Review: Chelsea Dingman's Through a Small Ghost
On Chelsea Dingman’s Through a Small Ghost
by Tyler Truman Julian
It’s been said that the most traumatic experience of anyone’s life is one they can’t even remember: their birth. If we are to understand this as truth, then the question that remains is how this trauma impacts us for the rest of our life. The inverse of this, according to Chelsea Dingman in Through a Small Ghost, is that that a mother never forgets that “birth is sometimes about destruction: blood / & shit & sound. Or no sound. Just blood.” Dingman’s newest collection presents a speaker reflecting on her stillborn daughter’s death and the life she has built since. In this way, the speaker explores mortality and life, humanity’s propensity to accept that which may not make us better in order to feel some semblance of normalcy, and the complicated relationship between a man and woman who are left reeling after loss. There is an obvious heaviness to this work, but as I read, I marveled at the beauty of Dingman’s words and was pulled along by the clear narrative thread that wove each poem together.
I have been a fan of Dingman’s work for years and found her familiar appeal to image, masterful use of enjambment and the line break, and moving narrative arc in this new collection, but was struck by the use of space in this work to highlight the themes of absence and loss and the speaker’s confusion at them. The poems in Through a Small Ghost use the page, direct the reader to this absence, attempt to name it, then rename it in a way that I have not seen previously in Dingman’s work, showing the evolution of the writer and a shrewd reworking and understanding of her subject. In “A World within a World,” the speaker reckons with the way the world has sought to rename and stigmatize her and how that differs from her troubled self-definition. Dingman writes,
You say mother means [ ]. Maybe it means
genius. A plaything for the dark
world. The pretty one.
…
Remember
when you were [
].
This attempt at renaming runs through the collection, highlighting the speaker’s struggle to understand what it means to be a woman whose body seems to have betrayed her, whose body does not adhere to society’s expectations of the maternal. Dingman’s speaker reclaims this lack of definition in a poem directed to her male partner, someone who experiences the grief of a stillbirth but in a way distinct from the speaker. In “Let the Night Come, Monstrous, & Make Use of Us,” the speaker asks, “Am I the red-eye? The receptacle. / The body where others leave themselves. Gutted, // you leave me to the rain. / You pretend a body can’t be named— / the daughter we lost.” The conflict of father and mother in this loss revolves around this stigmatization, the desire by one to “move on,” the knowledge of the other that moving on is a simplistic understanding of the situation and an impossible reality. As the poem continues, the speaker declares, “I want to name the blood. The hurt / of her. The shadow-prayer of her. // I want to name the dark. / I want to name you bastard. // I want.” The speaker’s shadow-prayer pushes her to elevate her body, name it holy. This won’t be a moving on, but it does represent an acceptance and reclamation of self, and across the pages, Dingman asserts through the speaker, that in her “failed” body, the speaker is “almost / home…Almost / something holy.” This shift in thinking allows the speaker to live with her “small ghost” and appeal to a deeper spirituality, a naturalism that invokes fertility and loss all at once. In this nature, I find the human condition, according to Dingman. In “Revisions,” she writes,
we are the dead, the blue, the ghosts
of trees & rivers, the countries
where there is no one to damn
us & someone else tends the light
& sometimes
there is only me, this light untended,
this world I don’t want to wake in.
In this collection, there is a communal invitation into the speaker’s grief, but as the excerpt from “Revisions” shows, Dingman’s poems also pull away, maintaining a confessional distance that roots the poem specifically in the speaker’s story and highlights her experience as a woman and mother. This authorial control of the collection highlights the disconnect between the speaker herself and her partner and appeals to an audience that may, at certain times, exclude some readers. This is not a flaw of the collection but rather an extension of the reading experience and poetic narrative deftly crafted by Dingman. Through a Small Ghost, as a result, is a stirring and humbling read. In “How Briefly the Body,” Dingman writes, “[T]he body is a story…[but] in the body, all things / have an end…every story I’ve known / carried off like tree pollen // in the white spring wind. But I enter, however / briefly. Asking nothing.” If I am to ask anything, it is that we all enter the story of Through a Small Ghost and ask ourselves what traumas we carry, maybe from birth, and what we can learn of empathy in the community made by words.