Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2021. 104 pages. $16.00.
Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations is not content with the singular equivalencies of metaphor. Kelly’s second collection balances transformation and definition, constructing a space beyond naming. These lyric poems offer a resilient “I,” enlarged to hold the self and memory of the self (“Now” and “Then”) which is to say, the range of human experience which we so often deem impossible for ourselves to carry (and yet we do). That is Kelly’s craft: to manifest two unlike things and say they do not negate one another.
In Kelly’s opening poem “House of Air, Hours of Fire,” the speaker states, “I lived in the flame, practiced being / incomplete, a progression, an action without place.” Place being usurped, the self becomes the record and refuses it. The speaker defines the self as “palimpsest”—an indecipherable remainder reformed, reworked, and endless. After all, Memory, too, is a Titan and the mother of gods. Memory fills the pantheon of The Renunciations. Under these intimate divinities, Kelly presents the myth of metamorphic exchange—to be perpetually present but unfastened, relocated into the permascape of trees and stars. Yet Kelly refutes the passive exchange of the body into permacape:
—though nearly anything
can be overwritten, and what can be left behind
is no more or no less a matter of will.
If the self is palimpsest, then what is it to address the indecipherable if not to address the self? With a shared elliptical address, Kelly’s “Dear —” epistolaries call infinitely to the liminal bodies who compose a collective “we.” If only a trace of the previous self is left, let it be its dearness; let it be its plurality. A community of work, of exchange, exists within these epistolaries. Kelly offers human touch, friends, love and also, the self whom we find hardest to hold.
Within this context, Kelly reworks a past tense to make room for brightness:
We were like that then,
eaten and eating,sawing and sawn.
I mean, of course, our bodies
Kelly offers metaphor and also disambiguation, “But about the tree— / no euphemism there.” We must keep the physicality of “the heartwood, / the bark” alongside “the heart and lungs and vessels between.” And yet the poem is in the past tense. If metaphor can be mistaken for euphemism, then, in the past tense, what is the distance between euphemism and nostalgia? What else can we feel when faced with a past self in love, or when confronted with the distance from one love to another?
Kelly presents myth without milk and honey, without the thin coating of a separate speaker. She names herself within the collection when “Donika Questions the Oracle,” and in doing so, refutes the romantic partition of the self to construct a Janus-like figure, a lyric “I,” with a voice projected into memory and into possibility. Hers is the divination of the nonbeliever: to make a whole out of parts, or more aptly, to accept parts without a compulsion for completion. In doing so, Kelly engenders her speaker with her own authority of present feeling, the very thing one abandons when confronting the oracle. To divine for oneself is to question and believe. It’s an impractical demand—and yet who else is the oracle? Without the divine, the oracle becomes reflexive, a self held beside a younger self who must determine “what must / be sheltered and what abandoned.”
Even in metaphor, even in myth, Kelly calls out the body as a real body. The Renunciations is a text that must hold full beings and a speaker who must carry a whole lineage, even those who are are renounced—her “gold blade of a man—”, the father linked to his actions,
What he makes for her:
a junk bike she loves cattle red
in the field a mirror
a red wreckage of her body.
We cannot write off as mere complication the love that crafts joy and reflects violence. To renounce another, to reverse another’s claim and rename the self, comes with the implication of rejection. This is a “father, / whose name I refuse / to say as he refuses / his father, the half-known man,” and this is a text concerned with half-knowledge. Like the supposition the speaker imposes for her father, now removed to a past boy,
Did he ride a bike, made from junk parts,
in the South Central LA sun as fast as a boy might?Surely he did that, oracle, surely that.
And when he rose like an improbable stone
from the father’s gut—whichever father
I mean here, whichever father makes sense—
Through myth-making, Kelly offers something whole cloth, renunciation as a tool of preservation, a memory renamed but carried in the body’s own multiplicity, the “junk parts” that make one child’s happiness and then another, as essential as the “improbable stone,” hard and undeniable in the body. The oracle says a fate is unavoidable. We know we cannot go back to who we once were, but Kelly counters that the body is malleable. The Renunciations is a collection which reworks the linearity of metamorphosis. “Every body makes its own ash, / manages its own diminishing,” an erasure of our own making which in turn makes room for opportunity.
Kelly’s poems turn towards possibility. One sonnet begins “I am neither land nor timber, nor are you / ocean or celestial body,” yet Kelly develops such expansive bodies:
a practice, a series of postures. See
how I became a tree [ ],
and you [ ] a body in space?
Kelly suggests we are no more than what we are, “we are the small animals we’ve always been,” and yet what we have been does not exclude a human potential for change—even change that is yet without language. In a collection which asserts the physical nature of the body, of bodies together—which is to say our humanity—Kelly engenders the intangible, an uncertainty which allows the body to be more than its negation. The body does not engage in linear logic but in becoming.