Book Review by Christopher Marks
Title: The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry
Author: Veronica Eley
Publisher: Roger Langen, distributed by Ingram
On reading The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry, one has the impression that feeling itself has produced the work. Trepidation is sounded in the opening prayer, “saints and angels/protect me/from spilling/this cup of blood”, the prelude to the complex verse narrative that follows. The whole is organised into three main parts: ‘Secret Monsters,’ ‘The Bodhisattva,’ ‘Mother,’ each its own drama, with groups of poems forming subsidiary scenes under headings like ‘Childhood,’ ‘Altered States,’ ‘Memory.’
The framework neatly packages the author’s story into a beginning, middle, and end: trauma, intervention, and recovery. In real time, the poems arose in two great bursts of creativity, as if exploded from a star. They are the outcome of the poet’s journaling through the “tunnel of rooms” in her psyche. A small candle of poetry was held to each. It is this deep grounding in poetic language that gives the collection its true order. Arising in the liminal space between body and mind, the poet’s words arise as articulations of the wordless realm of feeling, instinct, and bodily sensations. Thus “uncomposed,” the poems re-enact the poet’s story rather than tell it. The reader is carried along in her “little boat,” drawn by the “undertow” of the poet’s past, as it “sails/the red rivers/of blood/in the/veins/and/arteries.”
The pre-embodied, pre-articulate vocality of language – her “cup of blood” – is at the heart of the collection. In an early poem, she compares her personality to “broken pieces of glass … rotating/like a wind chime/inside my body.” The body gives sound to sense. The mind listens as sound images record the mood-disordered turmoil of traumatic events:
when it rained it hammered on the tin roof horses’ hooves pounding on the track the surf crashing in and out the recurring beat of a drum
This was “the soundtrack/for the birth of my first child,” she concludes; soon after, she carried her “swaddled newborn” down the “hardwood corridor” of the Home of the Guardian Angel, to be removed by the Sisters of Charity. Such cadences of language relax or arouse, harmonise or probe, the hidden world within. Repetitions like “my heart, my heart”; internal rhymes within and across poems; arpeggios of metaphor, as
layers of memory loss like the crust of the earth the erosion of a riverbank a rainforest in distress
and multiple registers and tonalities covering the full gamut of emotion – all create a sustained sonorous weave of a body singing through pain.
Words derived in this way carry their own warrant of authenticity. The book reviewer for Trauma Psychology News, a publication of the American Psychological Association, says as much when she commends the work as a “remarkably convincing demonstration of the power of words”, observing that the long breakthrough poem, natural and man-made consequences, “cracks open new methods of figurative language to speak what cannot be said”. Other reviews point to this same intrinsic power of words to convey feeling, with descriptors like, ‘authentic,’ ‘searing,’ ‘vulnerable,’ ‘raw,’ ‘courageous.’ The word ‘beautiful’ also appears. The Blue Dragonfly is without doubt an absorbing example of scriptocatharsis, but it is also an achievement of art. As a fellow traveller and sometime poet, I understand the precious necessity of words for navigating a dark landscape. But it is poetic language, not authenticity alone, that gives words command over a reader. In this respect, words move from felt undergrounds toward a light source outside. Feelings become thought, things felt become seen. Through expressive language, private experience rises to a communal, sunlit space above, in an objectification of self and world.
The poetic enlightenment of the body (and its hidden pain) is achieved primarily through metaphor. “My life/is a room/that I have lived in/too long,” the poet writes. Starting as an interior space, as “silence/a space/dark and quiet,” each poem is itself a room. Metaphor reveals its contents. It is one of the pleasures of this book to see each room light up, as the protagonist plots her methodical path through the dispelling darkness. Trauma and unmeaning yield to new ways of seeing. Even a single image has the power to convey a story, as when a “little bird/with three-pronged feet,” seen outside her window, is described as a “microcosmic dinosaur.” Note the metaphorical flash, and how it resonates sympathy for her own survival. Two poems about her silver necklace show the personal distance she has travelled. In one, her necklace, of “sparkles, ice,” is “tight/to the point/of strangulation … reaching down/into the/depths of the earth … [where it] travels/down rivulets/into crystalline caves.” One hundred pages later, with winter ending, the necklace resurfaces as “an aura of protection/a token/of my truer self,” while “night stars/glitter … [and] snowflakes fall/uniquely … fairies skating/on a moonlit night.” Night has become day, aided by the language of light – candle, sun, or moon, or whatever glitters on the page. When the poet resolves at last “to climb out … of the deep/dark pit,” she carries with her a “a book/of poetry.”
Is poetry healing then? In his Poetics, Aristotle links poetry to pain as a purgative. The protagonist in Greek tragedy seeks relief from trauma. The chorus, a quasi-spectator, provides context and commentary for the audience, in chants and songs that dramatize contemplation. But it is poetic language, Aristotle emphasises, specifically metaphor, that moves the audience. Its ability to re-enact (or “imitate”) the protagonist’s painful circumstance draws others toward compassion (pity), relieving the sufferer of the isolation of her pain. In the resulting catharsis, fear and paralysis abate. In The Blue Dragonfly, the compassionate witness is the poet’s own psychiatrist, pseudonymised in the text as Pallavaraiyan. “Indian/from another continent,” he is the “stranger” whom she recognises as a “comrade spirit/a healer.” In their real-world encounter (as we learn from the foreword), he retained her for private therapy from professional curiosity. The creativity of her language had moved him to empathy. He was unable, however, to access her inner states through conventional therapy. Only when he discovered her poems did he gain insight into the turmoil of her mind. The poems then became the basis for a therapy that would last 17 years. Not surprisingly, in an unpublished commentary on her work, he describes her metaphors in terms similar to Aristotle, as “fresh, authentic, and beautiful.”
The literature on trauma and narrative recognises poetry as posing a challenge to trauma’s paralysing effect, like an in-woven mass on the brain, “tangled like vines … [in a] deep, dark pond.” In order to make it “speak,” the sufferer must unravel its “tight … interlocking barbwire.” The poet wrote 600 poems in this endeavour (of which 120 appear in the book). Readers should not look, however, for a concrete account of traumatic events. The poet’s focus is on the psychic impact of trauma. External events like incest, adumbrated partway through, cast an eerie shadow when one re-reads the section on childhood; but this only reinforces the psychological character of the work. The healing focus of her poetry is to re-imagine trauma in order to neutralise it. Psychic nuance also characterises the section on intervention, which restores personal agency to her life, and her subsequent post-traumatic growth. Her verse memoir is therefore a psychological record, with events occurring as states of mind. In its thoroughgoing attention to the stages of trauma and recovery, it is rare, and possibly unique, verse equivalent of the theory of trauma first presented by Judith Herman in her seminal work, Trauma and Recovery (1992).
It will not go amiss to conclude on the larger political and spiritual dimensions of the narrative, which, in related ways, express universal values. The author’s despair and outcry against her experience of rape is not confined to the incidents themselves. They carry as well an implicit yet unmistakable condemnation of the institutions of the police, judiciary, medical profession, and priesthood, which in her time she experienced as male. Her mother’s charismatic Catholicism internalised the institutional norms of permission which secretly or overtly blamed the victim. The poet’s cynicism and anger about this are apparent when she writes: “cross as symbol of suffering & affliction/cross as an excuse/cross over the bridge and see what’s on the other side/ (Little Flower) (Bear) (Monkey) (Pussy).” These words appear in the breakthrough poem already referenced, where she imagines herself “in a vaginal desert.” In the voice of an innocent yet knowing child, she issues a painful challenge to her mother’s view of the world. Before the poem fades out – losing consciousness, as it were – the poet has a vision that she will indeed find love, and that she and her mother will be reconciled.
This is the spiritual turning point in the narrative. Without quite realizing it, the poet/protagonist has crossed a psychological bridge to “the other side.” Three miracles await. The first is her experience of asylum. A prolonged stay in the psychiatric ward of a hospital provides refuge and support. Other patients, “monks praying for light,” form a community of suffering, all with stories not unlike her own. The second event is the encounter with the psychiatrist, someone “found … at the end of a long journey.” His compassionate, attentive gaze causes the paralysis of her trauma to relax its hold. As her feelings become unstuck, she senses the restoration of a “pulsation/in my robin’s breast.” She formulates this event as an effect of “the bodhisattva,” whom she conceives as a female spirit, who “wanders through the streets/a heart as big/as the whole outdoors.” The final miracle consists in her rising toward a newfound harmony with the world. She interprets this as synchronicity and flow in her own feelings. She has new access to the world, an immersive awareness of being both “outside in” and “inside out.” It is a stance of mindfulness that enables her to accept the risk of being and acting for herself. She is able to leave off “whispering a/little song” (inside therapy) and move toward the “greater surround/of movement and song” in the outer world.
In the last third of the book, catharsis lifts toward elation and wonder. Restored trust and a mastery of self has led to new sight. Appearances are revealed as but a window to a much greater reality, the visible world as but a veil for its secret beauty. “Free flowing/feelings” and thought fuse to sort out the “mise-en-scène”, to decode its patterns of connection and common humanity. This is “the miracle/of perception” which elicits her wonder. Protected by a new “harmony of body and soul,” her “guardian angel” – “he speaks without words/he comforts with touch” – she sets out on the final adventure. In the section on Memory, she re-imagines her past. Scenes from her childhood are re-visited, ghosts laid to rest, the metempsychotic history of the cotton mills acknowledged, mother forgiven. Healing, still fragile, is consolidated through moments of contemplative self-conversation, in rooms with “windows” to the natural world outside. The rhythms of time and space, of earth, sky, and animal life, are healing balms for her spirit. A red cardinal, “artistically contrasted to the/bleak surroundings” (of winter) is “a red lantern to light my way,” a promise of spring. The colours of a “changing sky” – pink, blue, fluorescent grey – tell their own story. While “across the street … [a] round/stained glass window/looking west” is a “bright yellow glow/a prayer.” It is the image of her confidant, the moon, whose “gold-yellow sanded beauty” reflects “the wholeness of round/the halfness of half” in a universe of “dark space” and “starlit nights.”
*Note on the Author: Veronica Eley was born 1950 in Manchester, England, the youngest of four children. Her family moved to Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1952. She worked as an adult literacy instructor in Toronto before retiring to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 2016. The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry is her first book.
Christopher Marks is a retired teacher currently living with his cat Tigger in Mississauga, Ontario. He spent the last years of his professional life working with aboriginal students in the remote northern community of Moose Factory. He has published two collections of poetry, Something of Creation (White Mountain, 2008) and Further Up and Further In (Lyrical Myrical Press, 2012). His voice is that of the earnest spiritual seeker, following – wherever it might lead him – “the majestic trajectory of truth.”
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