The idea
of position is key to reading Barbara Goldberg’s masterful Breaking
& Entering: New and Selected Poems from The Word Works. Among the
selections of new and previously published work, Goldberg uses position to show
us place, placement, and power.
In
“Furlough,” the opening poem, we see a father, possibly a soldier given his
“tall, lean, muscular” stature, tossing his children in the air. The narrator
says, “I love/ to see them drop, not weightless, but light// as grenades.” It’s
chilling that “fear can be fun” and how the dad handles his kids is a kind of
“hand to hand combat.” The Dresser is more than alarmed—where is the location
of this poem? We know by the word dunam as in “That a dunam// of earth
is worth dying for?” Only in Israel is land measured in this way—a dunam is
equal to one thousand square meters. And thereby we understand that this man is
on temporary hiatus (furlough) from his military duties and is now attending to
his family responsibilities.
In
Goldberg’s first book Berta Broadfoot and Pepin the Short: A Merovingian
Romance, a working-class girl Aliste replaces Berta, a king’s royal bride. Aliste’s
mother Margiste, a “trusted handmaiden to Queen Blancheflor,” Berta’s mother,
has been entrusted to deliver Berta to her bridegroom. Except Margiste wants
more for her daughter who is also Berta’s half-sister. In “Aliste Considers Her
Position,” placement is seriously contemplated, but Aliste feels powerless.
Who was
there to turn to when I found
his
morning gift, a handsome brooch
encrusted
with pearls, on my pillow?
…
Not
Mother, hopping about with glee, fingers
greasy
from palace meat. She pokes my ribs
and
cackles, “We fooled him, eh? We two
make quite
a team.”
…
while I,
dumb
sheep, play the part of Queen.
… I’ve thought of claiming
defect of
consent, diriment impediment, but
Mother
would be lost for good, poor sheep.
In
subsequent books by Goldberg—Cautionary Tales, Marvelous Pursuits,
The Royal Baker’s Daughter, and Kingdom of Speculation—the
pursuit of power looms large with an ample
dash of deception.
Consider
in “The Future Has Already Happened” (from Cautionary Tales) how a
little girl known as Red Riding Hood has not only triumphed over the wolf but
sees this as the future with the woodcutter for her own progeny.
…Imagine
the wild Caesarean,
the ax and
its fresh cut, the blade
running
deep. And me springing out
to dance
on the planked floor with Granny
…
Give
serious attention to “Ballad of the Id” (from Marvelous Pursuits) an
internal powerhouse that seems inescapable.
I am your
rose hips and bunting and bootleg
and I am
your black bangs those devil’s
spikes
… without
me you’re puny and
pallid and
prudish …
I bit your
sister and squealed on the porter
and who
pulled you out of the muck of intention
…who stole your tom-tom
just ask
and I’ll tell you I did I did
Evaluate
Goldberg’s duplicity carefully when you read “Fairytale” (from The Royal
Baker’s Daughter).
Once upon
a time
a baby boy
was born
to a
suicidal woman
and a
suicidal man.
He was not
born to make her sane
nor to
help the marriage last
but
because his birth would save
his daddy
from the draft.
…
The little
boy is now a man
and takes
himself a wife.
One hand
gently strokes her hair,
the other
strokes his knife.
The knife represents
power, but might the knife be a stand-in for his penis? Certainly, sex can be
another tool of power.
The final set of selections from Kingdom of
Speculation take romances, fairytales, cautionary tales, and psychological
treatises to a heightened level of power. Could these poems be stories of
Balkis—Queen of Sheba or the woman Hatshepsut who became the Pharaoh Hatshepsu
(a woman pharoah who presented herself as a man)? In “The Master of Chance,” we meet “The Princess looking no more/ like a
Princess than you or I” who dwells in “the Province of Chance.” It’s an odd exchange
between a shabby royal and a card-playing man calling himself the Master of
Chance. He wants her to marry him so she can polish his casket of gold which
she recognizes as one that had belonged to her father. The poem ends with the
man asserting his power:
A woman
in my employ, as is everyone
in this State, for I’m the Master
of Chance, I cut the deck, declare
what’s
wild, as you are my dear, my Balkis,
my
Hatshepsut, my true Queen of Hearts.
“A Great
Darkness Falls,“ the last poem of Breaking & Entering we recognize
the shabby princess who now has possession of the King’s coffer which she uses
as “a fertile bed/ for her cuttings and seeds” while incubating in her purse
the “Egg of perfection.”
… All is
poised for
an ever
after. Sing praise to the Great
Lord Chaos,
his enabling dark. Praise
to the
touch of a choice companion.
And praise
to the Egg of Perfection
glowing in
the folds of a lady’s purse.
These lines
close the book on all Goldberg’s books in that wish for a fairytale ending that
provides love, union, and progeny, while placing the power in the female grip.
The book’s
title Breaking & Entering comes from the poem “Alarums and Excursions”
(from Marvelous Pursuits). The poem deals with a modern-day woman who
interacts with a security professional, “a man who knows the tricks of
breaking/ and entering and how to secure all she holds/ dear from those who
would trespass against her.” The cover image, a digital artwork entitled
“Tower” by Catrin Welz-Stein shows a youthful nude maiden (a figure like those
in Renaissance paintings by Titian) embracing the bottom of a tall building
built possibly on a volcano and which is breaking apart and on fire. The nude’s
long hair is swept up in the wind of the explosion. The image speaks ably to
the explosive emotional content of Goldberg’s book which presciently summons
our current day turmoil that deals with place, placement, and power as well as
truth and lies.
