Eastover
Review by Walter Cummins
Joan Wickersham uses the 1956 discovery of the fatal wreckage of a Swedish ship, the Vasa—sunken immediately after its August 10, 1628 launching—as the starting point for an inventive consideration of all deaths, especially those of her parents, in the poems and prose poems of No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck. By implication, no human sets out to be a corpse.
A design flaw caused the sudden sinking, as described in Wickersham’s “The Reckoning”: “She was wrong from the beginning – top-heavy / or badly ballasted, with a greedy row of extra gunports / too close to the waterline.” This imbalance allowed a sudden gust of wind to capsize the Vasa moments after its launching.
As in these lines, Wickersham’s language throughout the collection uses direct statement; a judgmental word like “greedy” is rare in these poems. Her lines are usually free of adjectives, just nouns and verbs that build into a cumulative rhythm that presents details in a matter-of-fact voice of gripping control and authority. She offers great precision and illuminates with clarity.
An implicit question that lingers in the background throughout is whether we are all victims of some form of design flaw, capsizing our destiny.
Just a few poems into the collection, Wickersham links the Vasa tragedy to her parents thorough the blaming invective heaped upon the designer’s widow after the ship went down. He had planned for fame and ended up a disgrace. The poet hears her mother’s commenting voice: “Can you imagine?” Those were the words she spoke to her daughter after their husband and father committed suicide, “and left her with the wreckage of his life, his business.”
The mother’s wreckage is of another sort, her failing, helpless body confined to a wheelchair. In her nursing home, “The aides would circle and murmur, count aloud to each other – One Two Three, heaving her into the lift where she hung, swinging in space, between bed and wheelchair.”
Is that the message of the Vasa, its 1961 recovery after centuries at the bottom of the sea, the careful cleaning and reconstruction of the old saturated wood, the perhaps even more careful matching of bone fragments to reconnect individual bodies, all now displayed in Stockholm’s Vasa Museum? What drew Wickersham to return again and again to that museum after her chance discovery of its existence? At some point in the recovery, the hoisted remains of the vessel must have swung in space like her mother’s wheelchair as it was being retrieved from the depths to serve as a memento mori.
The poem “Unseen” captures the connection of parents and ship and human fate:
… A collision is coming
with the finite. My father’s gun.
My mother waking up one morning
unable to walk. At what point did they understand –
if ever – the ending of their stories?
I am haunted by a photo of the ship
on the final morning of the lift,
the moment the thing, so long submerged,
became visible; the water-worn heads
of a pair of wooden knights
breaking the surface, curious and astonished.
What would they discover above the surface? Perhaps the message that stunned the poet as a child when another girl sang a fact about death: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.”
There was another world my parents hadn’t mentioned.
Maybe they didn’t know? I was afraid to tell them or to ask.
The kid on the bicycle knew. The song knew.
There were worms and we were helpless.
