While there is no central theme underscoring Karen Rigby’s chapbook, Savage Machinery, the poems hold together as a lacework of themes that recur throughout: spirituality, art, and an honoring of the common.
In “Verité”, Rigby writes If you find beauty it will rise// from the half-moon petals strewn/ on the nightstand or the shirt// tossed over the radiator. And many of her poems are an exploration of how we find beauty – whether it’s in a work of art, in attention to our religious beliefs and customs, in everyday objects, or in our relations to others.
Yet, along with poems such as “Song for the Onion,” “Bread,” and “Plums,” are poems that touch on the surreal, like “Bathing in the Burned House,” in which a woman showers in full view of passers-by. Rigby speculates that Maybe the neighborhood wives// take turns bathing yards/ from the road, someone new each week and that Mid-August, any miracle could surface--/ Mary’s image graven in the road’s peeled tar.
This weaving of surreal with religious imagery can also be found in the collection’s longest poem, “The Story of Adam and Eve,” which has the epigraph “Boucicaut Master and Workshop, c. 1415.” The poem, which is written in several short sections, begins with the narrator’s speculation on those brothers painting; in cold rooms: deep blue/ and olive snaking/ down a tree. Other sections seem to be meditations on the work of these Boucicaut Masters, whose job it was to “illuminate” or embellish a manuscript:
Think of the calligrapher
gesso lamp-black oak gall mineral pigments
the book revealing
what bereft means: the field whelmed with salt
crows echoing their brothers the songbirds
a city of exiles given to powdered iron.
In closing her collection with the poem “Shroud of Turin,” Rigby urges us to see relics in the penny/ rubbed too long. She asks why we are willing to see trickery in the shroud, but not mercury/ rising in glass tubes? What I appreciate most in Rigby’s poems is their ability to invoke the reader’s participation in this lifelong quest to find meaning in that which surrounds us.
23pp.
