In “Bones - A City Poem” Cheryl Savageau writes these concluding lines:
forget that you are walking on the bones of your grandmothers
(from Dirt Road Home)
This work is a poem of chants - chants which call the spirits of the great blue heron, the snapping turtle, the red fox, and the “living waters of Quinsigamond.” Yet all these incantations begin with the word “forget.” “Bones – A City Poem” is a flowering kernel of themes central in Cheryl Savageau's volume Dirt Road Home: how it is that forgetting equals loss; what we must uncover to recognize the truth of our own lives in all that surrounds us to confirm it; how it is that our individual identities develop in dialectical relation to the impress of culture upon our psyches; and in an important paradoxical way, what is dangerous and most necessary to remember in the face of everything that buries those bones deeper, everything which seeks to extinguish the remnants of what lived through those bones. As the narrator in the poem “Survival” asks: how much is forgotten?”
Cheryl Savageau asks this question throughout her work as a Abenaki/French Canadian woman. What, precisely, has been forgotten, hidden, obscured, denied, and unrecognized is the ground the poems in Dirt Road Home reclaim with a resonance for all of us—Native/Indigenous, African, European, Asian—who are always in the process of knowing our own rootedness in all its luminous complexity. Central in this search is the world evoked in the poem “Looking for Indians,” which speaks of what we are taught not to see, even when it is our own reflection:
I remember asking him
what did they do
these grandparents
and my disappointment
when he said no buffalo
roamed the thick new england forest
they hunted deer in winter
sometimes moose, but mostly
they were farmers
and fishermen.
I didn't want to talk about it.
Each night my father
came home from the factory
to plant and gather,
to cast the line out
over the dark evening pond,
with me, walking behind him,
looking for Indians.
It is this reclamation, this discernment of paradox and dialectical motion which make Dirt Road Home an original and moving contribution to what Carolyn Forché describes in her anthology Against Forgetting: The Poetry of Witness as poems which “bear the trace of extremity within them.”
In Savageau's world, this extremity is no easy outsiderhood, and circles around the double-edged experience of exile, encompassing both that journey out to the most remote part, and the long walk home. In the poem “To Human Skin” we hear:
Over the last meal
we'll ever eat together
he tells me, I'm going up north,
up to the old home country,
Abenaki country. He smiles
in anticipation, his feet
already feeling the forest floor, while my stomach tightens
with the knowledge that he
is going home. I push
the feeling away. But when spirit
talks to spirit, there is no denying.
It is perhaps only from the exile's margins where the sight-line can be cast out to traverse that point of crossing between the inward and outward landscapes, as we hear in the powerful concluding stanza of the poem “Genealogy”:
Her maiden name
she always told me was
Laforte, the strong,
but now I find it is Lafford,
as in a place to cross rivers
as in having to pay the price
of crossing.
This dual vision, so elemental a perspective in this collection, is evoked with keen narrative clarity in the poem “Roseanna:”
...When her husband returns
they will go together and claim the children
they will leave this place
crossing borders and languages
they will take on the mask of immigrant
their children safely home
not watching from a window
for a glimpse of her remembered face.
As poems of witness, Dirt Road Home stands as an act of remembrance, and in speaking in the voices of all who can no longer speak, these poems trace the way remembrance is a restorative process. The act of putting language to silence is, as Forché maintains, “an attempt to mark us as [poems] themselves have been marked.” When, in the poem “Grandmother,” the speaker laments,
Grandmother, why
are there no stories
about you?
the poem records the moment when absence is simultaneously echoed and vanquished.
Cheryl Savageau's poems are life-stories in the truest tradition of storytelling, and it is this quality which goes to the heart of the revelatory power of narrative poetry. Her renderings of the many personages who inhabit the poems are remarkable for its clarity and directness. The highly skillful way in which she is able to get out of the way of the story allows the pure narrative voice to spring up unimpeded from the internal city of the poem. I kept hearing these voices long after my third and fourth reading of the book, like the voice of Louise laughing as she killed and plucked forty chickens before dinnertime, or Ol' Crazy Baker yelling “You're all bastards...”, and the scorched lament of the father in At the Fireworks, who says “If they dropped a bomb on Worcester,/...this would be the time and place.”
For what strikes the reader is that these are stories about people whose lives are taken up by doing—out of necessity. That it is what we do with our hands which becomes our transcendence. Here is the voice of Henri Toussaint speaking to his wife in the poem bearing his name:
The priests are wrong, Rosa,
it is not in the heart
that the soul lives, but here,
in the hands.
In bringing the soul down from its usual heights on the esoteric plane to the immanent quotidian moments of people's lives, the soul paradoxically becomes more than that ineffable expression of an individual. That the soul's locus is in the hands is an original rendering of genealogy: that it is a relation to the world through the hands which becomes the wellspring of cultural progeny. And once again we find ourselves in the land of multiplicitous vision: how the life of the hands is at once a culture's experience of its communal self, and the mechanism through which individuals find reflected their truest and deepest identities. This vision is at the heart of the power of Savageau's poetry, which restores to the narrative form its transformative power—its power to reveal as well as to tell, its power of witness, of giving illumination to what is invisible, of giving voice to vibrant history and the living moment so we can hear, in the penultimate poem in the collection, “Like the Trails of Ndakinna:”
Grandmothers, grandfathers,
your blood runs thin in me
I catch sight of you
sideways in a mirror
the lines of nose and chin
startle me, then sink behind the enemy's colors
You are walking the trails
that declare this body
Abenaki land
and like the dream man
you are speaking my true name Ndakinna
[This review was originally presented in an edited, oral form by Alexandra Burack as introductory remarks for Cheryl Savageau on the occasion of her poetry reading, March 28, 1995 in the Charter Oak Poetry Exchange Celebration of Curbstone Poets, Charter Oak Cultural Center, Hartford, Connecticut.]
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