Rain Mountain
Review by Walter Cummins
A swerve is not a deliberate choice but rather the result of a last-second panic, an instantaneous response to a sense of threat, twisting to avoid a crash. Laurie Blauner’s unexpected metaphoric disruptions are both verbal and autobiographical, radical linkages that capture the crises of her life, her inability to stay on course and a struggle to cope with the unexpected and escape the impact.
Throughout this book of creative nonfiction, I kept thinking of someone on a road hoping to reach a destination but encountering sudden roadblocks, confronting needs to pick new directions with barely enough time to adjust and survive a dizzying spin.
The death of those around her is one of those spins—deaths of people and deaths of pets along with the anniversaries of their happenings. Both Blauner’s father and her ex-husband died of sudden heart attacks, her father a man she had not seen in twenty years also twenty years before this writing about it, her ex seventeen years before, though his failures as a spouse enter these essays again and again—drugs, alcohol, and gambling.
Her next to last Siamese cat had a cancer that streamed through his body and left him lane and blind, demanding euthanasia. Blauner writes of death: “I always hope Death will go away. Somewhere else, anywhere else. But Death insists on consuming everything. So, near my birthday this year, I have a new Siamese cat, beginning all over again, and I’m afraid of how it always concludes. I need to learn the art of leaving, letting go.”
But Blauner seems unable to let go. Events in her personal life—her mother’s four husbands, her father’s business failures, her first husband’s decadence, her cats’ deaths, her own drinking—recur frequently in the poetic essays of this book’s four sections. Each time they lead to another swerve as she tries to find the words and images to help her cope with her past: “I drank too much in Montana when I lived there. I believe I drove better when inebriated., and I spent too much time over a toilet.”
She is quite conscious of herself as a writer, author of nine works of poetry, five of fiction, and two of lyrical essays. Speaking of a poet, she says the poet “thinks smaller and then bigger. He needs to be astonished.” Her own words project visions: “Small animals sleeping and dreaming their weightless words.” “Secrets churning through a tender chest.” “I dance the same way today swerves into tomorrow.” “Verb yourself into being.” Her sentences often leap into the unexpected.
For her, the possibilities of writing could be “A way to shape the world with serrated scissors” and “What you see outside a curtained window.” Things you never should do to a writer include “Recant your exciting life unless a writer can steal from it” and “Assume a neurosis keeps the writer scrawling words.”
My image of Blauner on a road to somewhere leads me to compare her with Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” which is limited to a choice between just two options and the realization that “I could not travel both,” the speaker opting for “the one less traveled by,” by implication avoiding the more familiar and taking a chance with the unusual option. For Blauner the possibilities are myriad, outcomes equally open and uncertain, whichever road is chosen suddenly dead ending at the necessity of more choices at possibilities of countless intersections.
She attempts to capture the root of swerving: “Everything spills into everything else … We always transform. What stays and what leaves? I never know what I’ll find.…”
