Bosom of The Beast

Aug 05, 2018 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

Book: Doe Songs
Poet: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné delivers a wrenchingly knifing confessional.
Embedded in a matrix of imageries, Doe Songs careens through the senses and leaves us nakedly troubled. The human psyche is split and pleads for healing, if at all possible.
We are tossed into the abyss of the unconscious, where dreams and reality lose their identity; where humanity is subsumed by nature’s primal call and where time, as we know it, surrenders to non-time.
In this shape-shifting labyrinth there is only the present. We must flow along the ever-changing currents of life, guarding against the forces poised to snatch our freedom.
Relentlessly, Boodoo-Fortuné exhorts in Chameleon Thoughts. “I go from fire to fire with each new skin, soon prophecy, secret visions, shed my face again with the turning of the moon…We fear chameleons too much, want things to be just as they seem…we want our small dragons to stay green, pocket-sized, always crushable in good conscience…Like a good chameleon, I change when my skin tastes danger.”
Throughout, there are cries of freedom, long stifled within the crevices of society.
“If you do not fight inside of the beast’s belly,” she writes in ‘Jaguar Mary, Maria Lionza,’ “time will turn you both into mountains, and if you see your own face in the rearview mirror shut your eyes.”
Nature responds to the poet’s oratory. They are in lock-step, mirroring each other.
To salvage their soul, they bear witness. They are both saved if but one triumphs.
Surely, Doe Songs reverberates with irony.
The writer stands her ground, but is ever elusive. She is vanquished but defiant, passively contemplative, but combative. A haunting besets her and surely there is trepidation; but she is hardened.
Hers is an atavistic cry that echoes in ‘Howler.’ “Here is no land for wild beasts; let the silver cross around your neck and the blade in your waist a beat witness,” she pens. “So what is there to do with the surging flood of the day but to turn your throat into a gourd that must hold it? Even you must know this: everything that breathes will howl.”
And there are more than just shades of the iconoclastic Shivanee Ramlochan.
Boodoo-Fortuné’s pain, though, is far more subtle, far more interpretative, far less loud. But equally brutal, it is.
And there is love unrequited. And foreboding. She is pained by the maddening complexities of the human experience. Whittle she doesn’t. She intones in ‘Waiting,’ “I’ve been waiting in places where you cannot begin to imagine, like under the streetlight by the corner, with slick toads climbing down my throat, and in the hollow below your door…”
In “The Haunting of His Name,” there is distrust and betrayal. “The man who loves you is nothing but a ghost,” she writes. “He walks through walls, his name on your mouth like prayer. His name is what you tell yourself before you sleep, a short cry in the stall of your throat. You must go into yourself now with your one small flame, burn down the haunting of his name.”
At every turn, Boodoo-Fortuné challenges the curse of belonging. In ‘Your Daughter is Trouble’ there is open rebellion. Stoic and poised, she asserts, “…too much of her father’s madness in her bones, too much silence in her speech, too much wanting…There is a lit fuse in your daughter’s mouth, her brownish body a bomb set down, soft and waiting to make war with her name.”
At the cusp of inviduation, Boodoo-Fortuné is resolute, unswervingly focused and compelling, ever speaking to the blinding darkness that is the human condition. With sheer intensity, she delivers a work of unbridled imagination.
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Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK
ISBN 13: 978184524188
Doe Songs by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
(C)Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné 2018
Ratings: Highly recommended