“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”  Even coming from a lesser authority than Robert Penn Warren, this statement certainly rings true and resonates among poets.

Body Rhymes, a collection of intensely personal poems by Donna Emerson, impressively illustrates what can be accomplished when Mr. Warren’s implicit warning is faced full on as a challenge and the poet’s hazardous attempt at self-understanding succeeds.

Of the twenty poems in Body Rhymes, all but two are written in first-person, the conventional invitation to the reader to identify with the narrator, to slip on the narrator’s skin and experience her world as she experiences it, to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell through her senses—to learn about and understand her the way she dares to learn and understand herself. Here in its entirety is the opening poem of the collection.

Morning Ride

This time we slipped out the screen door without slamming it.
Dawn shivered our skin as we skipped to the barn. 
I wore shorts so I’d feel her girth. Adan rode the bay in front
on the black and silver saddle.

We pressed through oats, wheat, Queen Anne’s lace.
Out to the pines where cold silence swallowed us.
The horses’ hooves made tiny brushing sounds on pine needles.
My mare’s breath before me, wreaths of white mist.

We looked for longberries.
Adan leaned to me, told me about babies,
where they really come from.
Fingering Jenny’s mane, my stomach spun.

We were riding ourselves, not grown 
but sniffing at it, high stepping
through woods where there was no trail.

Emerson’s is a sensual and sensuous world. Sometimes as cool and subtle as a young girl’s gaze quietly drawn to the saddle that the boy ahead of her sits astride, the boy whose name means “man, earth.” Sometimes that sensual and sensuous world burns white hot with no patience for the restraint of subtleties as in these lines from “One Hundred Hudson Street:”

. . .

The creamy walls stretched back for us.

Your mouth where my neck met my shoulders.
Your mouth inside my knees. My thighs
moved by themselves.

Your departures split us at the seams
while this one night stood,
stands still, while all else fell.

. . .

Yes, it is a world of passion and pleasure. But not surprisingly it is also a world of peril, where passion and pleasure are sometimes distorted, deformed, and destructive.  In “The Orchard,” a twelve-year-old girl is cruelly shoved into that dangerous world by an old man whom she had once trusted, a man who had once reminded her of her grandfather:

. . .

Or that he had put his fat oversized hands
down my white batiste blouse, breaking the thin
embroidery floss ties, the day before,
me backing up into crates of apples, 
ruining the display I’d just set up,
trying to get away in a lady-like way

. . .

In “Doris Lucile in January,” beauty is its own danger. In these lines, a daughter traces a pernicious inheritance back to her own mother’s childhood.

. . .

The beauty of the bunch, perfectly formed,
“smart as a whip,” her father said,

she mustn’t put on airs, so he whipped her,
and she had no airs, and later she whipped us and we lashed

out at each other, all cracked and able to be cornered
until we broke apart and left her house
to find more air.

. . .

In Emerson’s poems, no pain and no loss pass without leaving lessons behind. Four poems in Body Rhymes usher the reader to the bedsides of seriously ill or dying patients where lessons in acceptance, defiance, and despair are equally taught. Arguably the most autographical poem in the collection is “She Lay Asleep Wearing Oxygen” in which Emerson tends to her own mother in her last hours. Emerson’s honesty is brave and admirable; she sees and loves the good—and the bad—in her mother.

. . .

Smack in front of us:
fast, hottempers, spankings, cold shoulders,
“God damn it to hell,” as she opened
boiled eggs for breakfast.

Yet coy, a flirt, beckoning us close.
Full-out laugh that tingled her toes,
even entire rooms, confessions
in cloakrooms, all her secrets.

 . . .

Emerson’s poems are unflinching, earnest endeavors to understand her subjective self by delving into the most intimate, secret, and sometimes darkest episodes that have shaped and informed it.

“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding . . .” And yet, it is interesting to note that Mr. Warren did not say “what is writing a poem;” he said simply “what is a poem.” Could not the reading of a poem also be a hazardous attempt at self-understanding?

Donna Emerson’s Body Rhymes proves that this complementary interpretation of Robert Penn Warren’s assertion is not only possible, but probable. Readers who approach these poems with the same candor with which they were written will undoubtedly come away with a deeper understanding of themselves.