Something to Madden the Moon

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

Something to Madden the Moon is a banquet of imagery. Riches thinks
through her senses, introducing the reader to her world with a broad
range of gestures, from the caress of a child’s or lover’s hand to
the slash of a cat’s claw or suicide’s blade. She embraces the full
spectrum of imagery: primarily visual, but also tactile, auditory,
olfactory, and gustatory. Her usual method is a stream of consciousness
embodied in long, prosy, free verse lines or actual prose-poem blocks.
There are pluses and minuses here. Because she stays close to her images
and is respectful of where they take her, Riches avoids to a great
degree the disquieting feeling of voyeurism that often accompanies the
reading of confessional poetry. Clearly the poetry is rooted in personal
experience, and clearly much of that experience is painful, but we do
not feel coerced by Riches into following a blatantly pointing finger
into the recesses of her soul. Most of the poetry deals with everyday
experiences that trigger difficult emotions for each individual.
Further, the route is imagistic and exploratory; we’re entering a
world rather than reading a diary. These lines (from “Convergence”)
capture the method as well as the thematic concern of the book: “This
is where all comes back, this foothold, threshold, / invitation to a
joint venture aimed at opening the / hours to a stranger landscape.”

But letting the image lead in a stream of consciousness can result in
gratuitous obscurity—for example, “I see you as the moment before /
smoke leaves the sunbeam that took it from breath // if a rose has one
petal that says everything a rose has to say / in the silence before it
loosens then your tongue is the lost / fall of a rising sound it licks
the wasting moon” (“hold me in a moment thin as light”). Here we
just wish Riches would speak more clearly. The associations and
connotations are rich, to be sure, but so rich they tend to clot and
muffle sense. At times, as well, Riches strays into cute sentimentality,
as in some of the poems from the baby’s or child’s perspective. Such
an angle is notoriously hard to bring off, as the poems in
“birthing” magazines attest. The point of view can’t help but
appear faked, shouting out that “really Mommy or Daddy did this.”
Yet from our perspective some parts of early childhood must have been
troublesome, if not terrifying. Here, for example, we can see the
sentimentality uneasily mixing with something stronger: “Mother says
my mouth is a tunnel, the spoon a train choo choo the awful spoon coming
slowly tapping my teeth. Throat tight. Shut my lips. She pushes them
open . . .” (“the child given language”). Riches should perhaps be
applauded for attempting the point of view, despite the uneven results .
. . perhaps.