Repetition as unstoppable force
The opening poem (‘I.’) starts with repetition: ‘I was born in a forest // I was born and someone trained a light on me’. The effect is to emphasise beginnings, and this insistence continues with the word ‘silhouette’ appearing many times.
Repeated words from one poem often hop over into another, as though providing leaven for the next. So, the repetitious habit continues into ‘II.’ with the new prime words ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘touch’, ‘eat’, before ‘silhouette’ returns from ‘I.’ and then a repetition of the devastating phrase ‘billions of cancer cells’ and finally many repeats of the word ‘poems’.
This reader quickly sensed that repetition here means wake up, pay attention. In ‘III.’ ‘poems’ become a single ‘poem’ and the short sentence ‘I wrote’ plus the deeply significant phrase ‘white Western male’ take centre stage as new repeats. ‘Drunk on a floor’ and ‘on the floor drunk’ swerve the poem towards ‘flesh’, ‘dress’, ‘flesh-coloured dress’.
In ‘IV.’ the key phrase ‘all black people’ ignites a chorus of gathering energy — poems and their repetitions drive forward, an engine that can’t be resisted. In ‘V.’ the statement ‘I want control and that’s exhausting’ might provide a key to the repeats, which in this particular poem don’t happen.
‘Black’ is the main repeat in ‘VI.’:
I think of black a thousand times a day and try to draw
the word out of me.
Repetition as expression, emptying, even as exorcism, excoriation?
From ‘VIII.’ the poems revert to repeating certain key words, a well-established pattern providing incantatory reassurance. The poetry grows from the repetition. The visibility and audibility of certain words ensures their power:
all bodies are symptoms of thought
all bodies do beautiful and painful things
And the force of repetition builds to the last. The fourth stanza of the final poem ‘IX.’ has ‘black water’ or variations of it six times; these words then dart, meander, flow and flood through the poem, reaching into every crevice of it, until it is ‘that black fucking water’. Repetition finally brings all to itself: ‘I feel incomprehensibly attracted to the black water’.