Hannah Bonner. Another Woman. EastOver Press Inc., 2024.
Reviewed by Connie Jordan Green, Nov. 20, 2024.
The writer, Grace Paley, pointed out “it is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power [and] to learn the truth from the powerless.” Power in our society has for many years been held securely by men, and the powerless have overwhelming been the women. Love affairs often fit into this frame of control, as is the case with the protagonist in Hannah Bonner’s Another Woman who takes the reader on a journey of discovery following the speaker’s failed love affair with a married man, a journey filled with moments of despair and bleakness, moments of insight and strength, culminating in the lovely “Addendum” wherein the speaker ambles along a path and “slow[s] [her] steps / to savor the minutes.” She is in a place where she thinks “alone I am witness to my wonder” (p. 70), an echo of the closing line in an earlier poem “Remember This”: “I am the garden of wonder” (p. 68).
The speaker, in the process of learning from the powerless, calls upon historical and mythical women as she delves into what it has meant through the years to be female. Each woman sheds light upon the issue of rejection through the lens of her own experience.
For some women the remains of an illicit affair are bittersweet memories of the loved one and/or a refusal to let go of the love, exemplified in the voice of Delilah:
It was your hair I wanted.
The heft of it.
Its rain beating down upon me…
even when they strung you
up like a star,
blind and shorn.
You fevered through me (p. 37).
History and myth are filled with women who accepted their fate with a sense of resignation, recognized by the speaker through the voice of Lot’s wife:
…I rolled up
my tongue like a rug I couldn’t
find a room for. I ate salt incessantly.…
The angels flare: this I know:
I had so many warnings (p. 31).
Or who responded with a spirit of quiet acceptance, as with Aphrodite: “… Better to be alone, she thought / afterwards, than beholden to another (p. 69).
Along with the women who mourn and/or accept their situation are females such as Dido who proclaim defiance:
…my hair—the flames a branching
antler, a scorching crown.…
…Don’t tell me
this knots your heart of oak.…
… I am sifting
like a spatter of stars, a cooling calm, a queen.
A woman, a warning (p. 41)
Bonner’s exploration of women feeling rejected by their lovers or resigned to their losses leads naturally into poems that fall within the strong tradition of confessional poetry. Bonner’s poem “In Kind” echoes Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind.” Sexton’s speaker is someone who has “gone out, a possessed witch / haunting the black air, braver at night.” For Bonner, “I became the other woman / gradually, then suddenly” (p. 35). Sexton again: “A woman like that is misunderstood. / I have been her kind.” Bonner: “Sometimes she calls to me, / and I answer in kind” (p.35). The penultimate line in Bonner’s “In Kind,” “The scream lives in the mirror,” brings to mind another contemporary confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, in particular her persona poem “Mirror”: “I am silver and exact. …// In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”
Throughout the book, Bonner weaves images of deer, a bright thread that ties together the beginning and the end of the narrative’s central love affair. Deer wander through the poems, a stealthy spirit that gradually calls the reader’s attention to their role as embodiment of the woman’s state of mind at different points in the unwinding of the narrative. Early in the relationship, there is “the urgency of deer” (p. 32) and the deer that lick the “salt on [the] windowsill … dry” (p. 47); there is the revelatory “buck stand[ing] in the field, head cocked / like a telephone, all rapture and ear” (p. 29). After the affair has ended, “the predictable/ deer print track[s] / the perimeter of the house” (p. 55), culminating with the speaker’s realization, it is “not the deer I dream of / …not the deer. Their pelts. // Their panting. No, not even / after—their clamor to the bone” (p. 56). The speaker finally shows she is back in charge of her life with the small, tight poem “Untitled”:
I know I am safe
when I sense the deer.
Only I can
startle them (p. 59).
Among the longer poems is a smattering of shorter poems similar to “Untitled,” some with as few as two or three lines, so short they are only the gentle passing of a wispy shadow, and yet packing such startling imagery that the reader pauses in wonder:
And when he told her it was truly over this time
he looked at her like November light flung
long across a porch (p. 44).
Sun in January, Three Months Since You’ve Left
I can hear ice
all around me
breathing (p. 53)
Another Woman is a book that revels in the sounds of words, the richness of language, the way a few carefully chosen specific nouns can create a picture that calls forth an emotion: “Starlight and empty sidewalks, closed storefronts / and cicadas” and “streetlamps sputter Luna moths akimbo” (p. 26); “a tumult of finches / buffeted by wind” (p.68); “the white / peaches at dusk” (p.24); and my favorite image in the book, “the orchard winged in green” (p. 24). Bonner is as adept with words as a trapeze artist gracefully flying from handhold to handhold while the audience, breath held, watches spellbound.
The poems in Another Woman are honest, sometimes to the point of being brutal, but always memorable. Another Woman is above all a book that shines with hope and resilience.
Reviewed by Connie Jordan Green, Nov. 20, 2024.
The writer, Grace Paley, pointed out “it is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power [and] to learn the truth from the powerless.” Power in our society has for many years been held securely by men, and the powerless have overwhelming been the women. Love affairs often fit into this frame of control, as is the case with the protagonist in Hannah Bonner’s Another Woman who takes the reader on a journey of discovery following the speaker’s failed love affair with a married man, a journey filled with moments of despair and bleakness, moments of insight and strength, culminating in the lovely “Addendum” wherein the speaker ambles along a path and “slow[s] [her] steps / to savor the minutes.” She is in a place where she thinks “alone I am witness to my wonder” (p. 70), an echo of the closing line in an earlier poem “Remember This”: “I am the garden of wonder” (p. 68).
The speaker, in the process of learning from the powerless, calls upon historical and mythical women as she delves into what it has meant through the years to be female. Each woman sheds light upon the issue of rejection through the lens of her own experience.
For some women the remains of an illicit affair are bittersweet memories of the loved one and/or a refusal to let go of the love, exemplified in the voice of Delilah:
It was your hair I wanted.
The heft of it.
Its rain beating down upon me…
even when they strung you
up like a star,
blind and shorn.
You fevered through me (p. 37).
History and myth are filled with women who accepted their fate with a sense of resignation, recognized by the speaker through the voice of Lot’s wife:
…I rolled up
my tongue like a rug I couldn’t
find a room for. I ate salt incessantly.…
The angels flare: this I know:
I had so many warnings (p. 31).
Or who responded with a spirit of quiet acceptance, as with Aphrodite: “… Better to be alone, she thought / afterwards, than beholden to another (p. 69).
Along with the women who mourn and/or accept their situation are females such as Dido who proclaim defiance:
…my hair—the flames a branching
antler, a scorching crown.…
…Don’t tell me
this knots your heart of oak.…
… I am sifting
like a spatter of stars, a cooling calm, a queen.
A woman, a warning (p. 41)
Bonner’s exploration of women feeling rejected by their lovers or resigned to their losses leads naturally into poems that fall within the strong tradition of confessional poetry. Bonner’s poem “In Kind” echoes Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind.” Sexton’s speaker is someone who has “gone out, a possessed witch / haunting the black air, braver at night.” For Bonner, “I became the other woman / gradually, then suddenly” (p. 35). Sexton again: “A woman like that is misunderstood. / I have been her kind.” Bonner: “Sometimes she calls to me, / and I answer in kind” (p.35). The penultimate line in Bonner’s “In Kind,” “The scream lives in the mirror,” brings to mind another contemporary confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, in particular her persona poem “Mirror”: “I am silver and exact. …// In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”
Throughout the book, Bonner weaves images of deer, a bright thread that ties together the beginning and the end of the narrative’s central love affair. Deer wander through the poems, a stealthy spirit that gradually calls the reader’s attention to their role as embodiment of the woman’s state of mind at different points in the unwinding of the narrative. Early in the relationship, there is “the urgency of deer” (p. 32) and the deer that lick the “salt on [the] windowsill … dry” (p. 47); there is the revelatory “buck stand[ing] in the field, head cocked / like a telephone, all rapture and ear” (p. 29). After the affair has ended, “the predictable/ deer print track[s] / the perimeter of the house” (p. 55), culminating with the speaker’s realization, it is “not the deer I dream of / …not the deer. Their pelts. // Their panting. No, not even / after—their clamor to the bone” (p. 56). The speaker finally shows she is back in charge of her life with the small, tight poem “Untitled”:
I know I am safe
when I sense the deer.
Only I can
startle them (p. 59).
Among the longer poems is a smattering of shorter poems similar to “Untitled,” some with as few as two or three lines, so short they are only the gentle passing of a wispy shadow, and yet packing such startling imagery that the reader pauses in wonder:
And when he told her it was truly over this time
he looked at her like November light flung
long across a porch (p. 44).
Sun in January, Three Months Since You’ve Left
I can hear ice
all around me
breathing (p. 53)
Another Woman is a book that revels in the sounds of words, the richness of language, the way a few carefully chosen specific nouns can create a picture that calls forth an emotion: “Starlight and empty sidewalks, closed storefronts / and cicadas” and “streetlamps sputter Luna moths akimbo” (p. 26); “a tumult of finches / buffeted by wind” (p.68); “the white / peaches at dusk” (p.24); and my favorite image in the book, “the orchard winged in green” (p. 24). Bonner is as adept with words as a trapeze artist gracefully flying from handhold to handhold while the audience, breath held, watches spellbound.
The poems in Another Woman are honest, sometimes to the point of being brutal, but always memorable. Another Woman is above all a book that shines with hope and resilience.