Book Review: WANTING IT by Diana Whitney
 |
Wanting It Poems by Diana Whitney |
| Harbor Mountain Press, 2014 $15.00 |
Whitney ends the second section of her four-section collection, Wanting It, with these lines:
My fear?
…that the room keeps me safe
and boils me down, makes me an offer
of soup-bone, ash.That I’ll never leave here.
That I’ll leave.
As someone who concerns herself with place and the necessity of constant exploration, I find Whitney’s fear at the base of my own existence. How we can need a place and simultaneously push against it. How we mistake needing for contentment. Wanting It speaks towards the intangibility of desire—we travel through seasons, our faces pressed to the window, watchful, but of what exactly it is we’re wanting, can’t be so easily named.
These poems are expansive, and as we move through the seasons in each section, we are also moving lengths within each poem. I read Whitney’s eye like a kaleidoscope, pulling details from all directions, bringing scraps together to create a complete picture. In “Hindsight,” the first stanza is solely dedicated to describing the night, which gets compared to syrup, damp cloth, steam & ginger, cash crop. In “Making Babies,” halfway down the page Whitney begins “It’s the color of my morning glories finally blooming now that the days are cool…” and takes off for eight lines, without a full pause. While in other collections I would jot in the margins words like “mixed metaphor” and “run-on” I don’t here. The natural world becomes a force in these poems, a character in itself, leading the narration on winding sweeps at times, burrowing into the center cavities of the speaker’s body. I don’t dare try and contain it.
With that said, I wonder if at times the descriptions hold the place of honesty. If Whitney writes herself into the poem. For example, “First Super Bowl At My House” is a thick, three stanza poem. It begins with a trip to the General Store, notices a woman eating pizza in her minivan. In the store we switch to a thought of a man, which descriptions travel through the store and back to the house. But I’m more interested in the final lines:
…and I know
how she feels, the minivan woman, alone with her bundled-up,
red-faced hunger, an engine running that’s not her own
though it keeps her warm, it gets her home. I don’t know
football but I know weather.
I worry that in places we’re wanting these moments of simple clarity amidst eloquent description.
The strongest poem “Wanting It” begins the themes of womanhood, the violence of desire, and the contradictions between what the world wants from us and what we can give. Whitney’s repetition of “wanting it” sends a cold wave through the stanzas. He language is different here—direct, focused, tight. Her images punch us. The verbs are physical and wet, like “tongued the wheel,” “Those boys / who juiced the halls with slouch,” and “They wanted to kill me / back against a locker. I could feel my body jammed up on metal…” The craft of this poem should be the envy of writers, as should be Whitney’s masterful, subtle, complicated depiction of a woman. It’s in these moments that I find myself most in the middle, for “A girl can’t stand it, / all this beauty— / it makes her want to scream or hold perfectly still…”