Sarah Vap's Faulker's Rosary

My Ramke books were overdue at the library, so I am moving on to the Vap. My book club, a very small group of writers, just read this one, and two of us met last night to discuss it. I very much enjoyed this book, and I read it leaisurely, several times, over a period of several months. How all poetry collections ought to be read, probably.

I discovered Vap while googling another poet. I read her first as an essayist, and the first essay I read by her identified her as a mother. It's a beautiful essay, which you can read here. What I stuck with me from it, what I remembered about it before I reread it, was this passage:

"I want to ask them [contemporary women writers], not necessarily about their writing, but about their lives. How does their day go? Is their house clean? How clean? Where do they keep all their books?

Anything that helps me know anything about how to do it."

So for obvious reasons (if the reasons are not obvious, see my other blog link below) I was drawn to Vap, and I ordered her latest volume of poetry, which is described in reviews as being "about" pregnancy and childbirth, which also interested me. Most readers are somewhat wary of any writing "about" pregnancy and childbirth or motherhood. Such writing is suspect of being "sentimental." And maybe it's a fair suspicion--I'll admit that I've read and even written some pretty sappy poems about those subjects. But it seems a little unfair, however, that a poem about being pregnant or having a baby has to work so hard to prove it isn't sentimental. Sentiment is essential to both writing a good poem and being a good mother. This is leading me into a discussion of aesthetics I don't have time to complete, so I'll leave it there for now.

In any case, Vap's poems, which deal not with a run-of-the-mill pregnancy but a pregnancy in which she lost one of a set of twins, aren't sentimental. They are often quite personal, often fragmented, occasioanly, to me anyway, somewhat opaque, but no matter what they are compelling. I kept imagining them as paintings. They'd be collages, I think, somewhat impressionistic, sometimes surreal. What holds the book together, besides the narrative threads describing the pregnancy, are the moments of meticulous specificity. The poems will zoom in on a certain object in a scene--"our grape juice spilled by the dresser;" "crushing peppermints for the ice cream"--or a detail from a memory:

--she tied the bear-bells to our jeans,
called our dog for its warning smell, then sent us out to play--

(from "A bear as big as an angus in my parents' backyard"--Vap is also great with titles).

It's these details, I think, that save the poems from any danger of sentimentality. The collection, as I read it, seemed alive. As though the poems were being written or even lived as I read them.

Faulker's Rosary, though I still don't understand the title, was a fascinating example of a collection of poems that seemed to truly cohere. I would love to meet Sarah Vap, to get to talk to her about how she does it.