Book Review: Notes from Refuge by Lana Maht Wiggins
Notes From Refuge
Lana Maht Wiggins
Plainview Press 2008
Reviewed by C. L. Toups
Written during her exile from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Lana Maht Wiggins’s Notes from Refuge offers an unflinching look at the myriad of storms weathered by its female narrators against the shifting landscapes of history, identity, and spirituality. Whether they are outrunning a Category 4 hurricane, enduring trials of personal faith, or white-knuckling their way toward recovery, these women strive for a steady balance of self by confronting their darkest interiors and examining them through a prism of conflicting emotions. What results is the integration of fragmented beings into a functioning whole.
Wiggins astutely connects the personal triage of her narrators with that of storm-ravaged New Orleans. Since the devastation wrought by Katrina, the city, too, has struggled through a nadir and fought to resettle its fractured soul. It is a city that has always bargained comfortable truce between its disparate personalities, proving that the affectionate moniker “Big Easy” is often a misnomer, as Wiggins shows in “Nine Days Before The Storm”:
If you ain’t blue after walking the Quarter all night,
then you got no soul and you’re just a tin can drum.
If you want to see how easy the Easy is,
ferry over to Algiers to watch the Cathedral fade
with a half moon river of unwashed bodies,
then synchronize too many years of history in just one night.
Synchronizing history and experience is a theme that is well-supported by the architecture of Wiggins’s book. Her narrators are a collective fugue of feminine voices, entering from different points in history and different emotional circumstances to add their own meanings to the ever-evolving definition of Woman. Certain traits of the feminine persona, unfortunately, remain entrenched within prevailing culture, and women will always be challenged by the dilemmas these traits present. Wiggins chronicles this rivalry between woman and Woman with candor in the poem “Alter: ego”:
Did you really expect me to live
on a razor blade with intact sanity
and your hand cuffed around my ankle
You are the phrase
I coined all those years ago
when I still cared about you and
knew what was holding me here
and I, well…I’m sure it meant something
to one of us, but now it’s only a puny gesture
to hold your hand that way
With the simple use of a colon in the poem’s title, Wiggins succinctly presents the concurrence of stereotype’s influence and the directive to defy and diminish it. But the archetype and reality must eventually find comfortable marriage. Otherwise, woman will continue to struggle against herself, against her sisters, and against her Creator. In the poem “The Other Side,” Wiggins speculates on the possibility of a peaceable truce:
So if I say no one can harm me…and believe it to be truth, then
what should I fear? And if my reality resists all boundaries, who can
stop me from myself? Am I a slave to the excruciating rhythms of
gravity and time? Or just a passerby in a field of something like a
dream, but fluid and warm to the touch?
Free expression, without restraint or shame, is the desired goal. Can we liberate ourselves from those “excruciating rhythms of gravity and time”? Wiggins says yes. On the other side of fear and fighting, we can find understanding, compassion, and acceptance. In “Kitchen Poetics,” three generations of women—grandmother, mother, and daughter—bridge this gap in the most iconic of feminine locations.
Mom stirs the air with tomato sauce and memories
poised between atonement and pride.
My daughter lifts her head, finally, she hears and smells
heritage wrapped in a neat paradigm.
Notes from Refuge is a wrenching, introspective work of recovery. The narrators in Wiggins’s poems have traveled a near-destructive road, but they are not to be pitied. She invests them with dignity and grace in the midst of their struggles. Readers of Wiggins’s collection will find solace in these poems of empowerment and returning from the edge, reminding us that sometimes we are all just a grace note away from destruction or salvation.
Lana Maht Wiggins earned her Masters of Arts degree in Creative Writing in 2001 from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, where she is currently an Instructor of English. Her work has been published in The Southwestern Review, Poems for a Livable Planet, The Deep South Writer’s Chapbook, Dance to Death, Words-Myth, Moondance, Knock, and The Smoking Pot. She was initiated into the International Writer’s Group, Encres de Sang, where she was the guest poet/lecturer in Paris, France at the third annual International Gathering of Writers in May 2008. Notes from Refuge is Lana Maht Wiggins’s first full-length collection of poems. Visit Lana at http://lanawiggins.wordpress.com/.
C. L. Toups is an assistant Poetry and Prose Editor for The Rose & Thorn.
(Excerpts used with permission of the poet)
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