"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," the saying goes. However, that fury pales when compared to Diane Wakoski scorned. Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, is an interesting introduction to California beat poet Wakoski, and I use the word "interesting" to mean something not very complimentary. In the way your crazy Uncle Louie tells "interesting" stories when he's drunk.
To say this is a collection of new and "selected" poems doesn't quite prepare you for the highly homogenous poems assembled within. The collection would be more appropriately titled "A Woman Scorned" since about ninety percent of the poems contained within these 343 pages are the rantings of a woman complaining about men, the unsuitability of all of her lovers, and how ugly she is and has been all her life.
Wakoski exhibits a lurid fascination with George Washington over the course of the 25 years covered by this collection, setting him up as an ideal against which all her lovers are compared. Her imagined relationship with our founding father is trying at best, as evidenced in these lines from "George Washington: The Whole Man":
George, in and out of time, your historical hands
that should sign great documents move over my body,
into my brain,
squeezing the thalamus,
fingering the spongy protrusions that make me dream,
cerebellum, lifting each part away from the other to explore
all the channels, George of many
perceptions, your life
touched me in a way I respond to no one else.
The image, identity of myself;
George, you have come to recite the constitution in me in my
sleep.
The words soothe my brain that you earlier explored.
There are a few redeeming poems in this "selection," which lead me to believe we are not seeing some of Wakoski's better work, with a more diverse sense of voice and certainly subject. My favorite poem from this collection is her very sensitive poem "Slicing Oranges for Jeremiah":
And your son,
eating orange after orange,
until I felt the juice in my own mouth,
just watching,
and the sweetness,
and I wondered what was missing,
or why,
and where his thyroid went
or why there was not gland there,
and how even this baby animal,
your son,
must know that it was you who kept him alive,
remembering his pill each day,
and taking him places where people would respect him
and letting him make drawings
and build garbage structures:
and how his father knew too
it was you who kept him, your husband, alive,
giving him whatever artificial gland it was you did each day,
and how they both resented it,
depending on it as they did,
the men needing the woman more than any man could admit.
Although Wakoski's voice in this collection is primarily that of a complaintative spinster, the few strong poems indicate there may be more to her than the "selected" poems in Emerald Ice would indicate. Only further investigation of the original collections from which these poems were selected will tell. The collection is being reissued in August 2004 by Black Sparrow Press.
