Reviews -- on keeping things small



	on keeping things small

The Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Swenson
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton's poems aren't the sort of modest, repressed, diminutive constructions you might expect from a book with this title—stunted, delicate growths like bonsai trees.

Quite the contrary. Her title poem and her work in general argue against the damaging results of keeping everything under wraps, secrets and emotions packed away in neat little boxes.

"Even now, brazen greens press containment," she writes.

While her poetic constructions may appear fastidious and unthreatening on the page, their tendrils are strong enough to uproot old wives' (old husbands'?) tales and shatter the concrete of tradition.

Bushman-Carlton uses an epigraph from the Book of Leviticus—"And if a woman have an issue. . .[of blood], she shall be put apart seven days and whomsoever toucheth her shall be unclean"—to set up a poem called "Woman Bathing":

She performs the persistent ritual
of cleansing
the splashing of water
upon her scarlet flesh,
sullied with blood
to expunge the sins
the fathers shout

Can she wash away
the distorted reflection,
the accusing, leather-bound memorabilia,
she sees in the water lent,
rancid water-
pooled in stained basins,
colored with jaundiced eye?

Childhood, adolescence, family and domestic images dominate Sections I and II of On Keeping Things Small. She writes of her children in "There Are No Words," "Violin Duet," "The Second Time I Held You," "Remembering Teeth," "Claret Wood," "Temperature Taking," and several other poems, the most vivid of which is "When the Rhythm Gets Red," in which her drummer son Justin "slips in and out of manhood, the echo of youth in his ears."

Bushman-Carlton, who lives in Salt Lake City with her husband Blaine, can also transform a kitchen to a hothouse of creation in a poem called "From Wheat":

She turned the wheat
from Father's bin—
amber embryos raining loose
and liquid through her fingers—
into loaves.
Through cycles of grind, measure sift,
rhythmic kneading by pan of hand,
they multiplied,
uniform loaves to crack and scent
the morning kitchen,
loaves to slice and send,
bread to bed her children warm at night.
Plump as her aproned stomach,
russet as her summer arms,
her Monday miracles
lined the yellow countertops
like births.

The pearls of imagery and emotion that swell and expand in the first two sections of Bushman-Carlton's potent small volume, threaten to crack their containers in Section III but somehow never overreach their conceptual frame. She is a master of passion and control.

"Lydia, Reading in a Garden," based on a painting by Mary Cassatt, looks at an image of solitude and rather than loneliness, sees completeness.

In "Genesis," Bushman-Carlton, takes on the Adam and Eve myth and upends it: "Let's begin again," she writes. "Same garden."

While Eve naps,
God takes her hip bone, makes man.
He is good company,
and an asset,
can reach the high peaches, trim hedges,
his biceps like new squash
useful for carting off pruned limbs.

The snake in Bushman-Carlton's version is a "herpent" in a "blue pin-striped suit, a high heel, gold chain."

The wit and irony that Bushman-Carlton employs in "Genesis" comes to full flower in Section III in several poems, including "The Pulpit," "Woman bathing" and especially in "Wonder Woman," where females are seen to resemble vending machines expected to produce once coin of the realm is inserted.

Drop in an orchid
Take out a garden
Kiss her cheek
Pull out a family
A satisfied customer

While Bushman-Carlton's poems have grown over the wall of her rural childhood into uncharted territory, they don't forget where they were nurtured—on her parents' farm where "many times I watched his thick hands touch the soil" ("While I Wait") and in "Farmer's Wife" where "She calls him in with smoke from a supper chimney and smells of slow-cooked soup."