Unlike so many post-modern poets, who seek to obfuscate and confound, Rachel Tzvia Back's poem actually communicates with brilliance and clarity.
The form of Rachel Tzvia Back’s “Her Hands” reveals the influence of the poet’s having studied the ilk of Susan Howe and other post-moderns and avant-gardes, especially the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, with whom Howe is associated.
Unconventional but with a purpose
The poem consists of three-line grouping of words; in the first two sections of the poem, there are no sentences, only phrases. There are 18 three-line groups and a final two-line group. However, the poem sections itself nicely with upper-case letters appearing in groups one, five, and eleven.
First Section: “Her hands”
From group one to group five, the speaker in fragments manages to communicate that a mother is sitting with her hands upturned on her lap, as if she were praying, but there is “great lie” being perpetrated by the mother’s “ragged lifeline.”
Second Section: “Littlest / spirit she”
The second line of the fifth group begins with the uppercase letter, so therefore, it is clear that here begins the second thought: the mother had a child but she could not keep the child from dying; that is, she could not protect the child “from what / from whom / in the darkened” room where the baby slept.
The child seemed to sleep peacefully, its breath hovering in the “warm room,” but the world being what it is, ”precarious” and averse to keeping promises, the baby’s life slipped away: “suddenly // gone.”
Third Section: “The debate / as to how”
The third section of the poem refers to [“t]he debate / as to how // or if / one recovers /
raging in whispers” offering the mystery of whether a parent can ever recover from losing a child.
The stroller is now empty, the crib is now empty, and more terrifyingly the hearts of the parents are empty from facing all this emptiness. The only complete sentence in the poem claims that this grieving mother “is as / small / as still // and silent / as the baby girl.”
The mother rocked her baby girl to sleep, but the baby did not wake up. Without any other indicators for why the child died, the reader must assume it was crib death or “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" (SIDS).
It does not matter how the child died, however, because the point is that the emptiness plays so drastically on the mother’s life. The poem’s fragmented rhetoric captures the fragmented and silenced nature of the grieving mother.
Another Back article: Profile - Rachel Tzvia Back
