Key West The Newspaper

Flower Conroy
The Awful Suicidal Swans
by Flower Conroy
6 x 9 paperback, 40 p.
Headmistress Press, 2014
60 Shipview Lane
Sequim, WA 98382
$10.00

How can one not be amused when an adult book of poetry is brought out by a publishing house called the Headmistress Press? We have come so far since I was aiming my own poems half a dozen decades ago at the polite poetry editor of The New York Times! Miss Conroy’s book of poems reminds me of my own explorative work in which a civilization’s sexual life was a fantasy where that reservation of death we all have was dismissed as irrelevant, as in racing high-powered cars, boats, motorcycles or exhausting our own bodies dedicated, in sports, to the killing pace of competition. Here we have, however, another world where men are on the outside and the simple sensation of being female is the dominant and extreme fantasy of being alive as though the narrator were actually and really alive herself, which, of course, she indeed is if the reader has the courage to look.

We have here a documentary of what it feels like to be the goddess: assertive, confident, beyond reproach or, in other words, as I say, alive. This reader was impressed by the introductory poem that concludes, after a survey of an astonished childhood, with the mystical declaration of the ultra real:

“Crumpled money-flowers littered, littered the floor.”

“God Trace” is a poem where the narrator “could no longer watch through the basement window” jarring us awake before we get to the devastating normality in the last and final reference in the last line to “the possibility tonight for indifferent snow.” The juxtapositions of reality and fantasy are stunning, as suggested by the title of the book itself. I caught this when I first heard Ms. Conroy read in Key West a year or so ago but I could not get a grip on it until I could survey the text itself in this quite marvelous collection.