Book Review: Stacey Lynn Brown's Cradle Song
David Svenson
C & R Press
68 pp.
Stacey Lynn Brown's Cradle Song does not read like the first book that it is. Instead, it handles voice so well that it reads as if constructed by a much-published poet. I am reminded of Sharon Olds. I think of Thomas Lux. But what I am reading is Stacey Lynn Brown.
For her debut book, Brown's pieced together a long poem chronicling the childhood, the upbringing and the maturation of a Southern woman. Brown's unnamed, but numbered, poems entwine race, gender, identity, the loved and unloved, and family relationships with the death and rebirth of — what else? — an accent.
I left my accent in a gas station in Kansas on the move out west. Too much time spent in front of audiences beaming back sympathy for the slow wittedness implicit in my speech
But can an accent really be forgotten? Not for the poet of this book. Just as her accented voice returns "when [she's] back home, or drunk, / or just plain mad," Cradle Song uses the pages between its covers to return to a life that many might have refused to remember or revisit. The strength of these poems is Brown's insistence that no subject will be left unturned, and she executes each so tightly, the reader has to return himself and reexamine each line, each word to catch his breath again and hang on to the scope of her experience. Poem "XXVI" recounts her first air rifle, her training with a real gun and later her experience with the power and capability, holstered against her ribs, to use the weapon. Brown uses the metaphor of a gun to the head to portray her delving into memory: "Some nights, / I know how the hollow point / explodes my skull into darkness." It's an apt metaphor for the point-blank approach of these poems. Should we feel scared? No, because Brown isn't scared.
Brown, not one to paint with a single brush, changes voices between poems to create the picture of a past so real, so accounted for, that all we want to know is what happens next. The poems depict not only the vision of the main character, our general speaker, but also of another central character. Gaither, her nanny, emerges as a subject of love and forgetfulness, care and sacrifice. Several poems acknowledge the admirable role Gaither played in the speaker's life as she apologizes for taking her away from her own family, even her own child for so many hours a day, so many days a week.
Forgive her, Pumpkin, Gaither's true daughter, for taking her from you before the sun rose every day and returning her, spent, at night. I didn't know anyone could love or need her more than I did, those five days of your motherless week.
Later, facing on the fully tragic elements of this experience, our speaker again issues an apology, this time with such a weight resting in the lines that their short length speaks more than a longer length could.
Forgive her, Pumpkin, Gaither's true daughter, for her first time driving, afternoon, accident, so unsure of the gas, the brake, and the clutch, just the squealing tire smoke and the aching, dull thud as you crumpled into the past. I didn't know anyone could love or need me more than she did, every day of her daughterless weeks.
"I didn't know": that is an important theme of this book. The epilogue, with its continued smooth language and impeccable line breaks, confirms the journey of the book; it is a means of "revisiting your own—/ past, childhood, mother." It is the anchor at the end of a long chain of links. It is the quiet reflection of the final lines, "where you been."
And it provides a reason for more books to be written: to remember.