Sharon Doubiago, Body and Soul
(Cedar Hill Publications)

Jack Foley

"Under the Steering Wheel," one of the poems in Sharon Doubiago's new, complex, compelling book, "Body and Soul," describes "how the slander against [the author] / has never abated,...all my societies / like high school in that ugly way":

If I could tell you
the lies told of me. If I could tell you how many times
my heart's been broken, karmically forever
by this hill of persecution I fled, wisdom
would be yours as infinite as the stars.

It's a complex moment because the poem immediately preceding "Under the Steering Wheel" deals with a "lie" the poet herself has told. Like most of Doubiago's work, "Body and Soul" centers in autobiography. How does one tell the truth about one's life--especially if, like Doubiago, one has written about it before? How do you arrive at what "Under the Steering Wheel" calls the "absolute demand of the moment, the Truth"?

The transmuting activity of poetic language is one answer to that question. The various facts of the poet's life become the raw material which it is the poem's alchemical task to transmute into the intensity and immediacy of "Truth." Behind the rush of Doubiago's lines is Charles Olson's conception of the poem as "energy field," a conception Olson outlined in his famous 1950 essay, "Projective Verse."

"Body and Soul" is roughly chronological, but various elements--dreams, fantasy, and history, both personal and national--intersect in any given poem. Doubiago is charting not merely her personal life--which includes her mixed-blooded Native American ancestry--but "the soul's / autobiography," and if there are moments of extraordinary precision, there are also moments of genuine confusion. (What "holds body and soul together" is one of the questions the book's title raises.)

Doubiago is capable of wonderfully precise descriptions of unusual emotional states: "The buried images of my father rise / with each stroke of your long fingers, each / bite of your mouth the first time I am made love to / after he dies."She is also capable of breaking boundaries, of thrusting out into "a thinking toward something that cannot / be thought."

At the same time, however, she is a didactic poet: the examination of her life always brings her to certain usually feminist perceptions about our culture. Like her beloved mentor, H.D., Doubiago focuses on the individual life, but the individual life is only the pot in which the stew of historical consciousness cooks. The poet refers to herself as "nuclear blonde," and the phrase moves in various directions, not least of which is the "explosive" quality of her writing. If any given poem is a manifestation of the author's identity at the moment of its conception, then Doubiago's identity is in continual flux: it is a constantly active exchange in which various disparate elements touch purely by means of the poem's sudden, high-energy assertion of a momentary, negentropic flash--"nuclear":

Every day on the corner. Nancy
Jackson's pie stand. Hiding in the caves her grandparents'
whole lives. Halfbreeds who spill from her. Guy twenty
spilled my mother Garnet. On the couch, he and his mother.
Saloli Wodi belonged to which clan? Raking
leaves of flesh. Lawrence and Mozelle. Something
happened. Guy ran. Suzi died. Dora never forgave.
Not even their orphans. Something even the great rivers can't pass.

The problem of such writing is that the reader--particularly the reader seeking comfort, platitudes, and a deproblematized belief system--may well have difficulty following the leaps and turnings of the poet's luminous perceptions. Sharon Doubiago's work exhibits radical impulses, an experimental, "projective" style, and a willingness to be amazed at what her own poetry is telling her. In her pursuit of what she calls in her essay "Perdita's Father" "my difficult, mystical and ecstatic life in the King's English," she is capable of moments that leave even the most sympathetic reader in the dark. Yet she is also capable of sudden, surprising illuminations that you will find in nobody else.

"Body and Soul" covers an extraordinary amount of territory: political, personal, erotic, historical. The poet, currently in her fifties, appears as young woman, lover, mother, feminist, seductress: "Different people plug me into different currents," she writes; "I'm one of those women who doesn't know her age." She is rarely as lyrical as, say, Dylan Thomas or even Robert Duncan (another mentor). For her, each poem is a new beginning, a "search." As she says in "Perdita's Father," "you [can] still search even if you [can] no longer believe in Jesus."

For those who get it, there is much in "Body and Soul." Among the book's many fine poems is Doubiago's already well-known, Pushcart-Prize-winning "How to Make Love to a Man": "Run your tongue down the two tendons both sides / of his neck...." That, like "Son" and various other excellent individual pieces, is by itself worth the price of admission.

But the poems gain further meaning by their placement in the structure of the book. "Body and Soul" is a book of voices, fragments, puzzles. Its disjunctions haunt us, but the author's constant "quest"--her "search"--is as powerful a hook as you'll find in any murder mystery.