Book Review: Cherma by Jacqueline West
Cherma
by Jacqueline West
Published by Parallel Press 2010
Reviewed by C.L. Toups
Between 1880 and 1920 over twenty million immigrants entered the United States, all having fled their home lands to escape oppression, starvation, or the ravages of war. Jacqueline West’s chapbook, Cherma, draws its inspiration from “the names, lives, and family stories of a small group of Bohemian immigrants who settled in Wisconsin’s Pierce County in the late 1800s” and chronicles the transformation of this farming community as it sheds its native folkways and assimilates into the new American culture.
By weaving fragile imagery into the stark tones of these narrative poems, West reveals a multitude of vulnerabilities hidden below her characters’ steely resolves. Her careful attention to nuanced detail elevates specific events to universal experience and underscores the gains and losses of a people who have sacrificed much for their admission into American society.
In the opening poem, “Yanys,” a young woman debates how much she should reveal of America’s hardships in a letter home to her mother who waits expectantly for news. She envisions how her “mother’s hands would tremble /veins raised like small mountains over the bones /as she tore through the American seal.”
By using the term “American seal,” West emphasizes the significance of the letter’s contents and characterizes it as being analogous to an official document, one that acts as a vicarious passport for the mother. Ultimately, the young woman cannot bring herself to write about the death and loneliness that confront her and opts, instead, for a delicate treatment. She writes about the qualities of America that remind her of home, reassuring her mother
that at last they had plenty to eat,
that the land was cheap
and the china unbroken
and outside the tent where they slept on the dirt
clumps of violets grew wild in the ruts.
With unflinching focus, West probes the complexities of preserving the ideal of America as a land of opportunity and prompts the reader to question whether the cloaking of physical and emotional hardships serves to safeguard that dream for others as well as for ourselves.
The psychological conflicts associated with assimilation also play out in the poem, “Cobian,” where a contentious marriage acts as metaphor for an immigrant caught between the demise of one identity and the emergence of another:
From state to state she followed fast,
teeth clamped tight to the trail behind him.
He could have sworn she’d leashed him with a spell.
And so at last he changed his name.
V to b, k to c;
he sank through the silt of traveling strangers
West skillfully foreshadows this dark side of the American courtship with contradicting images that create friction and imbalance throughout the poem and show the uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety of assimilation:
She was lovely on their wedding day,
the lace cap like frost on her black hair,
black eyes bright as broken glass.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But after the dancing and shivaree,
when the Bohemian band had picked up their brass
and ambled home over the hills,
when the slender sliver of moon
had thickened to a coarse white eye,
his bride laid her docile guise aside.
Of course, he never admitted it,
big Bohunk plowman that he was—
Like the young woman in “Yanys,” denial becomes a coping mechanism for living in cultural limbo, and the assumption of new identities and altered expectations result in a bargaining of loss and gain.
The inevitable split that assimilation causes between first and second generation immigrants is also reflected in West’s collection. In the poem, “Merta,” a son’s aspirations to leave the farm and attend college are derailed when his father informs him he can’t be spared because there aren’t enough hands to do the work. West describes the smell that summer as
rotten and sweet.
Ripeness thickened in the air. The apples
fell faster than the pigs could eat, each heavy branch
trailing its tip on the ground
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The boys scooped apples by the barrowful,
brushing away the cider-drunk bees
and hauling the fruit off to three spreading cairns
that simmered and softened in the heat.
West turns the rotting apples into a poignant metaphor for the son’s deferred education, and the cairns he constructs out of hauling them off are an ironic memorial to his lost ambitions. When his father’s “slow step crushe[s] the cores,” readers sympathize with the son being relegated to wear the same uniform of “overalls covered in motes of hay / that clung to the denim like glinting pollen” instead of the "clean slacks and buttoned shirt” that “striding the brick halls” of college promised.
The characters in Cherma struggle. While many persevere, others give in to hopeless despair, but readers of West's collection will find familiarity in their journey. These poems are a powerful testament to the courage and determination of anyone who has ever sacrificed everything to follow a dream. Alexis de Tocqueville once commented that the American Dream was “the charm of anticipated success.” As the descendants of immigrants who settled here in pursuit of that dream, we often suffer from a Janus-type complex—while half of our spirit gazes back upon its origins, the other half is always lured by the promise of advancement. This constant give-and-take is the evolving inheritance of our melting pot identity and the central theme that carries through the poems in Cherma.
Jacqueline West’s poetry has appeared in journals including The Pedestal Magazine, Inkwell Journal, Barnwood, St. Ann’s Review, Pebble Lake Review, Rose & Thorn, and flashquake, has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded a 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her series for young readers, The Books of Elsewhere, debuts in June 2010 from Dial (Penguin). You can visit her at jacquelinewest.com.
C.L. Toups is Managing Editor and Senior Poetry Editor of Rose & Thorn Journal.
A+ on this thorough and thoughtful review. Much enjoyed.
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Well done, Cynthia!
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