Review: Shadow-feast by Joan Houlihan

Reviewed by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Shadow-feast
Poems by Joan Houlihan
Four Way Books, March 2018
$15.95, 64 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1945588082

Shadow-feast is a tour de force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances. Joan Houlihan touches uncannily on the hidden pulse of experiencing her husband’s death. The perspectives that form the three sections, Hers, His, Theirs, evidence Houlihan’s ability to discern the distance from and proximity of each to each.

The collection’s title comes from a Japanese ceremony, a daily offering of miniature, meticulous meals, prepared for the ghost of a loved one. As the first page of the collection explains, this practice is called Kage-zen, or Shadow Feast. These poems, likewise exquisitely arranged, are distinct unflinching devotions to the realities of what we rarely notice and never say.

Shadows, of course, are cast by some physical entity interrupting a source of light. Houlihan’s power of scrutiny is focused on those tangible, apparently permanent, but actually temporary, interrupting presences. In the opening poem, the speaker describes her situation:

                                                            The only way to keep him, hand
or eyelid, was to rise. She met                 each step with his.  She ate
her part and his, stirred and kept him          to a cup of tea, finger handle worn
by him, the rim, the rim, he also put his mouth to                                      

Deep tenderness is underscored by insistent clarity. Our attention is brought into focus on a cup handle worn by her husband’s habitual finger, then, the very rim of the teacup. That “him, the rim, the rim” echo is a characteristic sonic tolling that communicates, in intense compression, the expanded and precarious edge between here and not here that the book explores.

The wasting away of the body, the loss of that very entity that takes space, that has mass and weight, that intervenes sufficiently to cause shadow, is the trajectory of the book.. Again, he first section depicts him as a cartoon:

STICK FIGURE, knee boned, you

and continues:

step off the scale—
Almost to my high school weight!
Your smile so fake it breaks me.

The rhymed weight, fake, and break render the situation in three simple poignant strokes.

Then the poem shifts into a different and equally unflinching register:

We count, withhold, endure.
Skin without mind, tissue-
timed, blood and detritus –

The physical being’s somatic reality is named. The “we,” perfectly ambiguous at this stage, includes at least those in attendance, and possibly the dying one as well. For sure, the inevitable process separates the speaker from the “you” in the last lines “What ate you away / keeps on eating.”

One of the balances Houlihan accomplishes is between the shared intimacy of the experience and the utter isolation of each from each. By the time we enter the section His, Houlihan renders his inability to explain what’s going on to the opaque other (though, presumably, she is that very other). The section His mirrors the opening words of the book from Her point of view, “Slept out to sea and sailing…” with His words, “WOKE DARK, lung-snared, creaked out a cry.” (There are elegant reflections like that throughout the book.) He continues, “No one heard me. Took my winded climb up from inside.”

The stark language enacts the bleak resignation of illness. Then, there is a surprising perspective, that of climbing up a staircase (the “winded,” of lung congestion succinctly evoking a spiraling, winding ascent) from deep in the physical body.

Coughed and blistered there. Aired by a window
and they came sideways to look into my last eye:
He is the same.  They left the eaten cities inside.

The inert body, passively “aired” with a still conscious mind, is unable to articulate to those who lean over the bed and are perceived sideways. He is the center, and we have access to his visceral understanding of the devastation inside himself. The tension is extreme.

Heard my head say hollow. No.
Heard my head say hole, and then
the cold air through.
They say I cannot speak.

As a reader, one is vibrating between desperation to let “them” know what he is saying to himself, and the awareness that the poet, the very one who has become one of those who cannot or will not understand, is the one who speaks his mind. It is an ambitious multilayered perspective. He seems to strain to explain; we understand but cannot let him know.

In previous collections, The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009) and Ay (Tupelo Press, 2014), Houlihan has been exploring perspective. Not just in what is said by others, but in the way a culture, a grammar, points of reference in preindustrial or post-apocalyptic society might be communicated. She has managed to interrupt the restricted view that our conventions enforce. In Shadow-feast, she inhabits the vanishing but still urgent mind in a body, the ultimate familiar frame of reference for all humans, that is eating itself, leaking from itself, exploding and imploding.

In a later stage, the voice of the dying his inquires:

                                            Remember him?
The gentle man who tore the air
                              and would not quiet?

This once distinct, frantic self has transmogrified into another self, resigned or accepting or, in any case, calm. We might recognize the phenomenon as a stage of dying. Here is it represented with Houlihan’s dignified simplicity, a minimum of words, “lay” repeated, in its vestiges of lullaby, and the deft re-assertion of ownership of intention that the words imply: “When I sleep I’ll lay my head / where his head once lay.” The end of the His section is heart-breaking and comforting:

I WON’T QUIT. I’m your breath. The ache
in your legs and chest.  What hums in you unsnuffed
while I blow away. Uncontained as warm as wind

The last section, the couple’s, Theirs, begins, “AND ALIVE BETWEEN them, what was it?” And then answers the question:

But a presence, pent and spectral
strung with old words, rare to hold,
a flimsy skin made of her and him

The body of the man has emptied out, reduced to a spectral remnant, and the two are held together in the physical realm only insubstantially. At the same time, the weather of the book, which I’ve not previously mentioned, has steadily cooled towards winter. The second poem of the section begins “Snow-Light Chill begins a kind of home” and ends with the line, “No home but what he left.”

Because Houlihan is unflinching in her ability to witness the dismantling of the body and the disorienting of reality, we trust that the redemptive last poem is not a salve but is authentic: “AFTER IT COMES to calm.” (This penultimate line resonates with possibilities: does the “it” come on purpose to calm? Does calm come after “it”, death and all that preceded it? Both of course.) “AFTER IT COMES to calm / a sound remains in the bell.”

We are left with the vibrations that shimmer beyond what is tangible.