Requited: Poetry as a Truth-Telling Mechanism
The effectiveness of Kristina Marie Darling’s book Requited lies in its ability to remind readers that it is human nature to crave to be what we are not. To crave what we don’t have. Darling treats poetry as a truth-telling mechanism. This is a book that is aware of itself, its truths, and how it wants to tell them. The self-referential nature of this text urges the truth to make itself known. It enables the use of poetry as a truth-telling device, and reminds the reader of fundamental truths.
The book is the chronicle of a couple’s relationship, and their eventual parting. We begin the story in a garden, which might be a nod toward to the Garden of Eden, and what it symbolizes for us: a clean slate; new beginnings; fresh starts. Gardens and forests are so richly associated in Western literature with emotional truths, and the unfettered psyche. This trope was a clever one to utilize for the story of a romantic relationship because this draw that humans have toward the new, the fresh, the undiscovered, is what makes new relationships so intoxicating, but it is also what makes the end of relationships so difficult, because in breaking up with someone we acknowledge that a part of our innocence has been irrevocably lost.
The couple’s travels through these landscapes seems to mirror the shifting of their own minds and bodies. I was especially moved by the image of the deer that the couple encounters at the beginning of the book:
“Near the road, an injured deer has been left to die. Its dark brown eyes seem to wonder why we’ve left the roses behind.”
Like the Garden of Eden, deer also have connections with innocence and purity, but the image of the deer accomplishes things that the garden does not. The deer is a much more starting and emotionally relevant image because the deer is a living, breathing entity in a way that the garden is not. The deer looking at the couple so plaintively— essentially asking them why they are leaving the garden—enforces the emotional magnitude of the situation: the couple’s separation, and the resulting loss of their innocence and purity.
The passage about the girl’s lips turning blue is similarly jarring and powerful:
“How many dead flowers would it take to cover a field. You’re beginning to miss the girls in another city, their parade of torn dresses. A disheveled skirt retains an odd charm. In shop windows, mannequins still cling to bouquets. Their starched petals. My cold blue lips.”
The girl here is becoming a part of the landscape she is moving away from. This might be an allusion to the feeling that we are leaving a part of ourselves behind when we leave a relationship, and our desire to hold on to what we are losing. When we enter into relationships with people our identities shift, merge, and blur with the identity of the other person.
The emotional center of the book—the passage which I think anchors the entire text is found a bit later in the book:
“While I sleep, you’re documenting failure. An experience gives rise to ‘narrative.’ A heroine counting ‘unfaithful stars.’ Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphor. Above us, the room is heaving its small oceans. Somehow you imagine an elegant universe.”
The self-referential quality in this book manifests through the litany of literary devices and tropes the narrator mentions here– the poem is reminding us that we are reading a poem, by talking about various aspects of poetry. Reading this, we see that poetry serves as a way to document and memorialize failure. Maybe metaphor is a way for us to make ourselves into something we are not.
The erasure that closes the book—which is, essentially, the first section of the book with sections expertly whited out—seems essential to the narrative of the couple. It allows the book to come full circle, and is a way for the couple to dialog with one another—maybe in real time, or in each individual mind. Or maybe the epilogue is a reimagining of the past. A way to re-do what we have done, to right wrongs, to reevaluate and revisit or lives. Darling’s work reminds us that poetry gives us permission to do this—reinvent our lives.
Press: BlazeVOX, 2014
Page length: 41 pages
Price: $12.00
Lisa M. Cole is the author of the poetry collections Heart Full of Tinders and Dreams of the Living, and is a contributor to Wood Becomes Bone: A Mental Health Awareness Series, all three titles forthcoming from ELJ publications. Lisa has also written six chapbooks, most recently Negotiating with Objects (Sundress Publications) and The Bodyscape and Living in a Lonely House (Dancing Girl Press). She was a recipient of the Lois Nelson Award in Creative Non-Fiction in 2005 and a runner-up in SLAB’s Elizabeth R. Curry poetry contest earlier this year. Lisa teaches writing workshops in Tucson Arizona’s prisons as well as in various places within Tucson’s vibrant literary communities, including the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Casa Libre En La Solona. You can read her book reviews at http://moonglows-reviews.blogspot.com/. Find her on Facebook in both personal and professional capacities at https://www.facebook.com/lisa.cole.poet and https://www.facebook.com/lisa.marie.cole
