Review
Savage Machinery by Karen Rigby
Finishing Line Press, 2008
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Savage Machinery, Karen Rigby's accomplished second chapbook, might be described as an eclectic collection of ekphrases. Sure, there's Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe, and the 15th-century illuminated work of the Boucicaut Master, as well as an iconic scene from Sunset Boulevard, but Rigby seems to approach less likely subjects of ekphrastic treatment in the same manner as she does a work of art, subjects ranging from the scene out of an airplane window to homely kitchen staples like onions, plums, and bread.
The 16-poem chapbook opens with a dreamlike scene, "Bathing in the Burned House," a poem that could easily have been inspired by a painting, but the scene is one of Rigby's own imagining, and she faithfully describes her vision with an artist's eye for visual detail:
The house shimmers behind ribbons of heat. Like a child’s shoe-box diorama, three brick walls embrace the clawfoot tub. Its beveled rim is painted black. The brass rod stands upright as a heron. A woman steps behind the vinyl curtain, leans toward the spigot.
Having set the scene, she offers a narrative: “Women envy her freedom./ Tease their husbands, saying church drives/ and dry cleaning trips are white lies.”
But it's only a tentative one, leaving room for other possibilities; for instance, one in which the envious women are themselves, in collusion, the bather: “Maybe the neighborhood wives/ take turns bathing yards/ from the road, someone new each week.”
In this world where anything is possible, there's even room for a miracle, and the poem ends with one – but it's only a possibility: “Mid-August, any miracle could surface – Mary’s image graven in the road’s peeled tar.”
In "Sleeping on Buses," Rigby gives similar ekphrastic treatment to a very real-life scene, a woman sleeping on a bus.
The woman breathes, no one to signal home. She listens for her street the way the blind count closing doors. In the black Monongahela, bottomfish lie perfect in their element.
Those final two lines highlight one of Rigby's strengths, drawing dreamlike references and painting them in mystery through her careful choice of language. The Monongahela, a river that runs through Pittsburgh, is elevated by the music of its name into an otherworldly sort of archetype. Rigby uses words very consciously in this way throughout the chapbook, to effectively surprising effect.
It's her command of imagery that carries these poems, though, and which makes Rigby not merely a faithful renderer of objects or of others' visions, but an artist in her own right with language as her palette.
Her "Song for the Onion," is, in the tradition of the praise-song genre – rather than the literary equivalent of a still life – imaginative, sensual, and full of dynamic energy, “Let me flay the double-heart/ that stings or melts/ to caramel depending on time, temperature, weather.”
Again, though, Rigby delves even deeper, into the realm of religious mystery, a subject hinted at in the opening poem, but explored increasingly in the "food" poems and then explicitly in the final two, the last being "Shroud of Turin," an ekphrasis of a controversial object of devotion, which is tenderly posited as “the body of someone you once loved: an arabesque of skin.”
Still speaking of the onion, Rigby invokes the mysteries of spring, earth and sky, death and rebirth.
Let the roots drive the green hands skyward in spite of the earth. Let me remember the primitive, underground birth, and the kingdom of sleepers. Let me consider the lily’s doppelgänger.
The term "savage machinery," comes from "The Story of Adam and Eve," the penultimate and longest poem, which, after the Boucicaut illumination, depicts life before the fall, "before the savage machinery," although garden life isn't all roses even at the moment of Eve's birth, long before the serpent enters the picture: “the rib drawn through/ his quartered skin,/ the skin sewn and the woman/ born, a dark homunculus.”
Earlier in the chapbook, we witness candid glimpses of life after the savage machinery. One of the most compelling poems is "Norma Desmond Descending the Staircase as Salome," which manages, through vivid rendering, to elicit some measure of sympathy for a character self-absorbed beyond redemption, one acquainted with good and evil, but without knowledge:
When the klieg lights sear my skin I don’t remember the body bloating in the pool or the Black Maria nosing down my drive. I don’t remember that I shot Joe Gillis— only the blue flute singing. In that Kohl-rimmed prime I could live forever raising my own hand to my neck, each time surprised by its cool pulse.
The poems of "Savage Machinery" intrigue and compel careful (and repeated) readings because there is so much going on in them, at the surface as well as further underground.
There is more information about this publication on the author's website, karenrigby.com
