Review: Rachel Marie Patterson
On Tall Grass with Violence by Rachel Marie Patterson
by Tyler Truman Julian
From the outset, Tall Grass with Violence by Rachel Marie Patterson is rooted in the erotic, as Audre Lorde sees it. Lorde once wrote, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” For Lorde, the erotic isn’t only about sex and sexuality, it’s a “deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” The erotic is about desire, reclamation and freedom. Knowing oneself is the beginning of freedom and Tall Grass with Violence’s deeply human, often personal poems, exploring change and growth, revenge and resilience, create a truly powerful work of art.
The poems of Tall Grass with Violence are sensual, image-driven, building on one another so that the four sections of the collection tell a story of self-discovery and shifting power dynamics. The speaker sets the stage for this growth early in the collection, announcing in the second poem, “If nothing changes, / nothing ends” (“Metairie II”). And what ends? The first section of the collection presents a series of poems examining the theme of isolation: “I have tried to have a joyful heart, / to be made perfect” (“Metairie III”). The tone of this section signals to the reader that this pursuit of joy is ongoing, and we wonder if this isolation will, in fact, end. The speaker even desires the aloneness, to an extent, confiding in the tenth poem of the Metairie series, “You can always be alone / here with the salt grass, the rigs and their / perfect lights.” This speaker is experiencing the depth of her feelings. Even if the lonely feelings are unrealized and their import is uncertain, the speaker finds connection to the Louisiana landscape and it is in this connection to a fragile and shifting environment that she takes her first steps deeper into the erotic, self-realization and ultimately, power.
The second section of the collection pulls back from the imagist-influenced poetry of the first to wax narrative. Between memories, Patterson uses the lyric occasion to help the speaker sort through the emotions of the first section and give the reader a foothold in her world. Where the speaker seems lost and pensive in the first section, she uses the second section to explore the idea of freedom and what it takes to achieve it. In “The Seahorse Motel,” a coming-of-age poem, the speaker muses on rebellion and giving into feelings that spur on action:
My cousin taught me how to drink
in a half-priced room at the Seahorse Motel
with a handle of 151 and a liter of coke.
…
It was just the first drop, but
that night I understood the clean thrill
of forgetting, the numb thrill of waking
sleep. We stumbled to the street to smoke
our Newports, my spectral body teetering
against the salted air. I loved him for what
we shared, our mothers as nervous as purse-dogs,
our fathers severe and reticent. We stayed
awake all night, and when I finally blanked out,
I dreamt that there was no reason for all
our meanness—just that half-kicked bottle.
There is physical and emotional danger in the rebellion in this poem, but this rebellion also leads to a deeper understanding of self. Perhaps the attention to this risk is what Lorde means when she writes, “We have been taught to suspect this resource [the erotic], vilified, abused and devalued within western society.” In fact, it is after this poem remembering the Seahorse Motel that the collection turns again, often conflating human emotion with the actions of animals and shifts into the third section that relies heavily on allusions to myth and folklore. Patterson’s poems move from the realm of memory to the realm of fantasy to investigate liberation and how it is, to borrow from Lorde, vilified, abused and devalued. She uses the myth of Melusine, a mermaid-like serpent woman, the legend of seal-women, the classic story of sirens, and a general mysticism to highlight how feminine power is linked to the monstrous. And in this mythmaking, the speaker becomes aware of the power she holds, revealing,
I am not anything you ought to want,
or anyone—still, I’m the electric fence
you keep touching. (“I Am the Match”)
And
If I am bright,
if I am burning,
who’s to say I’m not
the sun? All your body
will be a pocket
for my impulses. So comb
your pockets; find the charm
you think will moor me.
I’ll bloom for you, then
I’ll pucker to a lime, but you’ll
go on admiring
my shoulders, my painted wings. (“Siren”)
These are the words of a speaker grown into herself, someone who has come to understand the erotic. The last section of Tall Grass with Violence presents a mature speaker, blending the image-driven poetry from the collection’s early pages and the narratives of its middle sections to create a sense of self-actualization for the speaker and resolution for the reader. The poems frequently show the speaker, who is no longer alone but has found a lover, claiming her own space. In “High Acres Drive,” the speaker reflects on the process of moving into a new house, replacing her home’s previous tenants:
The last woman who lived here
bought bricks and a kitchen, planted
a garden, then became a widow.
We spend our first spring mowing
dead nettles along the rusted gate.
I line three amber bottles above
the sink where you won’t forget—
aspirin for your blood, iron for your gut,
and the daily capsule that slows
your heart. We should fix the steel
windows, caulk the tile, have a baby.
First, scrape the old name off the mailbox.
This claiming of space suggests the alteration in Patterson’s speaker, one who has recognized the power in feeling. In the poem immediately following “High Acres Drive,” this shift is further illuminated when the speaker reveals, “For a long time, I was afraid that only good people / were able to be happy” (“The Worst Thing”). The speaker is happy but seems to recognize that the depression and loneliness present in the preceding poems were equally as important emotions as joy is now. It is in recognizing emotion and the power of expression that the speaker finds wholeness. In a quasi-ars poetica, the speaker posits, “To write a poem, you have to be afraid” (“Lake House”). Poetry, specifically the poems of Tall Grass with Violence, confronts fear, often gently but in order to cultivate power. “Giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity,” Lorde writes, “is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.” This reclamation of fear is at the heart of Tall Grass with Violence and adds meaningfully to conversations of power and change.
In Tall Grass with Violence, Rachel Marie Patterson creates an erotic exploration of change and a powerful story of self-discovery. The erotic “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing,” writes Lorde, and it is in this question that Patterson’s speaker rests, offering narrative, image-rich poems, rooted in revelatory lyric moments of growth and motivation. “Only now,” Lorde summarizes, “I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.” It is in the creative nature of the erotic that individuals make change, and in this way, Patterson both challenges and shines light on the weary drama of everyday life. Tall Grass with Violence recognizes the political in the personal and Patterson motivates each of us to be brave enough to feel deeply with her.