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Scars and Splendor

In this universe, what set of arrangements, groupings, compositions do we know better, more completely, than that of our families? All evasions of that knowledge are surely based, somewhere, on that knowledge. What lies nearer to love than anger? Fear maybe? With Remembering Fireflies, by Pamela Laskin and Human/Nature from Lance Lee, we have two explorations, two reports, familiar and unique, of that human landscape, so often dotted with both beauty and with scars. Sigmund Freud shows up, but rarely. The cover painting of Pamela Laskin’s book describes a young woman whose lips are set and strong, but whose somber, inward gaze provides a sad recognition of something gone. Still, when one turns the pages and begins reading the first few and generally brief poems, the lines short, and even when one encounters the first poem, “Abortion,” one is surprised by the ease of delivery, the simple diction, the cool and even nonchalant air where the past seems hardly as charged as the young woman would have it. Laskin divides her book into three sections: the first is “Pregnancy,” then “Mothers and Grandmothers,” and finally “Children.” The first several poems that speak of pregnancy seem gentle, and generate smiles of remembrance and recognition in one who only observed the process (The one undergoing the process might want to swiftly kick the shins of the observer.) until one comes to the title poem, “Remembering Fireflies.” And while the speaker’s tone is almost offhanded, perhaps by necessity, here one enters a world of tragedy, of sorrow, of regret; the poem speaks of an abortion. It focuses on the unfairness of choices, the blank inequity in the immemorial issue of why this one and not another? Yet underneath, there is an anger that tinges all the rest of the poem in the speaker’s bald assertion: “It was a conscious decision / getting rid of you....” Before going on to the following section, “Mothers and Grandmothers,” there is a brief coda in which birth is once more celebrated, where in a wife’s pregnant body a father sees,