Indifferent as a Deck of Cards
The Fates by Joanne M. Clarkson
Bright Hill Press, 2017
Reviewed by Michelle Leahy
Joanne Clarkson’s The Fates is a rich tapestry of lifetimes and reflections on all that a lifetime entails: family history, spirituality, work, fantasy, love, grief, and death. The poems in this collection are especially concerned with the intersections between life and afterlife, and between fate, free will, and fortune-telling. By delving into the experiences of mystics, widows, and hospice workers, Clarkson reveals a deep reverence for the transitional state of death and an understanding of the ways people change each other’s life lines.
The collection is divided into three sections, and each section begins with a poem depicting one of the title goddesses: Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos, the three mythological Fates who weave the tapestry of life. In “Atropos the Fate Dismantles Her Own Alter,” which opens the third section, Clarkson portrays Atropos marveling at the ways humans participate in their own fates as she describes a scene of an atom bomb: “No one hand could sabotage so many breaths / in a nano-second. A city’s arteries under a mega-flower becoming / flame, the confounder of paper and scissors.” In the poem, Atropos proclaims: “All Fate / is collective.” The poem, like the collection as a whole, explores the ways we navigate the collisions between fate and free will. It also asks why we try to predict fate: do we seek knowledge of the future or do we seek control over it?
In “Escalators,” Esther the Mystic tells her granddaughter, the poem’s speaker, about a young girl whose foot was crushed in the moving stairs of an escalator. The speaker, hoping to avoid a similar fate, begins to avoid escalators whenever possible. In the poem’s final lines, the speaker observes the way an escalator’s stairs disappear into one another, “indifferent as a deck of cards.” This ending conjures an image of tarot cards, but the way they’re described as indifferent reflects the complicated questions surrounding the concept of fate. Is it fate that is indifferent? Will it remain unchanging no matter how we try to avoid it? Or is it our attempts at predicting fate—through practices like the reading of tarot cards—that are indifferent, or insufficient, against the unpredictability and the instability of the future?
While Clarkson’s work poses thought-provoking reflections in rhythmic and detailed lines, I found the poems written from the perspective of a hospice worker carried the deepest emotional resonance. The compassion with which patients’ final moments are presented is almost tangible, and no patient’s life ever seems truly over. In this way, these poems engage in the collection’s wider conversation about the ways we participate in fate. It never seems as though a person’s life ends when Atropos snips their lifeline. Clarkson shows an understanding that each person’s life is woven into the larger tapestry of collective existence; after death, each person continues to leave an imprint on the physical world. This awareness can be seen in “The Goodbye Skin,” in which the speaker reflects on the way a dying man is held by a loved one in his last moments before passing. At the end of the speaker’s shift, both the dying man and his loved one have vacated his hospital room. “On the naked / mattress only indentations remain: head, / shoulders, buttocks, heels and next to this: curve of a hip bone.” Even in poems like this one, which is rooted so deeply in the physical descriptions of the moment, the influence of other poems’ spiritual characters, like Esther the Mystic—the grandmother figure who appears throughout the collection—is present, as the speaker asks: “Is it possible / to reach the dead? Minutes or years later? To / beg the breeze for a fingertip or the sun for the burn / of cheek against cheek?” The poem asks whether the deceased can be contacted in some afterlife, or whether the memory of their physical presence in the world is what remains after death.
The Fates never claims to have answers to any of these questions about death, spirituality, and fate. Instead, the questions vibrate both implicitly and explicitly around the poems’ descriptions of physical moments and spiritual explorations, like the moment of death in a hospice bed, an evening when a young girl kept watch over a dying bird, or five women holding a seance around a creaky table. The collection leaves its readers reflecting on the hand they play in their own fates, and the effect they have on the fates of others.
MICHELLE LEAHY is a graduate student at Western Washington University. She teaches composition and is earning her MFA in creative writing with a focus in poetry.
Featured image by Igor Ovsyannykov