Coming Together
by Elaine Marcus Starkman
Graphics by Ruth Starkman
West Coast Print Center, Sheer Press
Elaine Starkman, holder of an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, is wife, mother, housewife and obviously frustrated with that triad. To offset that frustration she teaches night classes at St.Mary's College and Acalanes Adult Center in California. This is her first collection, self-published.
The collection, for the most part, is a very personal one. In the mode of confessionals, once so au currant, now out of favour. But then, that is not the only anachronism in this collection. Elaine Starkman seems almost to have been lost back there in the heady apex of Women's Liberation. It is as though through that 'liberation' of the newly-educated middle-class woman of the 60s and 70s, Elaine Starkman found a celebrated personal liberation and she shouts hallelujah! off the roof of her head. Which is fine, but rather stale. Because Ms. Starkman wallows in this new-found 'freedom' (which always appears to confer on the male half the role of warden and is happily now passe), her poems come off as rather egocentric in their self-sacrificial plaints. Tiresome. Fine in small doses, but stifling when the reader goes on to read one, another, and yet another. As in the "Preface" poem, when Ms. Starkman offers:
"We have little in life/ besides children/ husbands, houses/ classes, cars, clothes/ when we are stripped/ what remains of value is on the inside/ in my case only my poems/ I offer them up".
Well, yes, indeed. But that should be a warning to the unwary; that 'we have little but children, husbands, houses, classes' (weary litany) etc. - what in God's name else is there beside the valuable essence of the mind? Her point quite escapes me.
Yet, and for all that, there is an elegance about these poems. True,Ms. Starkman appears to be as much in love with the poems as idea, as she is in love with liberation as escape - but these poems, taken singly, do sing. In 'Israel Remembered' there is a poignancy in "you were the past I did not know/ the psalm I dared not sing/ the wall I could not touch/ the manna I had no time to taste". And in the poem, 'Prayer', we see Ms. Starkman at her best:
lord, let my soul
soar above my room
let her dance on walls
to songs of violins
leap rooftops
to pages of poetry
praise
.... an orange, a horse
.... a mountain, a breeze
let her transcend all limits
of my small life
There is promise in this poet's work. Her poems are finely crafted, her language precise and the rhythm does carry the reader into her moods. Still, one comes away with a sense of having been stifled in the self-made dissatisfactions of one who has too much and hardly knows what to do with it. It is possible to be a human being without wallowing in the angst of Woman's Place.
If and when Ms. Starkman ever resolves her personal dilemma and begins to reach outside her own small concerns; if she is ever able to transcend her awe of Writing Poetry, she may well become a fine poet.
c. 1982 Rita Rosenfeld
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