Advance Praise for Cleopatra Mathis
Review by Tryst

There are books and books and more books and such little time. I mourn the fact that I shall not be able to read them all and will miss some great books in my lifetime as a consequence of having too many to choose from. But once in a while when I read a truly great book, I feel compensated, even blessed by the powers-that-be for writers as Cleopatra Mathis. I have an advance copy of White Sea published by Sarabande Books due to release July 1, 2005 and this is one of those few times in my life I am actually anticipating a book's release, anxiously awaiting its arrival. I want to announce to the world, "This is poetry!" and by God, it is!

Any struggling writer with doubts needs to know that great poems can be created in their lifetime, but it must take the dedication of the entire self towards that end and I believe Cleopatra Mathis has reached it. Just listen to these lines from "Salt":

All those years I went the way of grief,
     turning my stony eye on disorder, something to be cleaned
          and fixed. I was lost, scrubbing away at the hidden,

hating the vase where the fruitflies nested,
     the artful bowl that held ruined fruit.
          Throw away the rot, I said, making myself saint

of the immaculate, not knowing a thing about the soul.

By the time you've read those introductory lines, there's no stopping midway, no putting the book down. Dinner will get mysteriously burned, phone calls will have to be put on hold. But don't make the mistake that this is a reading marathon even though it's taken me almost four months to read and absorb every poem in the book, a good book can't be skimmed over--not one single word.

White Sea is divided into three sections. Section I consists of poems that take place in rural Louisiana. It is about a young girl coming into awareness as in "Want" (narrated in retrospect) and "Waiting":

(Want)

I come back to paper scattered on sand, shutters banging

and my young self still out there,
stumbling on the blowing beach,
high tide sucking her ankles
as she fights her way in a sideways gust.

I can't see her through the storm
of so many years, and what can I do with her anyway?
Furious girl, daring it all

(The Waiting)

I could still turn away. The tree,
another gorgeous southern thing, held me

from a longing so fierce I would go numb with it.
That world outside would claim me, close the self, lock it tight,
and what would it take to open again?

In Section II, the death of the writer's friend, Linda, is the subject of most of the poems. I've read a lot of death poems in my life, and in this instance, I'm recalling some of the poems by Marie Howe and Mark Doty. I'm often turned off by poems that become maudlin and exploit death. Perhaps, the one poem in this section that leaned a tad toward foreshadowing and sentimentality was "Linda's Poem" but then again, who would deny the writer this personal reflection any more than her grief? The rest of the poems in the section were full of pathos, sometimes angry, sometimes bitter, but above all, they were dignified. I cried, in spite of myself. In this particular passage, I was touched by how the poem validates the brother's feelings: giving a voice to the survivor, suffering that is not commiserated between the two, but silently understood.

(Called Back: II)

Now she called a truce, she'd withdraw, return
to her brother waiting in Providence, the station's
faint salt air. He took her bag, always the same
desire to please her, his same sweetness,
though the gesture now seemed watchful, conscious, part of
her essential removal from the life of ordinary things.
She was not ordinary. The trip was not a whim.
The fact of dying took up every space, all her weight
belonged to it, all her self in its service.

As for Section III and the rest of the poems in this book, I don't want to spoil it for the reader. There is no end, no beginning, just this wonderful constant flux of words that thrum to a lyrical passion. Mathis' uncompromisingly clear and uncomplicated vision aches with beauty. You can study her work for years and never know how she developed the language skills to match that vision. I sense instinct--years and years of honing her instinct, working at her craft and I thank her for that sacrifice.

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