Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9007040104
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by FRED CHAPPELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Katherine Soniat's means of seeing in her poetry is like the train headlight she speaks of in her opening poem, "Cameos." "Bit/ by bit it picks out and lights/ a world." She does not lay claim to a whole vision, and a reader may well feel that she distrusts efforts toward such ambitious overviews.
For Soniat, who teaches at Hollins, the illumination of truth (that is, poetry) comes in sudden, unlooked-for and swiftly transitory moments of perception. Her title poem attempts to illustrate her feeling about this matter in the image of an orange cat that was "so mixed up with the world" that its singular presence prevented philosophic systemizing or metaphysical speculation. This cat "was that brief crack/ when the world is perfect blend -/ celebration of cat, bird, and shrub -/ before things jaggedly go their way."
Few of us are permitted to glimpse these lightning moments of revelation; we come to our knowledge of them indirectly, recollecting in later hours what we did not realize we had found in earlier times.
She describes a part of this process in "A Place by the Window": "But memory/ fiddles backward through the stones,/ making what should not,/ come to light." Sometimes our vision of such revelation has to be reflected in another person.
In a brilliant short lyric, Soniat captures a 3-year-old child who experiences the otherness of mushrooms sprung up after a rain: "over these wild toadstools you peer/ like a navigator struck with the suddenness/ of land, its vegetable crest/ blooming from the shallows."
It is about human relationships that the tardy truths come upon us so crushingly. "The world is always shaping/ new hollows, smoothing old ones,/ and we go on trying to fit ourselves/ to one another." So the speaker avers in "Breath on the Mirror," having found her effort in trying to fit to another unsuccessful.
And she has found that the sad recession into the past of her immediate feeling has destroyed much of herself also. "Moving from room to room, I turned/ each photograph flat,/ placed a close warm/ breath on every mirror/ until I made myself and all/ the background disappear."
This veiled way of seeing is the one we are fated to have. "Cameos" gives the question its most wistful formulation: "Why/ can't every moment crack open/ like those trees so full of revelation/ when the train wanders at midnight?" "October," another fine poem, restates the question as an ambition: "I want you/ to hear through my skin."
Katherine Soniat is an extraordinary poet and "Cracking Eggs" is a brilliant debut. Here are intensity of purpose, clarity of observation and perseverance of attempt. She does not give herself an easy task. But her poems show that the hard effort is worth making in this struggle to portray "the dare/ of disappearance behind every move."
by CNB