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Book Review: A New Syntax

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  • Book Review: A New Syntax

    Arpine Konyalian Grenier
    Part, Part Euphrates
    reviewed by Celia Lisset Alvarez
    38pp. NeO Pepper Press. US$10. 0978840755 paper
    http://www.tashogi.com/neopp.htm


    A New Syntax

    Arpine Konyalian Grenier's Part, Part Euphrates collapses both landscape
    and time in a collection of poetry that challenges the reader to
    reconstruct both narrative and place from language that defies logic and
    tradition. Grenier creates her own evocative grammar of soul, self, and
    society in these five interrelated poems that together make up a mosaic
    narrative perhaps best referred to as political ecofeminism, but that
    really escape easy categorizations. Although heavily imbued with
    bittersweet glimpses of a deconstructed Lebanon traceable to Grenier's
    Armenian identity, Part, Part Euphrates is intensely personal and
    passionate rather than simply driven by sociopolitical concerns.

    The brief collection opens with `Lebanon regardless) would you
    rather . . . ,' a wistful look at the mysterious relationship with `G'
    that anchors the personal narrative thread of the book. The speaker is
    perturbed by the fractured realtionship to G and the presence of a woman
    from his past:

    he was her borrowed once a bruise on top each limb
    her totem pole detailing a flower near original
    shadow re-examined for rainmaking


    Combining free verse with prose poetry, Grenier crafts a broken
    narrative of loss and doubt in this poem, interspersing personal
    questions (`Why do I feel her spirit interfering with my realtionship
    with G') and fractured memories with a decidedly urban and postmodern
    sensibility best captured into the lines `the world is / my lover is.'
    The speaker asserts that `nothing is new in Lebanon since you and I
    cracked,' and this collapse of self and city sets the stage for the rest
    of the collection.

    Subsequent poems play off of this classic feminist tension between the
    personal and the political. `The Enthusiast' bemoans the relationship
    between Beirut's past and present in language that attempts to
    illuminate a neglected women's history: `So the deal is - poor ugly
    motherless Beirut suffering anonymity.' Grenier examines how `the theme
    of man' has excluded its female counterpart (`I'm not a daughter they
    say / I did not see it happen mama') in a gesture she compares to
    `backing against a one way street' and provocatively calls `syntax
    blackened.' She ends this poem both hopefully and forcefully, implying
    that women's struggle for voice, and, obliquely, for economic freedom
    (`today is the first day you're a pay-stub mother / beaming at a new
    syntax'), will bring about a new vision for Beirut:

    these are not ours these streets we fight in
    banal for some reason and emptied star
    the watch in reverse
    a new syntax
    prepared
    -ness

    out there
    street signals

    turnpike
    lane


    Though difficult to unravel, the images in `The Enthusiast' suggest the
    overall raison d'etre of Grenier's poetry in this collection, the
    creation of a `new syntax' driven by a woman-centered multiplicity of
    voice that takes Audre Lorde's imperative to dismantle the master's
    house to a multicultural level.

    Very much the anchor poem of the group, `The Enthusiast' also introduces
    the concept of male versus female theming or viewing that unites all
    five poems. `Gatekeeper, we unthemed' brings together the languages of
    science, gender, and politics to question the ways in which we relate to
    one another:

    there is no consensus or dissent they say
    within the urge to connect
    un-themed

    is the neutral such?
    how do where and how enter theme?
    how does how many enter zero?
    I had a dad and father and daddy
    is that too synoptic for you?

    Unlike in `The Enthusiast,' in `Gatekeeper' there is no sense of a
    gendered optimism. This poem is nightmarish and urgent. Grenier speaks
    of being `afraid of water and air and everything green or living'
    because `what is free or living must be commoditized and digitized.'
    There is a strong sense of disaster in this poem, where being `unthemed'
    also means being `unaccounted for.' The individual is powerless vis à
    vis a machinery of destruction that threatens both the natural world and
    its `private corners.' Although sure to find resonance with many
    readers, the poem lacks the unity of vision of `The Enthusiast,' leaving
    one with more questions than answers.

    Ultimately, however, Grenier presents a beautifully braided collection
    of poems that culminate in the final `Public at The Pergola,' in which
    all the themes of Part, Part Euphrates come together in a moving,
    postmodern collage of poetry and prose. Finally `unthemed,' the speaker
    of `Pergola' asks

    what to do with the scissors you gave me (Ottoman)
    what to do with the embroidered cross on one side
    the linguist and research analyst positions at United Technologies
    on the other the Biblical whole limbic

    The speaker's indecision and desperation is tenderly confessed in a
    letter to G and a job application that recalls the `enthusiasm / work
    ethic' of `The Enthusiast.' Grenier offers no easy resolutions. Like the
    river, the collection is `recurring . . . / breeding its underside.'
    What is remarkable about it is Grenier's ability to engage with language
    on its most primal, semiotic level. Words, images, and space collide and
    explode into each other, and meaning is accumulated rather than created.
    Such stylistic freshness sets this collection apart from other
    treatments of these (post)modern themes of individualism, gender, and
    ecology. Moreover, Grenier's ability to navigate the uncharted with
    grace and beauty also sets her writing apart from poetry that is
    unconventional merely to shock or transgress. She creates her own syntax
    and her own myth. She writes in the epigraph: `With an eternal lack of
    selfhood and longing for ancestry I am creeping along the sidelines of
    rhetoric and process hoping for an outcome that transcends my ability to
    determine the good in it.'

    Celia Lisset Alvarez is a writer and educator from Miami, Florida. Her
    poetry includes The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and
    Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry
    Award. Poems from these collections are also in the anthologies White
    Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (Demeter Press, 2007) and Letters
    to the World (Red Hen Press, 2008). Other stories and poems have
    appeared in the Iodine Poetry Journal, the Powhatan Review, Tar Wolf
    Review, Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Annual, zingmagazine, and Mangrove,
    and in the anthology Women Moving Forward: Narratives of Identity,
    Migration, Resilience, and Hope, Vol. 1. (Cambridge Scholars Press,
    2006). Her review of Christine Stewart-Nuñez's Unbound & Branded is
    forthcoming from Prairie Schooner. She currently teaches composition,
    literature, scientific and creative writing at St. Thomas University in
    Miami Gardens, Florida.



    http://jacketmagazine.com/35/index.sht ml
    This review is about 4 printed pages long. It is copyright © Celia
    Lisset Alvarez and Jacket magazine 2008.
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