Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 22, 1993 TAG: 9308220174
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PARKS LANIER JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Rita Sizemore Riddle's "Soot and Sunshine" is a collection of 21 poems and nine prose pieces with photograph illustrations. Altogether, the 73 pages provide the reader with many self-portraits of the artist as child and daughter, as young wife and mother, as experienced professor and poet.
But there emerges most clearly the portrait of one seeking among the dark caves of memory - darkness black as soot - for the sunshine, the illumination, the meaning of it all.
The dark caves of memory are also the caves of identity. To write is to cast upon the grotesque forms of memory a light, just as stalactites and stalagmites may be illuminated in a cavern. The natural realm is darkness, and the light is artificial. But artifice has its place. If they are lighted long or well enough, the formations may suggest other realities.
"Memories fade," Riddle says in her introduction. "People blur, rub off on each other like soot." However faded, they yet remain. Are they as reliable as the fading photographs, or were the photographs ever reliable at all? In an essay called "Quality Time," she describes a royal blue two-piece sweater dress which her ex-husband bought for her 18th birthday. "I still have a picture of it," she says, "in black and white. Back then, everything was in black and white." Soot and sunshine.
There is a lot of black and white in this collection. But it is the "nowness" of it all for the poet which is its most compelling feature. For example, she writes of a woman (perhaps herself) who "thirty years later . . . opened up a can of potted meat/ which smelled of home, and him, and time."
Smell and taste can be the most powerful evokers of memory. For Proust they begat a life's work, written under a French title which formerly was translated with Shakespeare's line "Remembrance of Things Past." The Proustian experience is a familiar one in literature. But there is also the Pavlovian, a habit of memory which triggers action and reaction, not just mere recollection. This collection has that kind of intensity.
Some readers are bound to be amazed by the Appalachian landscape of Riddle's poetry and prose; others will find it familiar. There is coal soot from the mines here, a father who "smelled like soot." "When he came home at six o'clock,/ you couldn't tell the color of his clothes/ from miner's black."
There was poverty. Of her father, she says, "You called water-bread `poor do' and ate it anyway. I won't." No running water. Home remedies: "warm pee water for scratches or sties/ ear wax for fever blisters, three kinds of weeds or a snuff-spit swipe/ for bee stings." Later, massaging her young son's aching muscles, she has the luxury of "mentholatum as it melts over his shoulders and back." Mentholatum is just someone's "home remedy" put in a tube. Break down our fancy drugstore remedies into their chemical components and they are not so different from Mother's pee water and ear wax.
Riddle powerfully evokes a world already fading, a world with some jagged edges. Its grades are steep. Near the end of the book we see a photocopy labeled "Fifth Grade Report Card." The grades inside are invisible. From it to a job at Radford University, the gardes are steep. Has she made the grade? Of home she remembers, "Sandy Ridge was just as crooked as this road/ but of course it wasn't even hard-topped then/ nor rutted out with heavy loads./ The dust was fine and soft when as a girl/ I traced my footsteps, clear and plain./ bare toes splayed, going and coming by myself."
"Soot and Sunshine" is a successful negotiation of the dark passages of memory. It begins in winter with Daddy working in the sooty mines. But it ends in the sunshine of spring, in the poem "Aunt Annie Talks About Gardening." The poet asks Aunt Annie, "What do you do with the vines and such,/ the dry fodder and what's left?" Aunt Annie replies, "Let it go back to the ground, honey . . . Let it go back to the ground."
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Soot to sunshine.
Parks Lanier Jr. teaches at Radford University.
by CNB