Blue Atlas
Blue Atlas, by Susan Rich. Red Hen Press, 2024. 111 pp. $17.95 (paperback)
Blue Atlas is an absorbing and heart-wrenching collection that revolves around the poet’s decision, thirty years back, to have an abortion rather than go full term with an unplanned pregnancy. As with many narratives of trauma, there is an underlying nexus of pain which renders the speaking voice hesitant or contradictory so that, one feels, the only certainty on the part of the poet is the absolute uncertainty of whether good life choices have been made. Indeed, the collection hones in on a crucial moment of decision reached only after a "nightmare" of indecision: “I decide / and undecide / a hundred times an hour” (“The Other Side of Paris,” p. 86). Leaving her lover's apartment in Paris on her "hardest day," the poet does "what was asked for . . . head[ing] towards the abortion" clinic in Manhattan ("The Decision," pp. 88-9). But even with the ordeal supposedly over, the nightmare is replayed endlessly as "a mixtape" (p. 88) of "different lives" (p. 86), or other possible destinies that might have unfolded.
In the long aftermath, the poet can only imagine variations of what might have been. Haunted by the recriminatory feeling that she “should have kept the baby” (“Crepe Myrtle,” p. 104), the poet lives an “afterlife” of regret amidst specular ruminations of how her offspring “would have developed” in an alternate life journey (“Binocular Vision,” p. 80). Yet, at the time of the pregnancy, the “checked-out father-not-to-be” (“The Abortion Question,” p. 59) proves unsupportive and the urgency of choice is devastatingly angst-ridden with the poet’s younger self under siege, not least because she is “four months pregnant” (“Shadowboxing,” p. 82). Choice in “The Abortion Question” is specific to “the future of your body” (p. 58) at the moment of choosing and not to be adjudicated on by legislators. But, as conveyed in these powerful poems, the question “did you have a choice?” becomes so fraught with the complexity of circumstance — “the deadbeat non-dad” and “sister (executor of the plan)” — as to be a rhetorical one to be answered in the negative (p. 58). This “choiceless choice” (Binocular Vision,” p. 81) generates resentment down the years and many of these poems allow the poet to “take [her] anger out of the box” in which it has lain since her reluctant acquiescence in a kind of execution (“In Praise of Anger,” p. 87). The collection’s power lies in its testing inquiry, with hindsight, of how “The Decision” — “baby or no baby?” — will reverberate painfully as a major turning-point in the poet’s life (p. 88).
So, this compelling book can be read, I suggest, in terms of the patterns underlying traumatic narrative as explored by literary scholars. Cathy Caruth helpfully reminds us that “the Greek trauma, or ‘wound,’ originally referr[ed] to an injury on a body” (p. 3) and, in her important study Unclaimed Experience (1996), she explores how the “story of trauma” is typically “belated” (p. 7) and involves a “double telling” in recounting “the story of a death” (p. 8) and its paradoxical survival. Without getting too involved in the intricacies of psychoanalytic theories of mourning, one can readily see how Rich’s poems adhere to the temporal dislocation intrinsic to the delayed “telling” of a “story of trauma.” For one thing, the remembered “wound” is physical as well as psychic. In “My Little Biscuit / My Lemon Peel,” for example, “the fetus” has the viscous identity of an “almost / child” (p. 65). The abortion itself, in “Arborist / Abortionist,” involves the “severing / . . . of a stubborn bud” using a “steel tool” (p. 16) and the survival of the whole ordeal leaves a “deep, sharp, sting” as if the “body could outlast death” (“Self Portrait with Bee Sting,” p. 67).
Although Rich’s early poems, published in The Cartographer’s Tongue (2000), emerge from her time working for the U.S. Peace Corps in Niger, west Africa, nothing in them alludes directly to the personal drama which unfolded for Rich in those years. The would-be father of her child is remembered, however, in this new collection, as being “loved . . . / to obsession like a pop song / a West African highlife beat” (“How did I love him —,” p. 49). Thus the “ashes of an almost marriage”, love and loss, have required half a lifetime to process (“Boketto,” p. 55). The interval between experience and expression, the “double telling” between “the story and the unbearable nature of an event,” in Curuth’s phrasing, is structurally embedded in individual poems and in how they are organized in Blue Atlas as a whole.
Indeed, the book’s first section (one of seven) is headed “Hourglass” to foreground the temporal complexity of telling and the ticking timebomb of pregnancy. The poetic telling occasionally breaks down to verbal fragments, the pain of expression hindering the ability to tell:
Refuting argument: Wanted out. Wanted none if it. None
of this ever happened.
[ ] To wake and have no memory—
[ ] Locked away without a way.
[. . . //. . .]
Possible conclusion: Mybodymmybodybodymyboymybodymy
bodymybomb—
(“Outline for Freshman Composition,” p. 40)
One witnesses on the page the circularity of the speaker’s ruminations, here very effectively couched in terms of a freshman essay outline of argument / counterargument. And so, the book’s central “Conundrum / of choice” or “no choice” (“Metaphors,” p. 17) is rehearsed and reiterated, just as all novice essay writers are taught to underline and repeat their thesis statement in building up an argument.
The powerful back and forth across time between the poet’s crisis thirty years previously and the present of writing reminds the reader of the “Unintended Consequences” of the poet’s decision to “acquiesce” in the abortion (p. 40). Indeed, there is a studied linguistic blankness to some of these schoolroom phrases, as if “The rest of [her] life” (p. 40) will be suffused by lethe or forgetfulness. These latter connotations of emptiness are contained in the very name for the Sahara desert, from the Arabic, meaning “brown void,” as we learn from Gregory McNamee’s book The Desert Reader (p. 93). However, if the post-abortion void equates, in Rich’s life, to winning an “Olympic Gold for sleeping / solo in a single bed,” (“Single, Taken, Not Interested ü,” p. 94) this solitary somnolence is part of an American aftermath of career and middle age. By contrast, the desert terrain of Niger and Morocco is full of color, notably blue, with the Blue People of the Sahara being the Berber nomads of traditional Saharan society known for wearing blue cloth veils and indigo skin protector when traversing the dunes.
There are many moments of rapture in this collection where the “symphonic mess” (p. 51) of the crisis pregnancy is nevertheless placed in its context of a life deeply enriched through travel. Cures Include Travel (2006) — containing poems occasioned by visits to Bosnia, Ireland, Israel, Somalia and elsewhere — was the title of Rich’s second collection. Thus, in “Wedding Dress,” we enjoy a celebration of “The Most Rapturous fit” of “the West African wedding wrap” with its “soft tint of a Saharan sky” (p. 51). Even if the speaker feels that her “unfaithful lover” would subsequently “lift the blue / scarf from my almost gorgeous life,” the poems gathered here testify to a gorgeousness that, though marred, is never occluded (“Self Portrait with Market Man,” p. 46). In fact, the abortion and its aftermath intensify the affirmatory glow of the Tuareg people, the traditional Berber nomads, whom she remembers from Zinder, Niger:
In the Sahel she had wandered millet fields, entered
encampments where women held her in Tuareg robes,
stained her hands in indigo. She oriented her limbs
by sand dunes; then, directions to the next well—
immersed herself in a galaxy of bodies . . .
(“The Day After the Abortion,” pp. 34-5)
These lines are full of “transatlantic longing” (p. 34), intensely felt, written through the painful lens of “post-op” depression in Manhattan. The love affair is with a people and a place as well as with the actual lover.
If cures include travel, Morocco has been a more recent haven for the poet. Information on the “Blue Atlas Cedar . . . native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco” is included as the collection’s epigraph (p. 11) and the renowned hardiness of this conifer underscores the violent wrenching of the “Arborist / Abortionist” in the poem of that title (p. 16). This is a “gymnosperm” tree, having neither “flowers nor fruits,” according to the epigraph, and Stephanie Conway further outlines in her article “An Introduction to Gymnosperms” how the word “comes from ancient Greek and means ‘naked seed’” (p. 2). One therefore senses a matrix of intended meanings behind this allusion. The “stubborn bud” (p. 16) of the fetus, and the feeling of something — the baby or a void — “Curled deep inside” (p. 34) one’s being both seem analogous to the gymnosperm as does the “solo” (p. 94) life of the poet, creative and autonomous, yet vulnerable, with “No nuclear life. No child calling out—” (“Curriculum Vitae,” p. 101). There is also the confessional aspect of these poems, the unflinching honesty of a “naked” voice. The graciousness of the Blue Atlas Cedar also brings a certain arborescent feeling of renewal in such poems as “Medina, Morning” featuring a “beautiful Berber merchant” whose “ointment and oil” and “cups of tea” offer the medicinal balm of “new selves . . . / in the High Atlas” (p. 78).
Given the acrimonious debates surrounding “The Abortion Question” on both sides of the Atlantic, this collection has a special relevance in the current moment. As a deeply personal account, it resists any direct investiture in political debates and dismisses the would-be roles of “lawyer” and “judge” (“The Abortion Question,” p. 60). Instead, these poems acknowledge, in a deeply admirable way, a sense of personal brokenness which is woven into the book’s fabric like “small” pieces of “spiritual” cloth kept over from west Africa (“Wedding Dress,” p. 51).
Reviewer Ben Keatinge won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2022 for his manuscript "The Wireless Station." A regular reviewer for Poetry Ireland Review, he published, as editor, Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy in 2019 (Cork UP). He lives in Dublin.
