Soulskin
Marily Krysl. NLN Press, 1996.
Warscape With Lovers
Marilyn Krysl. Cleveland State University Poetry Center,
1997.
Joe Francis Doerr
Had Mother Teresa been asked to write an addendum to the Song of Songs under the tutelage of Creation Spiritualist and recent excommunicant Brother Matthew Fox, she might have produced a work not unlike Marilyn Krysl's Soulskin. Krysl draws from a wealth of life experiences in both the world of academe as an award-winning poet and teacher, and as a volunteer at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. Her voice is at once profoundly compassionate and supremely sensual.
Soulskin is divided into seven sections beginning with Self Healer and ending with Death, Life. The poetry itself is musically elegant, and is written in a variety of forms including free verse, couplets, and quatrains. Poems such as Planetary and Sound Healer are visually reminiscent of Marianne Moore's experimental stanzas, but are much less idiomatically and metrically restrained.
In the prose preface to Self Healer, Krysl plots the book's thematic progression and defines "soulskin" (coined by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book Women Who Run With The Wolves) as that "transforming energy" required to"leave the surface spaces of our lives and go into psychic darkness" in order to emerge both physically and mentally refreshed. In the title poem, she speaks of this soulskin as a "shimmering/sex skin, my saffron monk's robe/skin, my wet suit walrus skin, my SINGING AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS skin" which "shines/as only the body can shine.
At times, her work bears a striking resemblance to the poetry of twelfth century abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen with whom Krysl shares a manifest concern for the precarious health and future of global interconnectedness (what Hildegard saw as the "web of the universe") when she writes, for instance, in "Innanna": "If they take away the small things/I will hold to the immensity." As Hildegard observed that we humans "do not even know who [we] are," Krysl reminds us of our inattention in thepreface to Self and Nature. There she writes: "Nature is who we are...I wanted to 'remember' the unspoken knowledge that we have when we live fully in our animal bodies." In Transformations: The Terrace, the body, in merging with the natural world, is reborn as a "damp, dewy" entity nearly identical to Hildegard's conception of the body resurrected in the contemplation of a "cosmic" Christ as "green and juicy."
Section V of Soulskin, simply titled Calcutta, chronicles the months Krysl spent working among the poor, sick, and dying in that city. The tone of the poems in this section wavers between frustration and hopelessness. However, with "soulskin" firmly buttoned to the chin, Krysl plumbs the most bitter of emotions and emerges with her sense of compassion intact. Consider this from Devaluation: "A scattering/of ash, a flute, the pyre disappearing. I pass/the ghat: a girl calls out, begging her mother/for something to eat. Her mother slaps her. I'm/a dying woman, passing by. Garbage/as dirge. Look: those scattered crows converge." The fatalist underpinning of lines such as these gives way to life triumphant in the poems of the final section, Death, Life. Here, a Buddhist funeral serves as a framework for the resilience of life and its promise of reincarnation: "Let me go into the pure gullet of the vulture/Love me and let me go, as I am bound." And in these closing lines from Contraction which celebrate the birth of a child, Krysl completes the cycle with a pleasing resonance: "two people, without / the advantage of marble,/polished by the sweat/of what they've accomplished,/facing each other/across the small,/distinct distance/of the human." Pure soul.
Warscape with Lovers is Marilyn Krysl's seventh and perhaps best book of poetry to date. Exhibiting writing that has matured both structurally and stylistically since the publication of her first book, Saying Things, in 1975, Krysl demonstrates the most comprehensive range of work yet in the four sections that comprise this cycle.
In the first section, entitled War, using as a backdrop the combined landscapes of present-day war-torn Sri Lanka and the mythico-biblical worlds of Adam and his Sumerian counterpart, the primeval sea-goddess Nammu, Krysl explores the concepts of gender, power, and power relations between a) the sexes, b) man & nature, and c) economic & cultural enemies in a patriarchal society with an agenda seemingly determined by what Foucault called the "battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays." Krysl skillfully crafts and balances a tension between two such "truths" in this section's poems. Take for instance the fine sestina Nammu: To Adam in which an isolated, floundering Adam waits for the curative powers of water to dissolve his "faltering name" into that of Nammu. She writes: "My name burning your lips. You/have been a torch in the midst of a wave of destruction./Your shroud of water is ready. Come with me."
The second section, Ghazals For the Turn of the Century, finds Krysl using the traditional Arabic love lyric, the ghazal, to greet the millennium by examining the violent century that precedes it. Subjects ranging from the optimism of Whitman, to the folly of Vietnam, to the simple horror of spousal and child abuse offered in the fourteen lines dedicated to Hedda Nussbaum are excavated then arranged in the strata of unrhymed couplets. In the last of these ghazals, Krysl seems to play up the archaeological imagery in the final lines with a faint optimism for the next century when she writes: "I swing the pick again, break open a vein./It is this gleaming that becomes dawn."
There is a return to the Calcutta Krysl explored in Soulskin in the third section also called Calcutta. Initially, one wonders at the redundancy of this title choice, but ultimately there is no other single word in the contemporary, global vernacular that can express the magnitude of suffering and the maintenance of human dignity Krysl captures in these poems. Again, she offers the healing powers of water as a spiritual balm for suffering, although she doesn't appear to hold out much hope, short of a miracle, for a panacea. Calcutta ends with these few lines from Transfiguration in which she describes a thorough cleansing of the cathedral cum hospital ward of the seemingly endless streams of excrement issuing from the sick and dying: "I dipped a handful of rag in a bowl,/watched the water gather in its threads./Little by little the water filled it/to the lip with the shine of wetness."
Part four of Warscape with Lovers explores the possibility that the panacea for the world's suffering so longed-for in the first three sections is nothing more than compassion, and that compassion in itself is nothing short of miraculous. The imagery of water in this section is once again important and recurrent as it becomes synonymous with agape and spiritual renewal. Appropriately titled Love, section IV contains several poems written in lyric forms often employed in the examination of love as a central poetic theme. Love includes an exercise in sapphics, and three sestinas: Carpe Diem: Time Piece, Homage to Pierre August Renoire, and Eden of Water. It is in this last sestina that Krysl unites what had initially appeared in the cycle as irreconcilable; namely, the patriarchal and the maternal. She does this quite simply and elegantly in a few ordinary words: "Water is God's womb. Know/your origins..."