Elizabeth Gregory by Kevin Carollo
OHM Editions, March 2018
42 pages / Rain Taxi
Perhaps more than any time in recent history, American poetry is galvanized. It seems every week a new call goes out for poems that address the revolving door of crises we’re living through, many precipitated by action or inaction by the current government administration. While this does provide a myriad of opportunities for artists and writers, some important things seem to get lost in the shuffle. One of these is dementia, which Kevin Carollo shines a light on in his new chapbook, Elizabeth Gregory.
Elizabeth Gregory mostly follows one journey through the heartbreaking disease that is dementia. Carollo makes an emotional impact early by tying content to form, in this case a pantoum:
There are some words too hard to say.
Say the moon is a woman weeping
and that’s a picture of your daughter.
I ask you where she is but you don’t say.
Say the moon is a woman weeping.
Some things we have to learn by heart.
I ask you where she is but you don’t say.
Is it today or yesterday today?
The convention of repetition built in to “Dementia Pantoum,” as well as Corollo’s choice to stagger every other line, elicits a sense of waning control that becomes more prominent as the chapbook progresses. The titles of some poems appear backward (e.g. “Unit Victims Special” instead of “Special Victims Unit”) and in the poem ‘Semantic Dementia,” letters are missing in the entire poem:
i mus b lke alwys havng on o to letrs gne mssng.
yr mothe tonge ets yu dwn agin an agin.
yu ma thnk yuk no wht a scissrs doe fr examle
bt yu cnt alwys tel th diffrenc betwen a scissrs
an sa a pencl.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
on cold evn argu tht mst peple ar a lest on o to crds
shrt o a ful dek s th sying goe. th mai thng s t kep
tying t liv yr lif. yu r ho yu r an ho yuv alwys ben.
Poetry fails because it can never totally encompass that which it’s trying to get at: in other words, poetry is a human endeavor and so will always be limited by language. But the marriage of Carollo’s subject matter with poetry seems to “get at” dementia more than, say, a story on the news. “Semantic Dementia” is a totally believable written expression of dementia that operates within the real world. Of course Carollo’s perspective is that of an outsider, of someone watching dementia creep over a loved one, but this poem, and many others in Elizabeth Gregory, encompass that heartbreak so well, it truly elevates the poems to a plain that poetry rarely reaches.
But Carollo doesn’t leave on a depressing note. In the last poem, “Time (Pink Floyd),” he writes:
[…] I’m talking
about my mom, I’m talking about
every mom. Every day is a pogrom
on memories of what we did and
with whom. Every day is a program
I can’t seem to get caught up on.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From tomorrow on, I’ll start every
war with remember when. In the end,
Mom, it’ll come down to you and me.
Never mind how, never mind where.
In the end, there’s tenderness. No matter the trials and tribulations, he will still be there for his mom. Love is an important element woven throughout Elizabeth Gregory and what Carollo suggests triumphs in the end. Life doesn’t discriminate in what hardships it tosses, but love, that indescribable thing that poets having been trying to describe for hundreds of years, even under the most extreme circumstances, conquers all.
