Review
Mythology of Touch by Mary Stone Dockery
Woodley Press, 2012
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
In her debut collection, Mary Stone Dockery identifies a secret mythology of touch in a world where the human touch seems to be an increasingly arcane phenomenon, possibly in danger of becoming nothing more than myth.
In "Letter for Physicality," the speaker insists on the existence of the body, and her words could be read either as affirming the reality of something ephemeral or attempting to galvanize something once constant but now lost—or perhaps as both.
I cry My body and the buildings warp against sky shiver-metal mirage of city, of hands. It grows dark and darker. Still.
Reanimation emerges as a theme in this collection, as lost loved ones are mourned, and in the final poem "Self-Portrait as Mortician," the speaker finds herself wishing she could "knead the skin of these bodies with/ my own hands, to reshape them,/ to pull an arm up and to lift a leg,/" reviving them through touch. The poem concludes, "if only we'd just stop looking." Again, it is the human touch, not the human gaze, that is needed to heal.
Dockery has a knack for building momentum in these sensual poems. In "Spinning," she takes the reader on a dizzying ride, tearing down familiar country roads.
... She was used to the sound of cicadas when the roads narrowed, how their drone exploded around her then lifted, the murmur of the world just like a soft breeze right when you need one. She rode through the Ozarks and their weary bluffs, through sands and cacti and clouds. Dusk and its rum-glow of light...
While Dockery knows how to infuse the fantastic and inanimate with an air of sensuality, she also knows how to weave an air of mystery into what is most literally sensual, as in "Letter for the Last Time I Saw You": "... You once/ put your hand through me and we shuddered// within the translucence, you poked around/ for the sound of stars inside of me, wind chimes,// bitter wings, golden, glass..."
While the collection holds together thematically from start to finish, structurally, the verse ranges from prose poems, which comprise most of the collection's first section, to sparer, more experimental free forms, as found in "Self-Portrait as Lovers": "At the window. A hummingbird. A ghost./ Wings scraping the highway. Like your lips// across my shoulder blade. The sound of ache./ A stinging whisk. A palpitation of asphalt. Of breath. Sometimes/ I think the bird watches. Us. Just to show// how slow. We move. You are eating again. The same."
The emotional appeal of these poems lies in the immediacy of the imagery as much as in the urgency of the tone, and the former aspect, that of sounds, colors, textures, narrated dispassionately, only lends force to the latter, as in the opening lines of "When Want Becomes Salt":
Try to open this casket with a burning clam shell, Listen for the scrape of husk and copper, incisions for each claw and nick on the smooth pearl-blue lid. Remember: a boat in a frame does not sway, no matter how blue and dark the waves swoop up, clinging in strokes to a wet page.
