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Vinegar Moon by Donna Biffar
ISBN 1-904224-35-0 £7.00 BeWrite Books, 32 Bryn Road South, Wigan, Lancashire. WN4 8QR www.bewrite.net

This book has caused me to lie awake at night disturbed by the pain and violence bleeding raw on the surface of many of these poems. Both were present in Donna's first two collections, Water Witching in the Garden and Events Preceding Death, but always subdued within beautiful ice sculptures of poetic construction. Beautiful constructions remain. But there is no ice in Vinegar Moon. It has melted in the lava flow of Donna's let-down hair.

     Good Woman
                                  --- You call me your good woman: /
     tell your friends you've shaped me / as a hatter shapes hats.
     / Over whiskey and Coke you brag / how I'm kept /
     hooked in the closet. / At your command I open my body,
     / cover your head in fur. Good woman // who keeps her
     books / and poems in the basement / behind old boxes of
     summer / clothes. Woman who keeps / her teeth and
     fingernails clean. // Now that I understand / I like to think
     of your terror, / handed a woman who knows / the rattles
     in your throat / are those of a pit viper / lost in the kitchen.
     The skin / you shed falls off in the stew. / You tell our
     children to march, / take up forks and spoons, / to feed
     you, to love you.

   In the two collections mentioned above Donna managed to maintain a certain distance between poet and subject, keeping her "I" an impersonal spectator in the best Eliot tradition. This is no criticism. The poem as a beautiful ice sculpture with the poet visible only in the lines and curves of construction has much to recommend it. But a poet rolling up the pant's legs, or lifting the skirt, the wading out into the muck and mire with his or her very personal "I" up front has its own recommendation.

     ...I knew / what he needed, a mother, a potted geranium /
     by the window, an upturned face for a good, / hard smack
     ... 
                                  (from The drunk's wife misses her husband)

     He knocks my Woolf from the shelves / throws my
     hanging angels / through the picture window. 
                                                                        (from Asking for it)

     She calls us, says she hates / our fucking dog, calls us white
     / nigger atheist liberals ........ Jesus doesn't love us, how
     could he? / We call Bush the Shrub. / We write poetry that
     doesn't rhyme. She swears / she smells opium, .... 
                                          (from The woman who hates our dog)

   Such involvement of "I", so unlike Donna's previous work that it strikes me as a summing up, a clearing of decks for a new departure, could easily become chopped-up prose running on ad nauseam. But Donna never forgets she is a poet making a poem. The most personally involved poem in the book, a poem that could easily have descended into self-centred sentimentality, is written straight, without false pathos.

     Hospital Creed
                                         --- You are my sunshine, / he sings
     and the nurses repeat / to each other how sweet, / did you
     hear? Now my boy asks me / to hold his mask. No disguise
     I tell him, / no fuzzy mouse face or superman suit --- / no
     bucket of candy apples or Snicker bars. / And the doctor
     tells Mike / no seizures allowed / on her shift, and we
     believe / in good white coats and stethoscopes and / bubble
     gum gas, and science / and Christians praying / in waiting
     rooms. / We believe / in automatic doors, tiles on the
     floors / Dr. McAllister on line two, / and babies who suck
     and swallow and breathe / the way my boy wouldn't
     breathe --- / and aquarium fish who don't understand / air
     No Bandaids, Mike says. / No applebobbing choking fits,
     no tricks no treats. / I tuck the blanket around his neck and
     / his silent tongue grows thick. / New sunshine turns to
     moon / in his white room. / When the veil between the
     worlds is thinnest / the living see the dead. We believe / in
     monitors, blood tests, reports, / the made up nurses who
     smile, / you're doing fine, sunshine / Now is the halo of
     venom and air, / my hand shrouding his face, / and there,
     there are my boy's eyes above the mask, / believing me /
     again.

   Donna never writes Down's syndrome in regard to her son (though in another poem, Opening Chant, she writes mongoloid retard). Donna seldom informs. She makes the reader feel.

   Yet Vinegar Moon, in spite of the pain and violence, is not a depressing read. The heroism of this woman is opposite of depressing. No matter the pain. No matter the violence. She never gives way to anger or despair. There are poems in this book of joyish beauty. She writes tenderly of her elderly mother. She writes of children, religion, and sex. True, emotion and "I" threatens to run wild in some of the poems. But she always brings herself up, finds a balance, never forgets she is a poet, not a preacher, not a pamphlet writer. When the last poem is read, the book closed, what we have is solid, disciplined poetry constructed by a poet in complete control.