Quivira Reviewed by Thaisa Frank

Review: Quivira by Karen Kevorkian

Reviewed by Thaisa Frank

109 pages

Release Date: January 1, 2020

Publisher: Three: A Taos Press

Quivira, Karen Kevorkian’s third and stunning collection of poems, explores the tensions between internal and external landscapes and personal and collective memories. A tough, ironic pilgrim, Kevorkian places herself in the midst of these tensions and lets them wrestle with each other, intrude on each other and inform each other. The result is a visceral experience of the southwest, ranging from its extraordinary landscape to its brutal history. 

Quivira is divided into three parts and  each shines a different lens on the tensions between collective and personal experience. The first section, “Quivira,” follows the poet’s intimate encounter with the southwest and its history. “21 days” traces the poet’s journey back from the southwest to her city of “burning Los Angeles.” The last section, “The Call and the Drag,” maps the poet’s interior journey at home in Los Angeles—a city the poet once called her Gran Quivira…a place unfamiliar until one day it isn’t. 

Many of Kevorkian’s poems begin with an aerial view that funnels into what is private, personal and even spatially enclosed. The first poem, “We Do Not Circumnavigate,” begins with the narrator’s celebration of the landscape:

soft pink earth  eroding from a cliffside

announces a mesa’s beginning….

wall of angled rock you could touch

………….on the other side of the rushing green

ice cold Rio Grande.. 

And ends

in a quiet room

turquoised fingers, a suitcase filled 

with black clothes, the orange scarf you bought in

………….Paris Athens Arequipa Santa Fe

that on waking you take milk and coffee

study a tree’s mask of light

that there were a mother father grandparents uncle 

aunts cousins mostly dead the lovers husbands

………….self a workout uniform all you had to put on

“Quivira” was the name of the gold-laden city that led Francisco Vasquez de Coronado on an ill-conceived quest. His fever-dream took him to what became Kansas, and he pillaged the people and the plains of corn and squash as if he actually had found gold. 

………….they drew a line to keep us

from crossing over gave us headpieces

and dressed skins not gold and precious stones nor

brocades promised from the pulpit, we gave them

pearl beads, cascabeles never seen before

heavy artillery and a good place to

batter down pueblos, looped aluminum

Xmas tinsel, human shielding  

As one travels with Kevorkian, the conquistadors and their ruinous expeditions never elude personal experience. Indeed, the contemporary landscape is often a palimpsest. What begins as:

daytime moon brighter than smooth horses 

morphs into 

……. cities in flames 

in defense of fictions…

I cannot tell you what country this is

for I think it is not on the map

the  general said.

“21 days” marks the journey from the southwest to Los Angeles but alludes to the compostela, a certificate of accomplishment given to pilgrims who completed the Way. It also mentions the altarpiece at Ghent and Grace Cathedral. These broad references include all pilgrims, in a sense seen as vulnerable microcosms of Coronado’s quest for a mythic city. 

Everything had been a lie

walking 110 miles to what

upright truth standing on its head

trickster, gulling

Like many pieces in “Quivira,” Kevorkian’s poems in “21 days” often begin with a panoramic view and telescope to the personal:

Black patent sky

snows crisp talking back

car’s cold cave breath

rimmed at the curb

5000 feet

scalding the light of the box store

boil water with chocolate and sugar

simmer with milk until heavy 

in a  white china cup

small room with one chair for reading

white noise in the mind a cat tongue’s 

soft clicks wetting fur

walking in stilldark

to an unseen

reliable  trill

                    In  “ 21 days” the poet stops in a graveyard with Walmart flowers/angels plaster and plastic/ toy trucks seashells  toy sheep, sees an Aztec dance in a motel foyer, and leaves the southwest for the Mojave: 

the last day

like peering into a glass case

turquoise and silver

small town with streetlights

only now and then turned on

dark to hurry through

passing the little horse field

cars parked at the fringe

Although the last section,  “The Call and the Drag,” is more interior, Los Angeles is still a palimpsest: Its river, half- hidden by freeways, was witness to a brutal colonial history. In her “burning city” the poet answers the call to become a medicine man (“Evidently I Was Still Somewhere”). She has powers to save that dissipate in the drag of “my own dry idiom”. Yet even in a poem about the death of someone she knows, the personal and collective tug at each other.

deafness within deafness

smoke in the night fireflies,

sparking what is rough

what is smooth what are

their names mind of

clear light…

………….

above hotel workers

waited for buses

organized walking to

buildings no longer standing

here is where once

every sentence begins

Because personal history and collective history are caught in a cycle of overlap and separation, the three sections of Quivira trace a circular journey. The first section, which focuses on the layered history of the southwest defines the sweep of the book. But Quivira could also be read backwards, starting with a singular existence in Los Angeles, reversing the direction of the journey, and ending in the southwest.

Kevorkian’s sensibility resonates with C.D. Wright, Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías, all of whom she describes as bringing “a distinctive voice and prosody to historically freighted landscapes.”  Yet her kaleidoscopic lens brings a universal element to the historically freighted, reminding me of Wallace Stevens’ and his relentless quest to capture experience through imagination.  Like Stevens, Kevorkian peels away layer after layer, discarding elegant detours and giving her poetry a metaphysical dimension. 

Kevorkian’s subject is dark but her voice is never rhetorical and ranges from what is imaginatively evocative to the ordinary and mundane: Chasubels, feathers, masks,  gold teeth and angelitos mingle with plastic angels, and a house “of adobe the deep tan of 1940 Max Factor pancake makeup”. Like the emergence of a hidden river, the text offers passages that are lyrical, sunlit and beautiful:

The cat’s black velvet sizzles with cold

come in come in

stranger to me

with your gold eyes

I myself wear a mask

sometimes very tired

take it off

aspen leave she

brings in

curled

yellow tongues

Kevorkian’s line breaks often interrupt syntax, creating a sense of urgency and breath as the voice seeks to find words. The result is an exciting sense of intimacy, allowing the reader to participate with the poet, as she gives voice to the unspeakable.

Thaisa Frank’s fifth book of fiction (Enchantment, Counterpoint, 2012) was selected for Best Books by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, Heidegger’s Glasses (Counterpoint 2011) was translated into 10 languages. New work appears in  New Micro  (Norton, ed. Scotallero, Thomas),  Short-Forms Creative Writing (Bloomsbury) and online publications. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto.