Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The Sacred Feminine

by Brandi Herrera Pfrehm

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Though much of the imagery in This Place Called Us recalls the sensual dance between the natural world and the human experience, more often it's brought down to the level of the acutely personal and specifically feminine.

In this collection, Lisa Wujnovich - an organic farmer, poet and MFA student who calls Hancock, NY home - delivers the reader a sizable helping of the sacred feminine. In doing so, she offers up glimpses of the bramble wild heart of a middle-aged woman; as wife, mother and daughter to the land.

Within this context, nature serves as confessional - sunshine filtered through stained berry-glass, birdsong as psalm and the whispers of ancestral spirits through orchards, rather than cathedrals. It is here she divulges her deepest, most womanly secrets: the process of birthing, nurturing and raising her children; the headiness of youthful desire and the sorrow that is sometimes felt in its maturing; the long and often twisted road we call marriage, and the aches and pains that accompany aging. At every turn of phrase, Wujnovich seems to be saying: for better or for worse, here it is, this life I've chosen, have tended, and am receiving.

In the eponymous poem, This Place Called Us, she puts it thusly: "So what is this place / Where love lives, anger, hate- / this place of shared dreams, / this place called us? / when did becoming stream / into what we've never been? ... We've gone from you wanting me, / to my wanting you, to nobody / wanting anybody, back to the beginning..."

She continues to grapple with the chase and chance of romantic love and how over time, sexual motivators and desire make way for duty and discipline. In Pick Day, she likens the cutting and sorting of lettuce to a lifetime of tending and decision-making, and ends by harvesting the most important fragments.

"I sharpen my knife, grab a bucket, climb / to lettuce patch, select a head, / bend over and lift leaves, slice stalk, cleave earth, / hold rosette - weigh his words, reject" and goes on picking and stripping to deliver one final blow, "Reach, mutilate, wonder - how can I leave? / Search farm, home, kids, him, separate / outer leaves from inner leaves, compromise, toss / in a bucket, grab a head, recall his lips, choose - / good enough."

Wujnovich isn't afraid to mingle beautiful with ugly; the innocence of life is always just one step away from the next cycle, death. She caps off this juxtaposition in the poem Root Chakra Psalm, "Sky opens up, plops out white puffs like a mammal / Giving birth, so gorgeous, I almost stop breathing / Die from beauty, second cousin of pain."

And in Northern Lights, there is no loveliness in hitting a doe with her car, of the "stumbling death or slow mend, the insides bleeding" even when pitted against the moon, or the beauty-soaked backdrop of the Aurora Borealis. Life, as it were, is transient.

In this land, this map of her psyche, for every new bud struggling to push itself out of the earth there is a subtle, aged nagging. As in Naked, when she turns her eyes toward the knotted and gnarled, "There is no hiding November; / trees silhouetted in loss. / Sepia limbs scrawl the sky wrinkled, / like me lined in dusk..."

Yet for all the grit of reality, Wujnovich never loses sight of the quixotic. Her nectar-sweet vowels, fresh rhymes, and childlike perception are satisfying. While foraging for currants, she sings a juicy, red ode to youth, and gives in to a giddy sort of love every spring. With each stanza in Root Chakra Psalm she builds slowly, earth and sky madly bursting into ecstasy, until finally climaxing. The reader just can't help smiling.

What Wujnovich excels at most is carefully lifting stark lines of verse from beneath the brush. But her occasional foray into socio-political discourse deserves a different setting. And her verse is challenged by Mark Dunau's photography; a mindful depiction of an artist's love affair with the land and his family. Through this looking glass, Wujnovich's words lose a touch of the mystery she's toiled so many hours in the heat to establish. Where separately they have the potential to ignite the imagination, together the fire kindled between the two as life companions seems to diminish.

It would be interesting to observe Dunau's photography in an intimate gallery setting; likewise, Wujnovich's lines beg to be read, unaccompanied, in a separate volume. Either way, continue to imagine her crafting rows of verse: carefully and meticulously, though always aware that nature will have the final say, and the earth, its way with her.

Lisa Wujnovich will read poems from This Place Called Us and new work from her forthcoming manuscript at Buffalo Street Books this Wednesday, June 17, at 6:00pm. Stockport Flats is a small press (Equinunk, PA) dedicated to promoting writers whose creative buoyancy builds community. For more information, visit http://www.stockportflats.org/