Paper Moon

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Mary Ellen Csamer’s first book, which is dedicated to the memory of
her mother, is divided into three sections.

“Learning the Words” opens with the commencement of a marriage,
children, a breakdown, and the wish to “make a whole” once more,
using the “beads / from the bracelets / the children wore in
hospital” and the “worn blankets / with their stale sweet smell / of
babies gone.” This is a section of truth-telling and life-living,
where the pain of loss surfaces in everyday images.

Section 2, “Blue Moons,” evokes a month with two moons, suggesting
the duality of life. “Night sounds frighten” her, but right is also
the time “to conceive a miracle,” while “fairy tales are lies”
and “summer holds the light / but winter, the memory of light.” For
Csamer, “There are poems in old men’s eyes, / in babies’ fingers,
poems in the wind / … in night screams / and morning silence.” If
they can be expressed, one is “alive” even in the midst of pain and
suffering.

The final section, titled “Letters Home,” reveals a farm-past where
“childhood summers / shone & passed like motes in evening light.”
Even in this land of fantasy, Csamer comments that while nesting in a
redwood tree, children “make sounds like small animals / caught in the
headlights.” The children, like the poet, are unconsciously aware of
the contradictions present in the reality of life.

Csamer is conscious of language and seems to struggle with the words
she chooses: she sees “language which is unique to her” as
“silence.” Alternatively, she claims a “manic me / untainted by
restraint.” From Csamer’s experience, women’s lives combine pots
and silences, and an upbringing that involves “Catechism (sounds/.
[which come] from our mouths like a foreign text).”

Csamer’s poems convey a general mood of sadness while at the same
time communicating universal truths and honest emotions that are
recognizable to all.