She

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.

She is described, on the back jacket cover, as “A novel in poetry
about the depths of a woman’s consciousness.” It tells the story of
Penelope-Marie Lancet’s obsession to have a child and the
“fragmentation of her personality” that is revealed in letters to
her younger sister, Jasmine. Penelope lives in Calgary, her sister in
Trinidad. A preface in prose is written in the hand of Jasmine in which
she describes her sister. “Penelope-Marie, was the artistic, dramatic,
literary one. Even before she left school, and certainly while at
university, Penny often wrote ten—or fifteen—page letters in a
highly literary mixture of poetry and prose…. It amazed—perhaps,
more honestly, annoyed—us when she began to publish.” I am not
certain whether this preface is designed to give the reader a sense of
reality, or whether it is reality. The family did not appreciate
Penny’s indiscretion, exaggeration, her “sometimish” behavior that
was “socially unpredictable.” Yet, her letters, faxes, poems, and
“scenes” are now published by her sister. Is this a conundrum for
the reader to resolve?

The opening letter, composed as a stream-of-consciousness prose poem
describes the city of Calgary: “Our north bank’s modest villages
time’s cul-de-sacs / touched with the gentle ungentle huddle under /
wait a drunken boot.” It gradually slips into “painful whirling
falls momentary / absences blankness.”

Many of the passages are written in dialect that takes so long to
decipher that I am sure I miss the point. For example, in “mAri
Performs,” one reads: “jes banal / to tink us aberashun / wha dere /
to heal / in we variousness?” Patches of violence scattered throughout
the prose make me feel that you have to have the stomach for this type
of material. “She rummaged in kitchen drawers until she found shears
and, shrieking, attacked first her hair, then the discarded sweater. It
was not enough. When the blade plunged into her thigh there was no
feeling, just blood welling up,” and so it continues. This is not a
book I would choose to read; however, I acknowledge that in performance
and for a specific audience, there is uniqueness, passion, and
compassionate understanding for women who live with the constant crises
of multiple personality disorder.