All We Need of Hell
"In her second collection (after Etruscan Things), Lesser leads her readers on a exploration of mental illness that is less a descent into madness than a journey towards emotional health. Detailing her experience with depression, suicide attempts, hospitalizations and the often devastating effects of medication, Lesser demystifies depressive illness in poems that are direct, reflective and instructive (a glossary of pharmaceutical and medical terms is included). These are not highly figurative or dramatic poems like Plath's, to whom Lesser will inevitably be compared. Instead, Lesser rejects ornament and article, the "merely beautiful" and " well made" verses that now leave her cold, in favor of straightforward, often journal-like narratives that "praise simple/actions, human/and possible." Lesser plumbs language (etymologies, sounds, the work of literary predecessors) for its regenerative powers as she faces her own illness and the deaths of friends from AIDS and cancer: ". . . if there have been no words, no tropes for/such occasions before, I must find them now."
-Publisher's Weekly "Honest, wise, and harrowing, these are poems absorbing to read and impossible to forget." -James Merrill "Rika Lesser's All We Need of Hell is a brave and ravaging book. The poems harrow the personal hell of suicidal depression and the deaths of friends and discover, as they proceed, astonishing resources not only of language--puns, pivoting syntax, polyphony--but of a loving heart and the instinct for life." -Rosanna Warren BLACK STONES IX (And I, and Silence) Again you have withdrawn into the body of pain which is killing you contend by force of will alone, help a diamond hard to accept or own We are rich, you and I above all else in friends who stay on even though we abandon them Don't leave me at a loss now before you have to go Giving voice to more than the physical causes you to choke, helpless to spit up the cruelest clot: the heart in closing has no more room for love Is love so poor it cannot save anyone? Like stone the silence of your long retreats At this remove I have no defense but to write (for fear you won't): Mother come Mother I'm dying Come let me go © 1995 Rika Lesser For Elisabeth What do I mean to tell you, you at six, child not mine, the one child I will have? Why do I need to write you in this book of horrors – illness, death? You who dance through your fevers, ask, at a funeral, if the dead in their private boxes must wear clothes, muse afterward: so many old folks, there must be thousands more underground. So unlike the child I was at your age. Am now. With thirty years between us, you insist that until I have a kid, I’ll be one. . . . By kid I guess you mean a state of mind, of play, a gift for entering someone else’s imagination (yours). Or is it merely, spoiling godmother that I am, I rarely scold or forbid anything but sweets at 10 a.m.? Elisabeth, I love you, love how you beg me to stay on longer than I plan, love the sound of your voice on my phone tape saying, “Rika, [kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss] when are you coming next?” Love how your love asks nothing but that I play. I’ve missed half of your birthdays, sick with a sickness I pray you will never know. Happy child, how old will you grow before you read this book? I grew up with my nose in books, my mother’s illness before my shielded but seeing eyes, the weight of it pressing the life out of my life, which, as someday you’ll learn, I have tried to take. The gift I would like to make you (for once not pink doughnuts, heart-shaped stickers or soap, paper fans, or tiny dinosaurs) is the hope and the knowledge: The worst does pass and can be survived. Summer’s child, camp is over. Your mom says two of your front teeth are loose. My mind’s eye blinks: You are prone on your bed, kicking up your heels, wearing a bra and god-knows-what kind of post-punk hairdo, talking for hours and hours on the phone . . . to me I hope, planning the trip to Sweden I promised you at four, or calling to say: “Rika, I just read that book of yours, you know, the one with Hell in the title. It’s alright, I love you. All right, that is, except for the poem about me. What made you think I was so happy?” You did. Your joy was contagious. It was your gift to me. (1989) ©1995 Rika Lesser |
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