Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems by Margaret Rozga
Lit Fest Press, 2017
The poet’s challenge in this book is how to make art from history and yet, “Take care / that it not grab hold of you, sentence you / to long complex clauses, multiple subordination.” Throughout the book the poet is playing with language: sometimes stuttering within the line; transforming words; using repetition, parallelism, anaphora, and internal rhyme. For example, in the lines above from “At the Worcester Art Museum,” the dual meaning of “sentence you” is not accidental. As the poet researches the history, how does she begin her lyrical narrative so it is not weighed down with facts and dates?
Fortunately The Letters of Jessie Benton Fremont broadens our image of Jessie. Her writing is lyrical, her self-reflections and questions compelling to the reader. The poet italicizes Jessie’s words within the poems. The use of epigraphs and the “Timeline of Key Events” in the end matter help to anchor the reader. Recurring themes that appear throughout are Manifest Destiny as justification for western expansion, the slavery question, and women’s limitations in the nineteenth century.
Beyond political and social implications (and there are many in this book), it is the dialogue that Jessie has with herself, her friend, her family, and her husband that I find the most interesting. As contrasted with her “mapmaker” husband, Jessie says, “I will create paths with my words,” and as the transcriber for her father and husband, that is what she did, write their stories and her own. She creates her own destiny out of words. The universe of Jessie Benton Fremont is capacious; her struggle with the slavery question adds dramatic background to this story of a woman making her way in this men’s world, through the administrations of “Little Van, slave-holding Tyler, Bleeding Kansas Pierce—officious old men eyeing young girls.”
This book is spoken through multiple voices: Jessie, her Pathfinder husband, her friend Lizzie Blair Lee, and Senator Thomas Benton, but it is Jessie’s narrative and the other voices give perspective on Jessie Benton Fremont. The most interesting voice is that of the poet who asserts her point of view while viewing art at the Worcester Art Museum or viewing documents at the Archives of the Worcester’s Antiquarian Society: catalogues, campaign pamphlets, cartoons, satire, caricature, advice, and humor among the sources the poet digs through. She knows there is more here than the “fragile pages of father-/and husband-centered history…”
It is this challenge that the poet presents that is the animus for this book, and the writer is more than successful in melding voices, modes of writing, language, image, and personal and political history in this impressive book of poetry.
Kathleen Fagley is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose chapbook, How You Came to Me, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012. Her work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, Memoir Journal, Cutthroat, The Comstock Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Fourth River, and most recently online in Switched- On Gutenberg and Nimrod Journal. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at Keene State College in Keene, NH.