Sunday, Nov 2, 2008
Posted on Sat, Nov. 01, 2008
Donna Trussell turns survival and loss into powerful poetry
By KATHLEEN JOHNSON
Special to The Star
Donna Trussell is a survivor. Poems in What’s Right About What’s Wrong, her debut collection, are eloquent testimony to that.
In 2001 Trussell (who is married to Star theater critic Robert Trussell) learned she had ovarian cancer. It makes sense, then, that so much of her verse bears the mark of someone who knows firsthand what it is to survive, of someone who has found out the hard way what’s right about what’s wrong.
Trussell’s “To Miss Candace Mayes, Lost on the Titanic,” about a woman who survived the sinking of the famous ocean liner, is one of the most moving portraits of a survivor I have ever read.
The poem is spare, polished and perfect. It begins with a depiction of a woman who drowned during the disaster: “You’d be gone by now anyway./You would have married,/grated nutmeg,/buried a husband in Boston,/knitted and traveled/until your children buried you.”
The narrative ends by showing – with telling yet understated details – the effect the drowned woman’s act of sacrifice had on the life of Mrs. Wilkins, the person she saved by offering her place on a collapsible lifeboat:
Mrs. Wilkins later divorced
and went to an asylum.
She’d tried everything—
painting, charity work, a pilot’s license.
Her hands would climb the trellis.
Her feet were never still.
This is one of several poems that deal with what is gone and what is left behind. This classic poetic theme of loss serves richly throughout the collection. “Posthumous Poem,” which closes the book with sure-handed and skillful finality, demonstrates Trussell’s lean, emotionally scrupulous style. Not a word is wasted.
Another similar work that deals with death, “Premonition,” is equally sculpted, stripped down to essentials that bring about a profound response in the reader. Images tumble dreamlike through the nine stanzas, ending with light, lingering, unforgettable lines that shimmer with truth:
She must get ready.
She gives everything away—
money, books, her lover,
new plates
still in the box.
But there’s always more.
She envies babies
with just smiles
and soft skin.
She envies the Sphinx,
with only wind
and sand.
In What’s Right About What’s Wrong, Trussell’s verse thrives on ultimate terms: the tension and polarity between living and dying. Her finest poems could have been written only by someone who has come face to face with such terms.
What’s Right About What’s Wrong, by Donna Trussell (62 pages; Helicon Nine Editions; $9.95)
Kathleen Johnson, author of Burn , lives in Baldwin City, Kan.
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