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There are many modern poets whose work is based in self analysis, the
sitting around poets as my mentor Jeff Nuttall called them, usually
their work is constructed around navel gazing; the poet’s quest for
understanding of their inner self or struggle with their inner demons.
None of it prepares us any better for what we are about to read than
the florid verse of the eighteenth century romantics would. To
anticipate the emotional impact of Janet’s verse one would have had to
be beaten up by a couple of Mafia thugs. No inner demons here, this is
very much wrestling with outer demons. The change of pace begins on
page 5 with a threatening poem, 5
Minutes Long, By page twelve the
first smack in the guts, laden with anger, resentment and a sense of
injustice, is delivered.
That describes what the reader new to Janet’s work will experience.
From the critic’s point of view the book, with its sudden mood swings,
its poems of distant and recent memory, the violence, blood red
passion, anger, warmth, madness and wisdom starts to unfold like an art
house movie, exploring in jump cuts the poet’s personality and
formative experiences.
Janet P. Caldwell was born in Texas and has lived all her life in
America’s Bible Belt, an area of extremes that creates many social
pressures unfamiliar to Europeans. This, alongside a traumatic
childhood due to a disastrous combination of circumstances moulded, in
my view, a person whose actions have often been steered by her
inability to reconcile herself to her true, iconoclastic nature because
of influence exerted by external pressures to live up to the
unrealistic expectations of the society she grew up in.
Once again the terrifying truth of St. Ignatius Loyola’s assertion
“Give me the child to the age of seven and I will give you the person
for life,” is demonstrated.
Many of Janet’s poems deal with struggles to cope with mental illness
(manic depression), and addiction and it is when writing on such topics
that her work grabs its readers by the throat, slams us into walls,
punches, kicks and headbutts us before leaving the crumpled heap of
emotions to which we are reduced, strewn on the unswept floor. It is
not that she is a violent person, I know her and she’s a sweetie, but
her skill as a writer and the very direct style (no wordsmithery here)
draw us into the narrative. But though the poems are very direct
in the way they approach subject matter there is also considerable
skill and originality in the use of language. Who else could invest the
phrase “my haemorrhaging symphony” with beauty (Voices, P94).
Many of the most memorable poems deal with abuse suffered throughout
childhood at the hands of a sadistic and depraved stepfather. Janet
tells in her interview with Poetry
Life and Times (November
2007) of
the circumstances leading to a family of four young children falling
into the hands of a man who delighted so in his role as omnipotent
patriarch and whose personal version of Bible Belt Christianity did not
constrain him from inflicting physical abuse on his four young wards
and sexual abuse on the pretty, blonde girl – child from a very early
age. Janet is a Christian and I don’t want to upset her, but I think we
must question the validity of a book proclaimed as the source of all
moral values that lays a duty on children to respect and honour parents
but does not mention the duty of parents to respect and honour their
children.
It is particularly poignant when in First
Haircut (p 128) we are
reminded that the siblings were required to call their tormentor
“Daddy” before images of a savage beating inflicted because Daddy had a
problem with a tangle in Janet’s long blonde hair while combing it are
rammed into our mental television receiver. As father of a daughter I
know how proud of their hair little girls little girls can be. The
first climax of First Haircut comes
when Daddy chops off the cherished
hair “with a butcher knife.” Throughout the ordeal the terrified little
girl takes refuge in counting to five and checking her fingers over and
over again, a habit in which she once more takes refuge when in the
second stage of the narrative, that evening Daddy, coming down from the
earlier high and craving more, ascends the stairs to her room.
Her
tresses had been one of the few things
she liked about herself, The
hair
once wrapped around her like
satin comfort...
The habit of counting to five is fully explained in the poem from which
the book takes its title, Five
Degrees to Separation which describes
how the victim learned to separate her psyche or soul from the physical
violation and degradation of her body:
In
the morning
when I was defiled,
five screams a minute...
She tells us, going on to describe how she is safe in numbers when “I
separate from myself.”
My
rabbit hole with
back doors aplenty,
five senses all shut down...
Progressing through the book we meet Daddy again and again as we are
introduced to more of his cruel games, his rages and his self –
righteousness.
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