BOOK INTRODUCES FINE NEW POET

by Donn Taylor, Book Critic
Conroe Courier, Sept. 28, 2001

Readers who admire active imagination and vivid metaphor will delight in Susan Love Fitts's new book of poetry, LICKING THE BONES DRY (Fantasia Music, Inc., $14.95). A native of Natchez, Mississippi, Fitts now resides in Montgomery, Texas, where she recently changed from marketing and public relations work to full-time writing of poetry.

As its preface notes, the book's unifying theme is the self in search of its natural state, unencumbered of the masks we collect in order to survive the expectations of others and ourselves.... Thus the poems' subject matter is life itself - in this case a mature life closely observed with depth, clarity, and philosophical awareness.

Some poems are intensely personal, expressing the pain of loss or the joy of love fulfilled, but these never lose their applicability to everyone's experience. In Two Faces Past, for example, the speaker looks at a framed picture of two people now lost to her, an old woman and a baby. Fitts deftly captures the poignancy of their inaccessibility in a way that reminds us of our own lost ones: I touch the old woman's/face; fingertips/ are requited with glass./I cradle the baby in her frame./Nonexistent to me now/except for the missing of her.

Another, Forever Man, reflects the quiet satisfaction of mutual love, a satisfaction that remains even when the lover is absent: When you return we will dance/around the edge/of the hologram of your absence that keeps/expanding back on itself.

Fortunately, however, Fitts does not limit herself to the merely personal. She writes of people she has known or admired--a bomber pilot of World War II, the conductor of a symphony, the psychologist Carl Jung - and succeeds in projecting herself imaginatively into the consciousness of each. In subject matter, she is equally at home with the miscellany of a laundry room, a text from Jeremiah or Joseph Campbell, or a painting by Cézanne. All receive the benefit of a transforming poetic imagination. In the laundry room: The clothes are separated/ready for their baptism/in the detergent-filled font. And the poems about music and painting (thankfully!) are never artsy, but always provocative: Were Cézanne's Olympia a sonata/what sound would it make?/And the sculpture/of Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony,/what shape would it take?

Nor does Fitts limit herself to her own persona: In one poem she speaks in first person as a thunderstorm: When I arrive in my cumulonimbus/robe and release my thunderhead.... The storm forces children into indoor activities, which they seem to enjoy more than those they abandoned outdoors. It concludes, Sun, moon and stars receive/the accolades, but only my dark appearing/can effect this joyous altered state. Which of us would previously have imagined a self-satisfied thunderstorm?

The poetic forms Fitts employs are as varied as her subjects. Most poems are in free verse, but others are in difficult imported forms. One is a villanelle, and one of the best is a sestina. Fitts also effectively uses "spatial prosodies," in which the poem's content is reinforced by its appearance on the page. (Poets as varied as George Herbert and Dylan Thomas have used spatial prosodies.) Thus the typography of the poem Perfect forms a perfect rectangle, the lines of Limitations pictorially blunt themselves against a solid boundary, and those of a poem about DNA twist themselves into a shape suggesting the double helix.

Purists among us will find a few technical flaws in certain poems. The villanelle labors a bit (most villanelles do), the division into poetic lines occasionally seems arbitrary, and the
emphatic word does not always occupy the emphatic position. But these minor defects are surprisingly few for a writer's first book of poetry, and they shrink into insignificance when compared with the book's outstanding qualities. Unlike the poems of many more experienced poets, these bear up well under repeated readings and close analysis.

LICKING THE BONES DRY introduces its readers to an author who possesses a likeable literary persona, who presents a seriously considered view of life, and who has significant things to say on subjects important to the human condition.

* * *

Donn Taylor is a writer and book critic. He is a retired Army officer living in The Woodlands, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas and has taught college English literature. His novel, The Lazarus File, will be published this fall.