Andrew Zawacki

Keelhauledheart

And Her Soul Out of Nothing. By Olena Kalytiak Davis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Winner of the Brittingham Prize and an exhilarating debut, Olena Kalytiak Davis’ And Her Soul Out Of Nothing is the intensely wrought articulation of the painful divisions between body and soul, and of the ways each is forged or dismantled. Its title completes the biblical passage stating that Eve’s body came from bone, and while Davis wonders whether the soul is "merely the sum / of our mental life," she also demonstrates that the self is a process influenced by a very real postlapsarian world. A first-generation Ukrainian-American raised in Detroit, Davis has lived in Chicago, San Francisco, Lviv, Paris, and in two Alaskan cities, and her poetry reflects both geographical and linguistic dislocation. She poignantly reveals how the soul breaks down, or is ripped apart and scattered, until one is only the afterimage of the places one lived in and left, the parents one loved and lost, and the people one gave oneself to in return for nothing at all. In baring the self’s fragile tenacity, she candidly accounts for the violence, absurdity and unexpected pleasures involved in people’s emergence into "full grown tender things called souls." Her urgent but poised interrogations lack those strains of self-pity often characterizing similar attempts by even more mature poets, yet her scrutiny is not indifferent, and her eerie, caustic sense of irony is not an evasion.

Her attention to the divided self posits the body as a skeleton which the soul can rarely inhabit peacefully. In the taut, moving "Thirty Years Rising," Davis internalizes the cityscape of Detroit, or discovers it written on her body:

It’s in my bones. My sternum

runs like Woodward Avenue,

it’s pinnated, parked on, full

of dirt, holding women in wigs and cigarettes, bars

lit from the outside in, it’s overflowing

with pooltables and ashtrays. My ribs

are holding up factories. . .

Inscribing on herself the cities she’s known, however, is not a position of strength. Rather, Davis admits the panicked, disruptive vulnerability of rootlessness:

I hopped

turnstiles to ride the Metro,

memorized EL tracks and Muni stations

until I had a huge worn subway

map on the inside of my head, but couldn’t get off at any stop. . .

I didn’t say it,

but: My sternum is breaking

with this. . . .

She explores the disconcerting ways in which she has been only "The Outline I Inhabit," and many poems are premised on an anatomical vision. More organic emotions of fulfillment usually take the form of a refusal to submit to damage or affliction, and are compelling in their understated relief, sometimes involving cautious humor, self-mockery, or guarded apprehension of nature.

Her struggles with the self’s fissures are also situated in poems of interpersonal relationships. In "The Unhoused Heart," the conceit of enlisting a shipwright to overhaul a vessel becomes a description of a woman trying to add weight to her too-thin frame, a failing activity in turn revealed as a conceit for her need to fortify her "keelhauledheart," as Davis again dramatizes the soul’s problematic relation to the body. In poems such as "Like Kerosene," she shows how isolation can occur even in love, and her more erotic poems are occasionally critiques of masculine possession, as when she considers a man watching her and notes, "He thinks my skeleton a fossil / he’ll find in his flesh." Elsewhere she recalls plaintively how she "gave up / this body for so many others," and even when she seems to be turning the tables, as in "Perhaps By Then You Will No Longer Be In Love," the infidelities committed only in a woman’s mind are rendered as transformative self-betrayals, resulting in further longing. Many poems concern how love affairs direct the self’s trajectory, and Davis’ meditations on such consolations and disappointments are suggested by the antithesis of titles like "In Defense of Marriage" and "Against Devotion." The formal, judicial rhetoric of each prefigures both the seriousness and condescension with which she treats marital fidelity and broader exercises in "reintroducing myself / to myself."

The collection is some fifteen pages too long, which is disappointing given Davis’s otherwise uncanny restraint. Several shorter lyrics, such as "Hey Precious, Listen" and "She Was Just A Sketch," are themselves sketches to unrealized poems, while others, like "Silkweed," dilute the cumulative effect of more stringent but elaborate successes. Plath’s cauterized self-studies inform Davis, as do Glück’s interrogative, accusatory defiances and Dickinson’s vertiginous journeys beyond death–yet nothing in And Her Soul Out Of Nothing sounds like anyone but Davis, whose idiosyncratic, elusive precision results in a fevered and often beautiful lyricism. This is a provocative apologia by a restless poet.