[review]

Dark Braid by Dara Yen Elerath
Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry
Selected by Doug Ramspeck
BkMk Press, 2020
Available from The University of Arkansas Press

The world that Dara Yen Elerath has created in Dark Braid, her prize-winning and celebrated first collection, is one of potent encounters, transformations, and strange embodiments. These poems hail from the depths of the feminine psyche, the Mundus Imaginalis, from the forests of the Brothers Grimm and the groves of Greek myth, which is to say, from the deep well of human story, and in particular, women’s stories.  

The first poem of the book, “How to Mount a Butterfly,” is a seduction story, the oft-told tale of a woman lured into sex and emotional possession. In Elerath’s version, a woman is conflated with a butterfly at the mercy of an “intelligent” but not-so-kind Lepidopterist. This first poem serves as an ominous prelude to the rest of the book, for there is a subtle cruelty and danger which underlies the instructions set forth in the poem:

When seducing a beautiful woman

insults make the best openers.

Mention mascara blackening

the rim of her lower eyelid,

or complain about the lace

fraying at the hem of her skirt,

the way she blinks too frequently

at neon lights that glow

through the bar’s

smoke-darkened windows.

Place her in the relaxing jar.

Alcohol provides another way

to soften her resolve…”

By the end of the poem, the woman is firmly mounted to the “board/with a silver pin.”  But this is just the beginning. As we follow one of the main arcs of the book, we witness an abusive relationship. Through Elerath’s precise and fabled language, as in “The Lyre,” we feel the fear and sense of entrapment:

                                                            “…Now I know a woman can

become a stone for her husband to trouble between his palms,

now I know a woman’s bones can bend to form a hammer,

a nail, a scythe—any tool her husband desires; now I know

she can be bound with wire, carved into a lyre, locked in a

closet; now I know she may come out only when she is to

sing. Now I know my wedding ring is the head of a tuning

peg. When he tightens it I scream higher.

Sonically mesmerizing and tonally haunting, these poems traverse the themes of puberty, menstruation, sexuality, romantic love and betrayal, abuse, trauma; and interwoven throughout are disturbing and marvelous images of the natural world in all its fecundity, decay and beauty.

Indeed, Dark Braid is threaded with moments of startling force. Take for example this characterization of the moon as a jealous and violent man from the poem called “Hatred of the Moon”:

Caught in his net of stars he envies

most of all the ocean and calls her whore—

pregnant, he knows, with drift fish, emperor shrimp,

bones, fins, salt, and scales he cannot

partake of. In jealousy he drags her body screaming

onto shore, batters her over and over—

and we stand here admiring this violence,

we call these beatings tides.

or these lines from “The Dolls Explain Themselves”:

So, if now we seem to thicken

with shadows, our silhouettes

to quiver against the wall, consider:

we are keepsakes of that forgotten

self, that self, that before

the taming, was wild and feral — murder

already stirring in her heart.

Elerath masterfully employs tonal strategies from a myriad of forms of address that makes for a compelling compendium of tales, lore, epistles, directives, and detractions. Sometimes elegiac, sometimes humorous (“I have given up the act/of kissing. It is a task/most taxing and involves/tongues and the passing/of saliva.”) — but never far from the pulse of Eros.

Particularly poignant are the poems that speak from the threshold of puberty: “When the blood first stained our underwear we prayed to Saint Strawberry. / To ease our pain we swallowed strawberries whole.” Equally poignant, the sheer tenderness and beauty of the writing, as in this excerpt from the prose poem “Blackberries”:

Between the night-lustered blackberry shrubs, I could see

the girls crying. They caught their tears in copper bowls and

poured them over the soil. Soon, the branches grew heavy;

and they reached to gather the fat, unusually swollen fruit.

Hands and wrists stained by juice, they laughed like nervous

butchers: yet what were they butchering? What were they

eating but sweetness? Their lips bore the color of goat’s blood

and rubies, the tint of old wounds and bruises.

A painting by Elerath, who is also a visual and graphic artist, gives this extraordinary book its understated and ordinary title. I admit that at first, I was puzzled by it, but with each poem I read, the image of the “dark braid” – with its interlaced strands of desire, pleasure, and pain — gestated and came alive, and I grew to experience it as a presence in and of itself, and when the dark braid spoke, it spoke all the poems in this powerful collection.