Beth Bachmann. Temper.

Wells, Zachariah

Beth Bachmann. Temper. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

"Fiercely distilled" is how American poet Nick Flynn characterizes the poems of Beth Bachmann's debut collection. Temper--a polysemous word connoting both uncontrolled rage and the moderation required to tame it--is a unified sequence of short lyrics (50 in all, only 2 of which are longer than a sonnet). The poems deal with the mysterious murder of Bachmann's 18-year-old sister in 1993--a murder for which her father was a suspect. In these methodical, hyper-condensed poems, there are no stray words or sloppy syntax. Bachmann's gifts aren't restricted to discipline, either, as powerfully memorable images and profoundly intelligent lines are scattered through-out, such as the conclusion of "Paternoster," a meditation on the Catholic prayer, "a line with a series of hooks" by the same name, as well, of course, as the more colloquial phrase "our father." The poem deftly weaves all three together: "The red treble designed to mock blood, to stick into the skin: one suspect-- / our father-- / Put this begging in your mouth, a decade of loaded beads." Bachmann's discipline and rigour, however, are also something of an Achilles heel. Lynn Emanuel says that Temper "quakes with sorrow one moment and is steely with forensic detail the next," but it seems to me that there is very little "quaking sorrow," or the "abandon" cited by Nick Flynn, to be found. Distillation serves to concentrate the force of a substance, but also removes impurities--not all of which are undesirable: it's better to drink water that's mineral-rich, even if the distilled stuff keeps your iron clean. Bachmann seems conscious that her approach to Temper's incredibly difficult subject matter begets a certain monochromatism. She writes in "Colorization": "Black and white distances the viewer." The poem concludes: "If this were in color, would you know whether or not to be afraid?" This is a knotty problem, especially for a young poet in her first book: the same self-conscious control that allows Bachmann to write of this subject at all keeps the poems at arm's length. Jehanne Dubrow has said of Temper that "the collection's subject is representation. How does the poet ... position herself in relation to the murder scene, the sister's body, the line-up, the mystery of it all?" These are writerly concerns; the extent to which a reader will appreciate their foregrounding will depend largely on the extent of the reader's own writerly preoccupations. Ultimately, however, even if the first 49 poems are mostly scaffolding used to arrive at the book's moving final "Elegy," the work is well worth it for poet and reader alike: "No shepherds. No nymphs. Maybe just one: / the girl with the fawn strips like a fisherman's rose. / Death turns its mouth red. It can no longer lie / in the lilies. Not on my watch. The lake is filthy / with silver fish sticky with leeches. Lovesick, / I flick a feather into the water. No stones. / Only the one in my pocket, heavy as a tongue."