Dog Girl - Heidi Lynn Staples

Ahsahta Press, 2007
Paperback. 82 pgs.
Review by Robb St. Lawrence

If you were to google the phrase “dog girl,” the top results would point you to websites about Oxana Malaya, a feral child from the Ukraine. When Oxana was three, her parents left her at home without anyone to care for her, and, without a place in her house, she went to live with the family’s dogs. She was found at the age of eight, barking and running on her palms and knees. Over time she got the nickname “dog girl,” a name that she apparently takes no offense in. If you watch a video, you can hear her speak in a voice devoid of inflection, her tone so flat and formal that it takes a moment to realize what seems off. This is fairly common among feral children that learn to speak, who have missed the crucial stage of their linguistic socialization, and can only ever look at language from the outside. They can only look upon language, never dwell inside of it, never be fully infected by the inflection of some mother tongue. And it might be here that one finds a connection to the title of Heidi Lynn Staples’ Dog Girl, its lyrics replete with wordplay that exposes the other in language, interrogates the buried echoes that infect speech in our clichés and our sincerest thought, coming at language from the outside. Even the title, a homophonic echo for “doggerel,” can be read as a demonstration of the way that levity and dead-dreary meditations on feral children’s relationships with language are possible within the same speech act.

Dog Girl consists of four sections that correspond roughly to the seasons. Beginning in winter, with Janimerick (like her first collection, Guess Can Gallop, this is a collection of poems that interrogate traditional forms as though they were carriers of disease), and ending on Decemblank, there is a kind of narrative trajectory as written on the body. Winter begins with a body empty as we expect the landscape, and the reader enters the collection with caution, with a feeling that they are entering in the aftermath of tragedy.

There once was a white with a mouth
And a caul with a north for its south
The cold snapped err its ice
White as laboratory mice—
A quiet thrall bid a sprout broken. (3)

The back matter of the book would indicate that the “explicit subject matter” of the book includes a “core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss,” and one can begin to see this grief and the loss itself addressed where a reader might expect the punchline: “A quiet thrall bid a sprout broken.” While there isn’t any way of accessing what “a white with a mouth / and a caul with a north for its south” gestures toward in any figurative way, there is certainly emotional resonance with the idea of a caul that’s backwards in some way—the veil of amniotic sac remnant on some births (particularly early ones) that tradition sees as a sign of luck, perhaps in this case a grave misfortune. And as invocatory form, as a mood-setting, a tragic limerick is pretty nearly a perfect way of demonstrating early on the—not conflicting, but complementary—thematics of grief and of joy toward the world that dominate the collection; I find it hard to imagine a limerick that, however sad, doesn’t call to mind a kind of “joy that exceeds pleasure,” to borrow a phrase from Robert Duncan, in our addresses to the world through language.

This joy is perhaps most explicit in the places where Staples makes most use of the punning wordplay for which her poetry has often been cited. For instance, in “Prosaic,” she writes, “I had become a release of banditry that triste sweet and bad at the defamed signs” (8), which calls up the cliché of “tastes sweet and sad at the same time,” and “a release of energy.” But the poem manages the doubled phrase as a kind of commentary—‘release of banditry’ is what ‘release of energy’ holds underneath it in its sonic echo. In a poem that seems on its surface about an affair, the wordplay makes explicit that whatever enervation the speaker has in this relationship is also that of the bandit, the thief who tristes sweet and tristes bad, who dwells near (in signs of) the defamed. And it is in moments like this, where the pun comments on its echoes, that this particular compositional strategy works most effectively for Staples. There are places, however, that what is often quite effective can feel like a tic, and lose its weight.

Very often in this collection, where one would expect “day,” Staples’ speaker gives “dei.” That would start to grate after a while if it wasn’t for its playfulness, and it’s possible that this playfulness does save those instances for some readers. But it was hard not to feel robbed of impact, going through the majority of the book, its first two movements, seeing this particular pun happen occasionally and with light impact, only to find myself in “Not, you no,” an incredibly affecting lyric to the aforementioned lost pregnancy, seeing “A whole nude dei” after a few instances of the same pun. Robbed of its potency by repetition (Stein’s rose was working against tradition, where this pun works against other instances in the same book put to different uses), by the way that the pun almost becomes cliché in context, what could and should be powerful writing becomes, potentially, another sleight of hand. If we see “dei” replacing “day” only here though, if its impact is fresh: “dei,” God, is shown as whole and naked in the loss of this child, Job’s suffering is re-positioned (as God is revealed nakedly as can be) with a woman at its center, experiencing a grief that many women experience, universalizing that myth’s core of suffering. The poem on its own is powerful, resonant, and enough to recommend the book:

Not, you no
not any more.
Still has the womb.

Not—
Though I thought the stone had grown
a bloom, a blue-eyed wild wily you.
A room called lit with rose.

A whole nude dei.
A now made of then. An us
swum in me, as the perfect
opposite of astronaut.

It’s worth noting:
You were to kick, crawl, laugh, noting
everything. Arise!
Wake in the middle of the night!

Yet this unholy host
shrank, backed into
preemptive: How could we? As if
a bee asleep in a bloom, you were
bled as raid. O Nothing more
numinous than mere chanson.

Mere chanson, only song
sung which weaves ever’s message, adored
organism weaving cellular faction, action
had to be taken, taken out
of the growing squall. (52)

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Robb St. Lawrence lives in Arlington, VA. He is in the MFA program at George Mason University and his poetry has appeared recently, or is forthcoming, in CutBank and Third Coast.