New Book: Bougainvillea Ringplay by Marion Bethel

Bougainvillea Ringplay is the long awaited second collection by Marion Bethel, a poet who has long established herself as one of the most necessary voices in Caribbean poetry. These poems are finely crafted works that reveal a maturity of voice and a distinctive use of language that delves into the fruitful place of intersection between her Bahamian dialect and the English that she plies as a lawyer. Marion Bethel’s poems reveal a mastery of syntax that one finds in only the most sophisticated poets. Her poems eschew all but the most utilitarian of punctuation marks, (question marks, apostrophes, and inverted commas), but commas, periods, colons, dashes are all ignored, thus demanding everything of rhythm and syntax.

The achievement of these poems is that they read with such control of sound and breath that such markers seem completely superfluous in her hands. Her poems are rooted in the landscape of the Bahamas, and so we will find the flora, we will find the sea, we will find the food, we will find the dialect, and yet we are never for a moment allowed to imagine this place as a cliché, as a tourist location. Instead, Bethel’s sharp sense of detail, her unsettling truth-telling, and the risks she takes with narratives about love and hurt in all kinds of relationships open for us an emotional intelligence that is arresting. History is constantly present for her, and it is hard to walk away from her poems without feeling as if you have finally met her homeland.

These poems are sensual in the most literal sense - the poems are about the senses, the smell of vanilla and sex, the sound of waves - radio, voices, sea; the taste of crab soup; the texture of hurricane wind, and the chaos of colors bombarding the eye. Bahamian poetry is being defined in the work of Marion Bethel and in Bougainvillea Ringplay she is doing so with grace.

DECREE ABSOLUTE

a sparrow sits
on the window sill watching
a woman on fire

she longed for
a furnace red dress
to break an addiction

to her rainbow of sparrow bands
arcs of beigetan blouses
blackbrownnavy slacks

she wanted a red red dress
to bellow for all
those straightjacket years

a red dress like Dinah’s
a goodtime woman who breathed
fiery red right up to her wet veined eyes

right right down to her liquid red
toenails & golden Guiana anklet
on her left foot

she spreads her legs wide
paints one lip at a time with
mercurochrome

her shadow wrestles her
to the ground & paints iodine
on wounded knees & sight refracted

...and the judge grants her prayer
to wear a red dress
anytime anywhere anyhow

***