 Are we to trust the speaker in Errata and none of the others? No, of course, as poetry readers, we know that none of them is exactly Haya herself; however, “Errata” explores a necessary split in the act of writing as well. In that there is a necessity for artifice, there is “dishonesty,” but in that there is an expression, there is “honesty.” Or, to put it another way, in order to write a collection such as this, a poet must place one foot in the world of lived experience, and the other in the unrestricted world of story telling.
Reviewed by Jennifer Bartman
Hook
by Haya Pomrenze
Rock Press
2007, $12.95, 80 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9676748-6
Haya Pomrenze’s first full-length poetry collection Hook has recently been published by Rock Press, an independent press located in Davie, Florida. In this collection, Pomrenze explores the theme of identity in the contexts of culture, religion, gender, family structures, social roles, locations, cuisine and the body itself. She accomplishes this in mostly narrative verse, in poems populated by a multitude of characters who are uniquely alive and complex.
The first poem in the collection is entitled “Straddle,” and the act of straddling—experiencing the tension of locating one’s body or experiences in two (or more) disparate locations—is one of the major themes of the collection. The poem begins, “My legs straddle the merry-go-round horse / at Magic Kingdom, balancing two worlds.” It becomes clear to the reader that the “two worlds” the speaker is describing in this case are the overlapping worlds of the Jewish and predominantly Christian cultures that coexist in the place where the poems are located.
Pomrenze explores this overlap throughout the collection, and does so with a mixture of honesty and irony that creates a rich, funny effect. For example, later in “Straddle,” she writes,
At poetry readings, my husband’s blue crocheted
yarmulke makes him stick out like a Republican.
I bring hamantaschen. Nicholas smiles as he offers
non-kosher wine that we decline. Everyone says
they like the poppy seed filling—so ethnic.
That last line is so funny and frustrating because it is sheds light on the fact that most people within the racial, cultural or religious majority think of customs and cuisine other than their own as “ethnic,” whereas their own is “normal”—hardly requiring a distinguishing adjective. This mindset is brought to light again in the poem “Sunday Baseball League,” in which the blonde, Christian character Tiffany yells out “You go Jew girl” to the speaker’s daughter Sara when she makes a good play.
In both cases, Pomrenze focuses the reader’s attention on the way a “compliment,” in reality, accomplishes the effect of othering a person. She shows the contradictory nature of language used to qualify identity. This naming and othering is echoed again in the poem “Happy Jew Year,” which ends with an image of the speaker walking home from the synagogue on Yom Kippur: “I walk home shoeless. A redheaded punk pops his head / from a slowed blue Chevy, yelling // Happy Jew Year!” The implicit understanding embodied by the punk is that there is the “normal” new year, which he likely celebrates, and there is the Jewish new year, which, being the other’s holy day, is worthy of a distinction, an adjective, that once again turns potential well-wishing into othering. And in this case, it was clearly not well-wishing to begin with. Pomrenze excels at wrapping outrage within lively and humorous narrative. It is a well-received package, and the outrage is certainly felt.
Negotiating overlapping religious and cultural identities is not the only act of straddling in Hook. There is also a focus on the way in which a person must straddle the multitude of roles that exist within families. In the poem “Plots Are For Dead People,” the desire to do more than straddle, to actually split and exist in duplicate is expressed with sincerity: “My husband has a small family. / Maybe we should be buried / near them. If only we could / each be sawed in half and join / both families, much the same way / we alternated holidays.”
In title poem “Hook,” the theme is explored, first, in an image in which the speaker is struggling to force the two sides of her mother’s too-small bra together and hook them in place. The image is notably about joining two disconnected sides in the face of a great resistance—a body, of course—but it is also about the speaker’s simultaneous repulsion at having to help her mother in this way and her feeling of duty as a member of the family. Pomrenze writes, “I kept my mouth shut as my sisters had done and tried to avert my eyes. It didn’t help. Somehow I always managed to catch a glimpse of her breasts before she thrust them into the grayish worn cups.”
Notably “Hook” is a prose poem, spanning the divide—if there is one—between poetry and fiction or, perhaps, poetry and the essay. Not only in the title poem, but throughout the book, there is a feeling of sincerity in these narratives that, as readers, we suspect must be drawn from the lived experiences of the poet. This desire to focus on the division or connection between truth and fiction, or poet and speaker, is explicitly complicated however in the poem “Errata,” which begins “The following errors are found in this book,” and goes on to correct the “factuality” of the narratives.
“Errata” is another example of Pomrenze’s engaging sense of humor, because, of course, if the other poems require corrections—in that they are “false”—who is to say that “Errata” is not a construction of the poetic imagination as well? Are we to trust the speaker in Errata and none of the others? No, of course, as poetry readers, we know that none of them is exactly Haya herself; however, “Errata” explores a necessary split in the act of writing as well. In that there is a necessity for artifice, there is “dishonesty,” but in that there is an expression, there is “honesty.” Or, to put it another way, in order to write a collection such as this, a poet must place one foot in the world of lived experience, and the other in the unrestricted world of story telling.
About the reviewer: Jennifer Bartman's work has appeared previously in Gulf Stream Magazine, 5AM, the Chambers County Review, and MiamiArtZine. Last spring, she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.
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