Abstract
In the 1980s, the French artist Sophie Calle worked for a few weeks in Venice as a maid. She took photographs of what people left behind in their hotel rooms. In one room, a pair of masks hung off the wall lamps. In another, clothing was strewn about the floor. Her work remains provocative: who sees what is left behind? Who cleans up after us (or doesn’t)? What stories do our private lives tell?
In her new poetry collection Matters for You Alone, Leslie Williams engages with similar questions. She, as mother, is the witness of the magical spaces her children create: “their secret rooms/ of pushpin maps, clay castles, shoes.” She counts the unseen work of caregiving and daily drudgery as worthy of poetry. In one poem, “Silent Retreat,” she describes closing up a house in Edgartown: “I let myself out through the back gate/ carrying a bag of garbage and my travel mug,/ uneaten peanut butter, clementines, and rice cakes.”
There’s a documentary element to Williams’ work, but also a contemplative, almost monastic, undercurrent. The speaker of the poems moves through domestic and daily labor, attentive to her inner and the outer rhythms of the world around her. A friend causes both intense admiration and envy; a robin’s egg falls out of the nest. The woman inside the home opens and closes the day. “Time to shuffle around again and pull down all the blinds,” she writes in “Sunset 4:14.”
Many of the poems read like a kind of poetic diary, with a profound commitment to the practice of attention to the ordinary. Some of the lines sing. Outside, she sees “the one Japanese maple furiously red.” While watching birds, she experiences awe and a kind of communion with them: “How carefully we’re made/ of curiosity plus silence// so the marvelous night might enter in.”
What the poet notices in her neighborhood is distressing. She watches “ranch-style houses being razed/ in a rage for something new.” She doesn’t think the “haggard firs” by the pond will make it through the “deep clean/ of the neighborhood.” The lines remind the reader that the quiet practice of attention does have a prophetic nature. Observation exposes the shadow side of a common suburban makeover. All around, an ongoing ecological tragedy plays on. A private thought has the power of a public injunction. The destruction begs the question: isn’t anyone paying attention to the life of the tired trees? The poet says, I am.
But it isn’t the practice of attention that the book ultimately values. For as the practice of attention persists, it begins to build up a mounting set of debts that the speaker of the poems really doesn’t know how to pay. The reader, also, alongside the poetry, feels adrift, taking stock of all that brutally transpires within and without. Like the accusatory proclamations of Jeremiah, the sins of self and society become overwhelming. Bitterness swells, the body falls apart, heirlooms are ignored. In her poem, “I’d be in Right Relation with the Wine,” Williams lists, “What about my unused eggs, the fired babysitter, the outstanding/ invitation, the Uber driver I’d like to change my rating for, the nurse/ I shouted at, the shriveled contact lens?” Paying attention is not the calming spiritual habit it purports to be. It takes inventory of inspired moments, yes—“the lone pine, whippoorwill,/ chalice, bells”—but also of all the poetic speaker and the world have done wrong—betraying the deserving, the sick, the friendless, and the needy.
Toward the end of the book, the desire to right the decks becomes a kind of intense longing, an urgent need for redemption. Will there be reconciliation for the friendship that unraveled like the long saga of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels? Will there be forgiveness for self and other, or will indignation bloom into an ever-divided future?
In “Quantum Entanglement,” the speaker of the poems reflects on “a spurred-shank jenny” prancing past a “a gang of turkeys” and is struck by “the majesty/ of every ugly thing turning/ beautiful, the way anything loved will be.” The changed proportions of her sightlines turn the speaker inward, not in merely observation, but in humility. She sees that the faults of her friend are “a speck compared/ to those same mountains in me.”
While the first part of Matters for You Alone ends with a priestly figure possibly destroyed by the sight of God’s majesty, the second part allows for a more tender gospel of grace for our “shivering selves.” In “Canticle with Love Entire Its Shape,” the mother catches a glimpse of herself in the “kettle’s silver face” and sees herself through the eyes not of beaten down and self-critical exhaustion, but of unending care and love: shadowed crossbars behind my head—I’m an anchoress—whose mother nights of offices and drudgery, lonely terror of the fevers, every cavil and constraint—are in a blaze made known to me as greatest privilege and grace, all the care poured in to raising them returns to me full measure, pressed down, shaken, running over, by ephahs ten- and twenty-, hundred- fold—overflowing in hermetic morning.
Matters for You Alone closes with a True Vision, in which the speaker and her friend are both wrapped in “A Cloak of Kindness.” Neither one is left behind. What is private and ugly has not ultimately corrupted them. Rather, grace has triumphed—each one of us precious and honored in the eyes of a knowing and loving God, whose compassion stretched out all the way to the hard wood of the cross.
Looking at old photos, posed “behind the lilac,/ honeysuckle, and the seas,” the book concludes and climaxes with a holy revelation: “I see our names are shining things/ on a great countenance today.”
