Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture by Novy Marianne

Author:Novy, Marianne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Presence and Absence: At Play with Ancestral Ghosts

In The Purgatorio, Virgil, Dante's guide in the afterlife, says to another ghost who has stooped to clasp his feet, “Brother! Refrain, for you are but a shadow, and a shadow is but what you see.” The ghost, rising, responds, “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.”9 Sandra McPhersons poetry imagines absence so palpably you can practically swim in it, as she positions it into investigatable realms, mappable regions, and imaginary spaces. Like Dante, she works with such love toward her ghosts that she seems to “treat the shadows like the solid thing.” Absent others in her work often seem more real than human characters, bringing to mind a charged, newly realized Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, or Denise Levertov—poets whose emotional messages are redolent with visionary descriptions of objects and places.

One of the emotional preoccupations of McPherson's first books is loss, which she studies not as a mourner but as a clear-eyed refugee searching its face to locate her own identity. The subtext of adoption is never better glossed than in the introduction to her second book, Radiation, whose epigram claims that our identities are forged by what has rejected us. McPherson quotes Valéry:

The color of a thing is that one which, out of all the colors, it repels and cannot assimilate. High heaven refuses blue, returning azure to the retina. . . . To our senses things offer only their rejections. We know them by their refuse. Perfume is what the flowers throw away.

Perhaps we only know other people by what they eliminate, by what their substance will not accept. If you are good, it is because you retain your evil. If you blaze, hurling off sparkles and lightning, your sorrow, gloom, and stupidity keep house within you. They are more you, more yours, than your brilliance. Your genius is everything you are not. Your best deeds are those most foreign to you.10

This epigram invites readers to participate in reading the poems both for what they are and for what they are not, a sort of fabric of hidden opposites. Like the poems about adoption, abandonment, and reconnection in Radiation, this prose poem concisely burrows between natural experience, the identity of others, and the poet/adoptee, the “you” who is keeping her emotions housed within. This quote suggests poetic responses to adoption: the sense of being abandoned; the sense that it was done for “the best of all concerned”; the sense that an adoptee's curiosity shifts between the self, the birth parents, and a lost collective we. Valéry shifts pronouns midway through his meditation, so that what is at first an impersonal observation about the sky, perfume, and other inanimate substances becomes next a shared, group experience (“we only know other people . . .”) and then an individual, second-person account (“They are more you . . .”). His impersonal naturalist observation—that colors

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