The Counting House, Sandra Ridley
reviewed by ML Wolters
Sandra Ridley’s The Counting House (BookThug, 2013) is a powerhouse collection, establishing its tone within very first words: “A husha. A husha” (“A General Tale”). The poetry is an ekphrasis work of artist michèle provost’s installation piece ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS: An Exercise in Poetry. The ekphrasis is mixed with a bit of plunderverse to create a loose narrative that spans throughout the four poems. The essays given by provost—Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and the Roud Folk Song Index—offer a lens that spurs on the other three pieces as well. Readers can understand the lens through these basic points: Ridley draws mainly on the idea of panopticism from Foucault and its concept of self-imposed discipline; this is then paired with de Beauvoir’s feminist critique of women as “Other” in a Subject (Man) - Other (Woman) dichotomy, in which women will never be seen as equal partners as long as they are socialized to believe in femininity as inadequacy, with male traits as the definition of strength and power.
The first poem, “A General Tale,” centers largely on the Roud Index, working with the haunting repetition of folk songs like “Ring Around the Rosie.” Ridley grabs onto phrases like “a husha,” “fall down,” “blackbirds,” and “posy” to embed a tone of imminence. “Lax Tabulation,” the direct ekphrasis piece, is styled like an accountant’s tabulation, each part constructed with phrases pulled from provost’s provided essays. The spaces between lists create caesuras that further play with space on the pages as breath-markers. Even more curious—the poems can be read horizontally or vertically, resulting in two voices. The third and fourth poems, “Testimonium” and “Luxuria,” heavily allude to the Foucault and de Beauvoir essays. Ridley takes up Foucault’s discussion of pancopticism and sets the speaker as the guard figure in the concealed tower, observing prisoners in the surrounding cells. The subject—“my Darling”—becomes one of these prisoners, which is where Beauvoir’s Second Sex comes into play; the Darling, as woman, is trapped in this cell of domestic household, disciplined by her supposed lover, whose “Affections will become more harmful” (“Testamonium”). The woman, always under the gaze, slowly becomes “Other,” just as de Beauvoir’s essay theorizes, through almost animalistic (and abused) imagery of “bitten hands” and “bitten lip” as well as through the constant interruption made by the second person pronoun that addresses the lover (and reader).
Ridley’s style is what brings the ambitious collection its success. Her choice to play with space, as if scoring the poems herself, creates a rich duality between pauses and punctured fragments—in this collection, her periods work more as commas, but provide a stilted rhythm that is essential to the tone. Her consonance of d and t throughout also add to the sound of stuttering as well as implications of violence and discipline. The rhyme throughout is subtle; slant and internal rhymes work as indicators to the reader—in fact, the major shift in Darling’s narrative is signaled with internal rhyme, falling on “reward” and “accord” in XXVII of “Testimonium.”
Slap-dashed versus reward.
She shall decide how long this will last and conclude.
Her own accord.
This shift characterizes the return of agency to Darling, the rebellion of de Beauvoir’s second sex. Asides work positively as insight into what isn’t said, perhaps due to an implied oppression. The collection—which begins with the words “A husha”—begs to be heard in its silence, within the white spaces of the pages.
The Counting House’s final lines are no less satisfactory, as its words are left to echo in readers’ ears when it pleads for something that can be believed in: “Rain. // Grief. // Skin.” (“Luxuria”). This sentiment then reappears on the final page in a slab poem of three new repeated words in various orders, inciting the effect of a tombstone to mark the collection’s end. Whether or not readers are interested in the greater philosophy of the pieces, Sandra Ridley’s strength in tone and the ways in which the mood—formed within the first four words—is built and maintained, should be entertainment enough to keep the pages flipping.
The first poem, “A General Tale,” centers largely on the Roud Index, working with the haunting repetition of folk songs like “Ring Around the Rosie.” Ridley grabs onto phrases like “a husha,” “fall down,” “blackbirds,” and “posy” to embed a tone of imminence. “Lax Tabulation,” the direct ekphrasis piece, is styled like an accountant’s tabulation, each part constructed with phrases pulled from provost’s provided essays. The spaces between lists create caesuras that further play with space on the pages as breath-markers. Even more curious—the poems can be read horizontally or vertically, resulting in two voices. The third and fourth poems, “Testimonium” and “Luxuria,” heavily allude to the Foucault and de Beauvoir essays. Ridley takes up Foucault’s discussion of pancopticism and sets the speaker as the guard figure in the concealed tower, observing prisoners in the surrounding cells. The subject—“my Darling”—becomes one of these prisoners, which is where Beauvoir’s Second Sex comes into play; the Darling, as woman, is trapped in this cell of domestic household, disciplined by her supposed lover, whose “Affections will become more harmful” (“Testamonium”). The woman, always under the gaze, slowly becomes “Other,” just as de Beauvoir’s essay theorizes, through almost animalistic (and abused) imagery of “bitten hands” and “bitten lip” as well as through the constant interruption made by the second person pronoun that addresses the lover (and reader).
Ridley’s style is what brings the ambitious collection its success. Her choice to play with space, as if scoring the poems herself, creates a rich duality between pauses and punctured fragments—in this collection, her periods work more as commas, but provide a stilted rhythm that is essential to the tone. Her consonance of d and t throughout also add to the sound of stuttering as well as implications of violence and discipline. The rhyme throughout is subtle; slant and internal rhymes work as indicators to the reader—in fact, the major shift in Darling’s narrative is signaled with internal rhyme, falling on “reward” and “accord” in XXVII of “Testimonium.”
Slap-dashed versus reward.
She shall decide how long this will last and conclude.
Her own accord.
This shift characterizes the return of agency to Darling, the rebellion of de Beauvoir’s second sex. Asides work positively as insight into what isn’t said, perhaps due to an implied oppression. The collection—which begins with the words “A husha”—begs to be heard in its silence, within the white spaces of the pages.
The Counting House’s final lines are no less satisfactory, as its words are left to echo in readers’ ears when it pleads for something that can be believed in: “Rain. // Grief. // Skin.” (“Luxuria”). This sentiment then reappears on the final page in a slab poem of three new repeated words in various orders, inciting the effect of a tombstone to mark the collection’s end. Whether or not readers are interested in the greater philosophy of the pieces, Sandra Ridley’s strength in tone and the ways in which the mood—formed within the first four words—is built and maintained, should be entertainment enough to keep the pages flipping.
ML Wolters is an editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review and a recent alumna from Wheaton College, Massachusetts, where she studied creative writing and history. Upon graduation, she was awarded with the Helen Meyers Tate Memorial Prize for Original Verse. She is a word nerd and the assistant of a New York Times bestselling author in Boston.