Anne Valley-Fox
By R.W. French
It may not be unprecedented, but surely it is unusual, for a journal to turn its
entire contents over to the work of one author. Happily, that is what “Fish Drum
Magazine” has recently done: volume 15 consists completely of the poetry of
Santa Fe resident Anne Valley-Fox.
In case you wondered what a “fish drum” is (I didn’t know either, when I
first encountered the journal), a prefatory note in the journal helpfully explains:
“A fish drum, or mukugyo, is a slit drum carved into a stylized fish used to
accompany chanting in a Zen service.” Zen Buddhism hovers in the background of
the journal as well as in Anne Valley-Fox’s poems, though in no way is
knowledge of Zen essential to appreciation and understanding. The poems stand
on their own as records of human experience beyond doctrine or belief..
They appear to rise from the depths to find their way into appropriate forms.
There is wide variety of formal experimentation. There are short skinny imagistic
poems (in one the shortest line is “&”), there are “prose poems” shaped like
building blocks that fill the page from side to side, there are poems in (unrhymed)
stanzas, there is a long poem in fifteen sections, and so on. The variety
suggestions a driving restlessness looking for, and finding, eventual repose in the
forms of poetry.
Some of these poems look outward to the experience of others, as though
they were on their way to becoming short stories, while others focus inwardly,
mixing memory and desire in the matrices of the present. These poems know
romantic experience, but that is not their mode. They have learned and changed
and, yes, made their accommodations; or, perhaps better, have found their
tranquility. Without bitterness, they accept what is placed before them and even
come to rejoice in it. Reading these poems, one might well think of Frost’s Oven
Bird: “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a
diminished thing.”
These are predominantly Poems of Experience, tempered by the wisdom of
maturity. They know that sensual and spiritual are not opposites, and they know
that time brings both loss and renewal. Consider, for example, the poem “Sands,”
characteristic in its tones. It opens with a memory of joy and release:
Slithering tongues & quicksand
kisses, you & I returned to each other, stranded
in the corduroy sands of Sonoran
mountains.
It seemed a time of rapturous innocence, before the intrusive appearance of a grim
and unforgiving reality changed everything:
Your brother
has not yet been slain by druglords &
tossed into Lake Chapala; your father has not
exploded himself, chain-smoking close in a room
with his respirator.
“I find myself,” the author remarks pointedly, “guilty of innocence.” But the time
for innocence has forever past:
Vaguely, I wish to resume our kisses.
Moonshadows ink the troughs of the dunes—
we will never get back.
Joys remain attainable—the concluding poem in the volume is entitled “Bliss”
(“Beyond the body, an evening primrose opens its petaled lips; we sip of its white
perfumes”)—but they are found in darker contexts, and they are reached with
increasing difficulty; still, they are all the more to be valued because they occur
within the restraints of somber knowledge:
My husband’s hair, tied at the neck, is spinning grey at the
temples. “It’s okay,” I want to console him, “the way we slow
down & grow cold.” Instead, saying nothing, I turn to close the
window.
As the lines I have quoted suggest, Anne Valley-Fox is willing to risk
clarity of statement, including simple declarative statements—
“Don’t hoard your stuff—“
bag lady sez in the bus
depot. “You’re loaded up & your job, lover
—your job is only to empty.”—
but throughout the book there is also a resonant depth of metaphor that startles and
delights. Often the two modes are effectively combined, as in “Song for Child and
500 Dolphins”:
Leaving his play, he
toddles into the kitchen, takes
my hand and places his cheek in the open
palm—as dolphins
washed up on New Jersey shores
lie pressing their anguish against the sand
and smiling sweetly.
At times—frequently—the poet seems to think in metaphor. She writes of the
“ordinary” experiences of life (children, husbands, lovers, Grandpa. Great Aunt
Katherine) in a language that freshens and illuminates at every turn:
Impatient, she prods him: “But anyone’s life
is a staircase or arc—tigered steppes
stretching away—we’re all
going down in the dark!”
Years before she would have coaxed, “Darling,
come closer!” stroking along the natural grain, but now
she’s contracted: “Don’t you realize it’s hell
or high water?”
At length he replies: “Even before a trap springs,
the breath catches, floorboards buckle, you stumble
and a gaff from the underworld
snatches at your ankles.”
Note: Readers wishing to explore further are invited to visit the “Fish
Drum” website (www.fishdrum.com) or www.Amazon.com, where the book may be
purchased. Or there’s always the old-fashioned way: write to “Fish Drum” (Suzi
Winson, Editor); P.O. Box 966; New York, NY 10156.
