Review: Saudade by Traci Brimhall

Reviewed by Doug Ramspeck and Beth Sutton-Ramspeck

Saudade
Poems by Traci Brimhall
Copper Canyon Press, November 2017
$16.00, 109 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1556595172

Sigmund Freud referred to religion as a collective neurosis—the believers longed to return to the comforting illusions of childhood when they felt protected by the “father.” In Traci Brimhall’s  Saudade, God is not so much a gentle father watching over the speakers. Rather, God embodies Freud’s assertion in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901): superstitions arise from cruel and even evil impulses that the individual represses and then attributes to some outside, malevolent source. In “Sanctuary,” for example, one of the speakers (Thomas) remarks, “There’s only one place God cannot find me. / God with his hooves on, God with his horns / come to force me back to my knees with his love.”

Set in Brazil, and beginning and ending in the 1970s, Saudade is a magical-realist verse collection, peopled by four generations of speakers. The collection moves back in time over a century, through real-world revolutions, Catholic missions, natural disasters, leper colonies, and rubber plantations, as well as through magical events including miracles, curses, devils, mysterious disappearances, and a boto (Amazon river dolphin) that seduces women. Catholic imagery and superstitious images mix, as the speakers, in many cases, invoke these outside powers in the face of their own fears, helplessness, and loss. Thus, in “How I Lost Seven Faiths,” the speaker, whose daughter has “vanished,” desperately tries everything, from “a side-speared redeemer” to “divination by umbrellas and solar devotion” to “the euphoric theology of handling snakes”—and four other futile “faiths”:

My undisciplined doubt didn’t sharpen my questions or make
the harem of angels stop haunting my godless mind. Better,
people said. It would get better. But I didn’t want better.

I wanted my daughter back.

Saudade reverberates with screams for help by characters lost in their own sorrows and fears, as expressed in the title poem: “I’ve given / at least half my faith to madness, the rest / to the chapters written for those who were made / for more loneliness.” Ambitious and inventive, this disturbing and beautiful book combines the intimacy of poetry with the sweep and scope of a multi-generational novel.