Scribe & Quill ~ Book Reviews


Tracings


Author: Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Reviewer: Judith Woolcock Colombo
Publisher: Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky
Format: Adult, Poetry, Paperback, 2005, $12
Rating: * * * * Quills


We live in a technicolor world. We use color to illustrate our moods. Blacks, grays and browns show that we are sober and reflective, oranges, yellows and reds emphasize our joy and passion, greens and blues calm and soothe. As children, many of us loved to throw gobs of paint on paper, on each other and on the walls. Color was magical like the Land of Oz or the deep dark woods of Babes in Toyland. As adults, color continues to mesmerize and entice us. We categorize the different types of love by color — the red of passion and the white of pure love — and the fashion experts tell us what color to wear or paint our walls. Color permeates our world and fires our imagination.

In Tracings, Howard-Johnson bathes you in color. From the beginning of her chapbook, she surrounds the reader with rich vibrant imagery. "Minute by mango colored minute the sky changes, high clouds whipped like meringue by astral winds…" Reading Tracings is akin to sitting with the poet as she flips through the pages of an album filled with vivid photographs. As you look at the photographs, the poet narrates her life story, stopping occasionally to emphasize a particular point or to engage you in a philosophical discussion on life in general.

Howard-Johnson's poems speak often of her heritage and her childhood home and community which she carries within her heart. In "This Place My Heart Lies," the poet reflects on hurtful words spoken by her mother-in-law, words that cast her as an outsider. She searches for self as she travels the country and world in a way her own mother never thought she would. "…his voice a song finer than Foster or B’rer Rabbit fables read to me by mother who never thought I'd see a black man or the night sky as Hapshutset saw it, a cloak of burned velvet enfolds galaxies, a Bedouin's bonfire spits embers into its depth…" Even as the poet travels, her heart stays behind in the place she claims as home. "In Everywhere My Dream," she speaks again of leaving home to follow her dream and the sense of both loss and fulfillment this evoked. She also compares her mother's bitterness, because she stayed behind, to her own sense of loss because she went away. "She a bitter seed now because she stayed, I so lost because I went away."

The author paints the pages of Tracings with her memories of childhood. She speaks of her first remembered sound, air raid sirens, that startled her where she sat in her father's lap. She narrates her first experience with loss as her father and later her uncle went off to war and left her behind. She remembers that her father smelled "of gabardine and good-byes," and she remembers the smell of her uncle's Barbasol shaving cream as he leaves to fly B-42s.

The poems, although recounting the story of one woman's life, are varied and rich, evoking images we all can relate to. In "Portraits and Poses," she states, "Some photos are best destroyed," a sentiment many of us share, but she also expresses the reluctance we feel in destroying something that represents a memory even if it "cuts too deep."

The poet ends as she begins, reminiscing on the richness of life with both its joys and sorrows. She remembers with love her aunt who is dying and who she says, "is too alive to die." She reflects on this loss and recounts her mother's wish not to outlive her child. In the poem "The War Museum at Oslo," Howard-Johnson speaks again of the brutality of war and how as a child she really never understood what it meant, when her father went to war, but now as a grandmother she reflects on what it means to her as she watches her grandson go off to fight. "Once I was a child who did not have to say goodbye, now a grandmother who must pay the price. My grandson heads for heat and oil and sand."

While reading Tracings, I didn't have a favorite as I sometimes do when I read a collection of poems or stories. Instead I fell in love with the book's language as a whole. "Night comes. Like Van Gogh, flames smear vermilion on indigo. Smoke blots stars, heat breathes on my nape." These are words to wrap your tongue around and savor. They are words that linger in your mind long after the poem is read and the book closed.