Lia Purpura’s book, increase, lingers. I ordered this book a few weeks ago on a recommendation and when it arrived began reading it immediately. Its size felt perfect: a hardcover, not too big or too thin. An odd picture on its cover offered no insight into what might lie between its pages, and its title, increase, could have meant anything. Why did she choose so vague a title? But the colors of the cover art are perfectly matched to draw hues from each other, to contrast and compose, the book looked ornamental on my night stand; it felt right in my hands.
Having read, last year, Purpura’s book of essays, On Looking, I knew her work was breathtaking, original, lyrical and contemplative (she is also a poet). I knew that she had a gift for training her readers to read her work at a different pace—her pace, her pulse and beat. I would call it a pace akin to the energy required of reading poetry: a contemplative pace that needs breathing room and cannot rush. What fascinated me about On Looking as well as increase, (beyond the obvious talent of the work) was the way Purpura’s writing drew me back to her. I thought of the book throughout the day and I wondered why I anticipated returning to it at night as I had when reading On Looking. How could a book composed in journal format, lacking a traditional narrative structure, having no plot, draw me back to it with such force? How could it speak outside of itself, extend itself by strength of language alone? I wanted to understand this because if there is any writer’s work I’d like my sentences to resemble, it’s Purpura.
The book is structured around the birth of her son, which takes place about a third of the way through. The first page reports the experience of the positive pregnancy test. “A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test.” This short first page ends with, “Tell me, now, who I am,” which sets up the book for an exploration of self through motherhood. The journal structure of the book—dated entries—works well with the theme of pregnancy and anticipating birth and even as record of her son’s first year (which is where the book takes us). In pregnancy we anticipate dates which mark the growth of the fetus, changes in the body, and the nearing birth. However, Purpura doesn’t play up this structure, she very rarely writes about the typical topics of pregnancy—how it feels to have something growing in you, the fear of birth or of raising your child, the anticipation, the inconceivable love of one’s new born child, and so on. Purpura almost always remains within the cocoon of the poetic, not stepping too harshly into the personal, but maintaining the ephemeral shape of the poetic where we are once at a distance from and in complete intimacy with the narrator. What the Seneca Review calls the “coy” or “reticent” voice of the lyric essay. For example:
The time I have, I take to look at him. To watch, which is to be struck, clear-cut,
swept, and reseeded. I need not move toward any task, at that moment, past
gazing on the face of my child. 108
There is intimacy in the mother’s observation of her child; an act we can assign intimacy to without much effort. Distance is created by abstraction, “to be struck, clear-cut, swept, and reseeded,” but abstraction or the metaphor used also deepens the intimacy of the given act of gazing at her child. This then is the cocoon of the poetic.
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