collection you hold in your hands is otherworldly, it is elegant, it is delicate. It is graceful, it is exquisite and ethereal. It is full of flowers and fairies and a piercing, thorny longing.
So I will use these words, but I will use them like wishes in a fairy tale: very, very carefully.
These poems are otherworldly. They seem to come up out of the pages from another time, from an asteroid floating in the dark, its surface clotted and bound with forests, with luminous flowers, with figures walking under branches that might at any moment becoming grasping hands. They are Romantic poems, drawing the ghosts of Christina Rossetti and William Blake out of Hades by means of spilling their human blood into the great silver bowl of a book. They possess that peculiar, delicious melancholy of paintings on urns, on cameos, of faces and drifting willows constantly bent in thought. They are not savage; they do not seek to be savage, to murder the heart with a scalding line. Rather, they tap the heart with a hundred tiny blows of a glass-maker’s hammer until it shatters.
These are delicate poems, turned on a jeweler’s lathe, their revelations draped as gracefully as Greek cloth. Goss’s language fits together like gems in a complex crown, a diadem of images and motifs, resting gently on the head, but with a deceptive weight. Ethereal willows (will I ever know a willow tree in the real world as well as I know the one that changes its leaves through the course of this book?) ponds, moors, woods couple with moments of intensely human, domestic realism (will I ever want a recipe as much as I want to know how to make Wolf Soup, served by a grandmother to a girl in red?) to create achingly genuine scenes.
And they are elegant. The elegance of Goss’s work has never ceased to amaze me. It feels effortless, but endlessly evocative and suggestive, flowing with the rhythms of both the natural world and the intimate socio-familial cosmos. These poems move through the year as we do, with the grace of inevitability, a familiar series of colors, scents, textures that never ceases to be surprising.
I remember one summer in Budapest, sitting with Theodora Goss and her daughter Ophelia below the tall windows of an apartment across from the National Museum, smelling a storm coming on while the wind whipped through the living room and into the kitchen. Ophelia was reading The Wizard of Oz. We could hear violins playing faintly in the square. And I thought then that that moment was like being inside one of Theodora’s poems. The wind, the dark clouds, the ozone of the soon-to-be storm, the leaves blowing free, just beginning to singe brown at the edges. Two writers, one per window, with long hair, one black and one red, and long names, one Hungarian and one Italian, lost in their own thoughts, in the books they were planning to write, drinking tea out of Communist-era china, picking at pogácsa from the bakery across the street. And all the while a beautiful little girl with pale red hair and great clear eyes reads about Dorothy and that other, more famous storm that blew a child from a world of dust to a world of color. That is what I mean by elegance, the synchronicity of images, the layering of experience and literature, the symmetry of soul and environment. Goss’s poems are so full of that elegance that it bleeds into her life, until, in some marvelous moments, there is no difference between a Goss poem and an afternoon spent with her, thinking in unison and companionable quiet. Hers is a weaponized elegance, targeted and unstoppable.
But of course, that can’t be right. I must be mistaken. Nothing elegant can be raw. Nothing delicate can break your heart. Nothing otherworldly can say anything real about the human experience. Everyone knows that. It is a universal truth, held universally.
I guess nobody told Theodora Goss. What good fortune for the rest of us.
Catherynne M. Valente