Mendeleev’s
Mandala
Jessica Goodfellow. Mayapple
Press, $15.95 paperback (100p) ISBN: 978-1-936419-49-4
Jessica Goodfellow’s second book,
Mendeleev’s Mandala, is an impressively full collection of work,
connected in theme and tone but widely ranging in form. The book is well-paced and
well-divided, and the poems stand strong as individual works while functioning
as a cohesive and complete journey. “Journey”
is an appropriate term because Mendeleev’s Mandala begins and
ends in transit, and the pieces in between are of people lacking homes,
physical or emotional. From the opening poem, “The Problem with Pilgrims”:
The
problem with pilgrims is they can go home, but you already are.
And, later:
The
problem with pilgrims is now you are one.
Goodfellow is so sure of phrase that it was difficult not to just list lines from the book in place of
a review. In “The Blind Man’s
Wife Makes a List of Words She Must No Longer Use”, she writes:
The
guillotine is in the details.
There are countless lines in
Goodfellow’s poems that can serve as keys to reading the rest of the work. The
line above is meaningful not only to its own poem but also to the rest of the collection. Goodfellow uses
mathematics, science, and history as frames to try to explain the inexplicable, common yet enormous
personal tragedies of life. Her subjects are brought down by the details they
cannot escape. In “Wilbur Wright Consults a Fortune Teller”, she makes masterful
use of phrases attributed to Wright himself (italics hers), “afflicted with
the belief that flight is possible” and “no bird soars in a calm.”
Goodfellow’s poems soar because they are not the poems of a clear, still
day. They are the poems of internal storms. Some familiar elements from
Goodfellow’s The Insomniac’s Weather Report return here: clocks and
time, nature, mathematics. She adds to these explorations of loss and
emptiness, aging, fertility, and family. Perhaps the heart of the collection,
the best lens through which to view the rest, is the third section, a series of
prose poems concerning “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau”, a powerful
sequence that makes the best use of Goodfellow’s themes and techniques.
She
is a lungfish, able to exist anywhere and thus at home nowhere, except in the
dark which is lit by her consciousness although she cannot see that, and also
cannot help but see it, and thus is not the dark.
Mendeleev’s
Mandala is
bookended by “Pilgrim” poems. It moves from pilgrim to pilgrimage, from concept
to practice, as a sequence of numbers take over the closing piece, “A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland”:
How
to Distinguish a Child from 6an Adult:
For
a child, count06ing backwards is as easy as counting for76ward9s.
An
adult says5, Anythi3ng
could happen, but is surpr7ised when it does.
(February
2015)
Purchase
Mendeleev’s Mandala HERE.
