12/01/01

Portals Press in New Orleans, Louisiana recently released Beverly Rainbolt’s poetry collection entitled, The Altar of this Moment to critical acclaim praising poetry that is, "…rich and evocative, complex and allusive, yet accessible to all readers open to the redemptive vision of mothers and daughters at the heart of their work." While at times Rainbolt’s work in this collection is a revisiting of the "Gothic South," and though her work has a definite sense of place, it strides beyond the label of "regional" to create a landscape in which women will find a facility to self-identify, to be empathetic, and to be impressed by Rainbolt’s insight.

The collection is split up into three sections: in(Her)itance, the Altar of this Moment, and the meaning of Gone which create an extremely interesting and diverse reading of a woman’s life. However, the first poem of the collection, "unstrung" precedes even the first section, and stands alone to set the mood for its reading. This first, isolated poem addresses the ideas of womanhood and family that can be found in many of the collection’s works. "i am split like a beat atom/ like grandmom’s pearl necklace/ beads bounce on the kitchen floor" (ll. 1-3). And subsequently in stanza three, "daddy slipped & broke his will/ on one of them" (ll. 9-10). This metronome sets the time for the reading of the collection as it quickly spans three generations and evokes a multitude of images and ideas of broken illusions.

The first section, in(Her)itance, is a collection of poems about Mother, motherhood both personal and universal, and ultimately the death of a dog. While it may not sound like a logical segue, when one reads the section they can see the progression as a natural one. The section begins with, "Memento Mori" and "in(her)itance handiwork" which begin specifically about the speaker’s actual mother, but evolve into societal ideas of womanhood and motherhood then progresses to "Starving Mothers in America" whose properly capitalized title questions the authority of societal ideas. In effect, this first poem ties the subject of mother in with the subject of known female suffering that is public rather than the stoic privacy of past generations:

I am here for all the hungry women;
I am here to help break the fast
for Norma Jean &Judy, for Virginia and Sylvia
for Janis and Billie
who drowned in it.
For my mother
who never let it surface (ll. 39-43).

As the section leads the reader to make connections between the known and unknown, the specific and more universal, the final poem of the section, "not forgotten," connects the death of a dog in the speaker’s childhood and another animal death "twenty-five years later" to the lives of her mother and grandmother and the perils and trials of their lives.

Section two, the Altar of this Moment, leaves the theme of motherhood to embrace ideas of womanhood not always in the "traditional" manner: intellect, sexuality, and spirituality to name only a few of the landscape’s dips and turns. Poems such as, "Ungirdled, I" address enthusiasm and free sexuality, while "The Streets Are on Fire (Wish you were here)" illuminates ideas of pain caused by society’s numbness to violence, and "the bus stop where Beauty crosses Broad," that takes the reader into the mind of the "poet-muse" dispensing humanity as she spills her purse on the "neutral ground" and ascends to narcissism with overtones of humor.

The final section, the meaning of Gone, returns to the idea of motherhood; however, it embraces and explains the hurt and anger of the death of a mother, and how this death affects lives immensely and irrevocably. The idea of the abstraction of the word "gone" in regards to death is attacked in all of the poems of this section, and many of the poem’s titles peal out the word to make its importance recognized: "the meaning of gone," "gone talk," "times gone," and "While i was gone." Even the last poem of the collection, one lauded by the AWP, plays with the word "gone" in "My Little Antigone."

The disparity of section two with the others is not one which jolts the reader with discomfort; in fact, this disparity is a wonderful retelling of women’s lives – the pain, the hunger, the sexuality, the laughter, and the recognition of all aspects of life in our skins. the Altar of this Moment is indeed a collection to obtain and cherish as a diary of women’s heartfelt experiences.