Out Of Canaan
Mary Stewart Hammond

W.W. Norton & Company

 
Out of the eater something
to eat came forth,
And out of the strong
something sweet came
forth. – Judges 14:14

In the Bible book of Judges, Samson, the strongest man who ever lived, is surprised by a roaring lion and responds by ripping it in two. He tears it in two with his bare hands ‘just as someone tears a male kid in two and there was nothing at all in his hand.’ Some time passes and he comes upon the carcass of the lion and finds a swarm of bees in it and honey. He then uses the occasion and circumstances to refresh himself and his traveling companions and to outwit his enemies with a riddle that he alone knows the answer to.

In Out of Canaan, by Mary Stewart Hammond, you will find a strong writer making honey out of adversity. In a prophet’s voice with a southern accent she judges and riddles the life around her.  She has divided her book into Canaan and Exile.

In the first half, Canaan (the land of milk and honey in the bible), she talks about life and death, the rod of discipline and the lash of rebellion, explores family issues that are visited upon the children and grandchildren and even the great-grand- children of a family. But she also describes living off  the beauty of the land as if its beauty were milk and honey. She shows the ignorance in back woods ways to be ignorance as bliss:
 

(An excerpt)

I

And we grazed in the first ridges
behind the Piedmont, toward the uttermost
part of the South creek, Lo,

wood smoke weaves ribbons
through fall days and the sun
skitters on tin roofs

like fat in a skillet. Here,
even the serpent is reluctant, dozes
in the sparse warmth

at the foot of tree stumps. Blessed
were the least of our brethren
for they ate with the wrong fork,

chased gravy around thick plates
with Wonder bread, didn’t know
the Sabbath from Shinola, therefore

were we holy. They shall move
their lips when they read this
and ignite the words with an index finger

run under the lines. If you know you can leave
in the middle of the night in the middle of the war
with a full tank of gas,

ye will never know them.

II

That the call may come forth like Jedidiah,
fear not. In those mountain hollows,
we grew eggs and beets, lifted up our eyes

for wild mushrooms. And King James
opened and closed on us, seven days,
with the ecstasy of pump organs.

So it is, cabbage roses flare
on cold slipcovers and Mamma’s shotgun
pauses on its peg leg

back of the door. For when you went forth
on visitations, your male flock
drew to the manse, thirsty for salt,

scared Mamma like daughters. Thus
were sour mash jars lined up
at the edge of the yard for targets.

And the steeple inched three times its length
across onion grass, pointing East
to home. And the shadow of death

danced on good days in the corncrib,
by sunset had crept under the fence,
reaching for the root cellar. Only

the fast dark saved us.

Quite a long excerpt eh? But the poem goes on and on, writhing back and forth– like the undulations of a snake–while the mind dances and handles the images of the poem, on faith, like a charismatic snake handler. And the mind does not get bitten. The mind is flushed with that epiphinal rush that accompanies rewarded leaps of faith.

Mary Stewart Hammond moves from heartbreaking Small Talk in which her grandma, who has kept others waiting all her life, becomes impatient waiting on death, to Hubris (in three parts) in which the arrogance of loving someone, anyone, but especially family, each and every one of them and us bound to up and die, is brought home like an amen.

And threes show up in other places in this book – Triptych with Missing Madonna and Blessings (in three parts: My Mother-in-law Sailing, Second Sight and Paying Respects). These triune groupings shiver with father-son-and-holy- ghost associations. 

Reading World Without End had me thinking of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Mary Stewart Hammond, with those two, could well comprise a female trinity of fierceness, complexity, and control.
 

World Without End
 (An excerpt)

My spanky Daddy. Always you call it
helping, your hands flashing to your waist,
fingers blurring like lawn-mower blades, and 
slash, leather rips from belt loops,
crazed, climbs the air overhead
coiling. Always, I disappear. I am not

your teeny daughter in hand-smocked dresses
your Mamma sent, my pretty new dresses
with sashes cut off, your scissors
raging through my closets so everyone
can see, until the hems can be let down
no further, my badness,

the stubs of my sashes sticking out
like baby arms chopped off. Even grown, I am not
your daughter when you’re detaching my daughter,
year by year, snip by snip, enticing her
to come sit down beside you, snuggle, bring you
all her problems with me

as if she were a sash and yours to wield
like a belt on my bare heart, spanking
Mommy until I’m embroidered with welts,
smocked and ruched, with stubs
sticking out, my mother arms
chopped off.

If the first half of this book leaves the reader identifying with the writer – longing 
for freedom but steeped in servility that sometimes serves a purpose, then the second half, Exile, takes us into banishment with her. And we find her exile to be something heavy but sweet, like honey distilled and fermented into mead – headache inducing and intoxicating.

Read Cosmetics and Ecumenical Movements on a Coffee Table, Suffrage and Blessings and see what I mean. Read Making Breakfast and Paying Respects, Nefertiti and The Promised Land.

Hear her drunken paean in Grandmother’s Rug:
 

(An excerpt)

On days I’m not listening,
when the words escape
rebellious as steam
from the snap-bean pot, hustle, answering
only to me, into lines and stanzas,
I kneel on Grandmother’s rug come to rest
on a herringbone floor four flights over Manhattan,
and cup my hand around the precise green lobe,
the blood rim of an ear full of yarn sky
floating detached in a divided eternity since 1911—
two years before the Armory Show—and I whisper
into the hooked earth of Virginia, “Hey Grandmom,
by heavens, I’m doing it.”

This writer will leave you drunk on poetry nectar. Out of Canaan is available from W.W. Norton & Company.

Starting in September of 2001, W.W. Norton & Company will launch NP, Norton Poets Online. NP will include great features: essays and interviews with Norton poets, an email newsletter with updates on current publications and what's new on the site, audio recordings of poets reading their work, and special National Poetry Month events.
 
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