And I must say, as I listened to the piece on NPR, I HATED the voice of the guest. Nevertheless, something about the interview, the story and the poetry stuck with me and I came home from work and finished listening to the interview via NPR.com.
The story is of Leidy Bonnano, who was murdered six years ago by her ex-boyfriend who strangled her with a telephone cord. Her mother (the guest), Kathy Sheeder Bonanno who teaches English has written a book of poetry about surviving that time called, 'Slamming Open the Door'.
POEM:
Leidy S. Bonanno, 21,
was found dead
late Tuesday
inside her first floor apartment . . . .
The killer used
Bonanno’s telephone cord
to choke her
then left her body on her bed.
[He] covered her face
with a bed pillow,
and locked the apartment
doors [before he] left,
police said.
.
.
.
Much as I hated the guest's/Leidy's mothers actual voice, her voice in poetry I found beautiful.
POEM:
Death Barged In
In his Russian greatcoat,
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.
He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.
Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed
between us.
Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck:
From now on,
you write about me.
.
.
.
This woman documented every terrifying moment of her life dealing with her daughters death... reached back into guilt, the second life of most parents.....
POEM:
Confessions
Don't pity me:
I was too lazy to walk
up the stairs
to tuck her in at night.
When I brushed her hair
I pulled hard
on purpose.
And always
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving.
.
.
.
She told us exactly what we've known forever.... that people can be so incredibly stupid.
What Not to Say
Don’t say that you choked
on a chicken bone once,
and then make the sound,
kuh, kuh, and say
you bet that’s how she felt.
Don’t ask in horror
why we cremated her.
And when I stand
in the receiving line
like Jackie Kennedy
without her pillbox hat,
if Jackie were fat
and had taken
enough Klonopin
to still an ox,
and you whisper,
I think of you
every day,
don’t finish with
because I’ve been going
to Weight Watchers
on Tuesday and wonder
if you want to go too.
.
.
.
She speaks about so wanting magic that it seems to happen, or
that it does happen....
Ladybugs
We see them everywhere now.
Last month, a tiny baby one
more orange than red,
purposeful, crawling
on the wall
above my side of the bed.
Inside a domed reception hall
at a fund-raising supper,
in the middle
of our round table
sits a perfect dead one.
We eat our soup
until one of us spots it,
our spoons slowing.
My niece wraps it in a pink tissue,
as if it were a sequin dropped
from the sleeve of God,
and takes it home.
After the trial, a blizzard
of ladybugs on the courthouse steps,
more this week
than Berks County has seen in years.
At first we crunch them underfoot
until, horrified, we look down
and know what we do.
Hundreds of them,
shining orange and black,
the dead and the living together—
the living
on the backs of the dead.
.
.
.
This is a book review that was in the New York Times about her book of poetry. Kirby says it all so much better than I.
And if you want to hear her interview, you can find it here....www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111218053
....................
My Daughter’s Murder
By DAVID KIRBY
SLAMMING OPEN THE DOOR
By Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
61 pp. Alice James Books. Paper, $15.95
At what point does life become art? “Life being all inclusion and confusion,” Henry James wrote, “and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which alone it is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.” Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s searing lines about the murder of her daughter are all sniffing, no finding. There may indeed be “hard latent value” in the calculated slaughter of a child; if so, you won’t find it here.
The facts are these: Leidy Bonanno was born in Chile and adopted by the author and her husband; her name is pronounced Lady, and her nickname was Ladybug. Shortly after graduating from nursing school, she was found dead in her apartment, strangled with a telephone cord. The found poem that relates the story of the crime is a newspaper article in which it is speculated that Leidy knew her killer; it is easy to imagine that she was trying to call for help at the moment of her death.
Shockingly, Leidy’s killer appears early in the book. There is a party for her when she graduates from nursing school, and in the last stanza, a “nice young man . . . / smiles and raises his glass.” Context is everything: by now we’ve guessed that she has been killed by a rejected lover, and here he is, cheering the new grad like everyone else, though murder is in his smile, and the hand that raises a toast will take a life.
Not every poem is as riveting as this. Some are merely documentary; a certain amount of fact is necessary to push the story forward. In fact, there is little here that stands alone. When I put the book down and walked away, as I had to do more than once, I found myself thinking not of individual poems, as is usually the case, but of an overall effect, a sense of horror mixed with anger and disbelief. And fear: we, too, have children, are mortal ourselves, and somewhere out there is someone who is writing a script dripping with murderous self-pity, a story so terrible we wouldn’t understand it even if we knew about it. Experts tell us that the would-be violent rarely act on their impulses. This one did.
The grieving know that grief is more than a single emotion, that, in fact, it is a doorway to all the other emotions, from anger to something approaching joy. The note of sorrow dominates this book, but it isn’t a one-note book. Readers will turn with relief to the portraits Bonanno draws of the people she never wanted to meet but who are now her lifelines, like the homicide detective who tells her, “I promise we will get this guy” and, when she shows him a photo of Leidy, says, “She’s beautiful; / almost how she looked / when we found her.” There’s even a near-gleeful disbelief in reading “What Not to Say,” a catalog of the thoughtless things said at the funeral. One mourner describes choking on a chicken bone and says that’s probably how Leidy felt, and another — I’m not making this up, and I doubt that the author is — invites Bonanno to go to Weight Watchers.
In the end, there is a trial. Bonanno describes her attempts to get inside the mind of the defense attorney and how, after the guilty verdict, she is surprised to find herself hugging the killer’s mother.
Readers will have to step outside of a familiar, comforting tradition of poetic grief while reading this book. Here are not the solemn measures of Shelley and Tennyson. Whereas another writer might have turned this hellish trip into stylized, polished work, Bonanno is still in the heart of the journey. Theodor Adorno warned against making art out of the Holocaust, saying that to strip the ordeal of its horror was to deny what the victims experienced. As I read, I wished Bonanno had developed her material in a way that would have spared me, and then I felt as thoughtless as the mourners in “What Not to Say.”
There are no high operatic effects in “Slamming Open the Door” because there’s no opera to watch, though there is one to participate in. To read this book is not to behold a completed work but to stand onstage with a writer who finds herself in the middle of a story in which she has been reluctantly cast.
David Kirby’s “House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems” was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry.
...................
Ms. Bonanno wrote this poem early on in her grief and read it at the sentencing of the murderer of her daughter. I imagine he was bemused....
POEM:
Poem About Light
You can try to strangle light:
use your hands and think
you've found the throat of it,
but you haven't.
You could use a rope or a garrote
or a telephone cord,
but the light, amorphous, implacable,
will make a fool of you in the end.
You could make it your mission
to shut it out forever,
to crouch in the dark,
the blinds pulled tight—
still, in the morning,
a gleaming little ray will betray you, poking
its optimistic finger
through a corner of the blind,
and then more light,
clever, nervy, impossible,
spilling out from the crevices
warming the shade.
This is the stubborn sun,
choosing to rise,
like it did yesterday,
like it will tomorrow.
You have nothing to do with it.
The sun makes its own history;
light has its way.
