Night garden

Judith Harris Tiger Bark Press, Rochester, New York, 2013, 102 pp., $16.95 paper, ISBN-13: 978-0981675282

Judith Harris’s most recent volume of poetry, Night Garden, represents her most exquisite and lyrical work on human suffering, the reality of mortality, and the desiring subject. Divided into four sections, the volume is framed by an initial “Poem,” which names “patience for the intolerable” as “the hard part.” When patience moves, “like a funneling wind/shrieking right through the window panes,” it sears through us, but the speaker acts as guide, juxtaposing images of fecundity and growth with those that speak immanent death. She is “a vase in the shape of a woman/with lillies pending from her mouth,” but also “meticulously glued together,/crack upon crack.”

If Harris offers a cracked poetic subject, she also cracks open her world for us. In “Root,” father and mother stand at the front of their house, where “nothing changes.” This couple cannot help their daughter, who looks for meaning even as they ritualistically shut it down all around her. In “My Mother Folding Linens,” the meticulous laundress closes the door “on what will keep.” One imagines that the daughter lives in that closed place with the laundry, keeping silent until she can speak her truth. “Neighborhood” finds her with mother’s umbrella, strolling out with it while “sucking on lemons.”

Just when the bitter taste of stasis feels like it could become too much, Harris lands us firmly in the light. In “Light’s Portrait,” we learn that “white feather and ash bone,/from above the world is never separate.” The lesson becomes one of height and depth, of connection through and even with pain. In “Night Garden,” we discover the resilience: “some flowers/won’t dissolve into the darkness.” Utilizing Lacan’s description of the mirror, imaginary, and symbolic stages, the speaker tries to sift out this human and narcissistic need for spectral identification, rather than casting off the unseen flowers into the f