I had high expectations for Danusha Laméris’s new book Bonfire Opera from University of Pittsburgh Press. And by the second poem, I knew I wouldn’t be putting the book down until I finished. This is a textured, dark and joyful collection. The voice in these poems is mature in the deepest sense of the word. In the poem “Berkeley” the speaker explains:
It’s not that I was happy. I was too young
to be happy, knew only its first blush
not the darker tones that come after
and give it shape. […]
Many of the poems celebrate sex and walk a very fine line, managing to avoid slipping into celluloid-worthy clichés or romance. From “World in Worlds”:
[…] after a little wine, I was surprised when he
leaning in to kiss me, to cross the threshold
that forever marks before and after in the heart’s guest book,
a portal you can open and find nothing —
or there might be nebulas, comets, whole galaxies.
The poems get sexier from here: full of the concrete sensual details that cause us to long for one another. The poem “Threshold” follows not long after “World in Worlds”, and true to the title, it is about crossing that threshold that “forever marks before and after”:
And I just stood there in my gangly, animal body,
sniffing the air of you, taking in the rough greenery
of your silence. More landscape than man. Or what I’d thought
a man to be. It was clear that you had done this — opened
yourself — of your own volition. And I felt, in that moment,
what I can only call a terrible power, the burden
of holding something that requires a great tenderness.
These poems never pull heavily on metaphor or symbolism. They are straight-forward and real. There’s nothing clever in the writing. These poems are honest. Sometimes painfully so.
In the second section of the book, the poet writes of her brother’s death. These are poems of grief, but the author is never morose. In the poem “Dressing for the Burial” the poet laments:
No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death —
The poem “The Grass” is a meditation on the grass growing over the gravesite of the poet’s brother. The poem begins with a mention of Walt Whitman. But the reader is also very likely to recall Carl Sandberg’s poem “Grass” which ends, “I am the grass, I cover all.”
It seems that Laméris’s poems often begin in one place and take a sudden turn, like a sonnet’s volta or perhaps like a haiku’s cutting word that shifts the reader’s perspective. One example of this is the poem “Feeding the Worms”, which went viral on Facebook this summer. The titular poem “Bonfire Opera” begins with an exuberant, naked woman singing an aria while half submerged in the sea, the water lapping “at the underside of her breasts”. But:
[…] And even though I was young,
somehow, in that moment, I heard it,
the song inside the sone, and I knew then
that this was not the hymn of promise
but the body’s bright wailing against its limits.
A bird caught in a cathedral — the way it tries
to escape by throwing itself, again and again,
against the stained glass.
Having said that, not all of the poems transition from a perspective. “Surfer Girl” is almost an ode to youthful beauty. An unabashed appreciation that never turns bitter or cynical — or covetous, or creepy.
From the poem “O! Darkness”:
“My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I have
as I ‘m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.
These poems are beautiful.
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Buy the book from The University of Pittsburg Press.
Laméris is an American poet born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Studio Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Her first book The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014) was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award.
