Barbara Tomash, Her Scant State

 

the history of her marriage and its consequence died
three years after the grey American dawn of not believing
a word she said

 

 

 

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In life there is love, the moment becomes a single, melted together and into
pain. Her hands raised, clasped, slowly moved his face.
                                                                                        “I believe I ruined you.”

The fifth full-length poetry title by Berkeley, California poet Barbara Tomash, following Flying in Water (New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), Arboreal (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2014) [see my review of such here] and PRE- (Lafayette LA: Black Radish Books, 2018) [see my review of such here], is Her Scant State (Apogee Press, 2023), a book-length assemblage of erasure poems that focus on Henry James’ 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. It is curious to think that at least two Apogee-published Berkeley poets have been focusing on book-length poetry projects that rework and even reconceptualize literary works by others, from Tomash’s collection to Laura Walker’s recent psalmbook (Apogee Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] that reworked Biblical text, or even Trevor Ketner’s recent reconceptualization of Shakepeare’s sonnets through their The Wild Hunt Divinations: a grimoire (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]. As Tomash writes in her “Source Notes” at the back of the collection:

Her Scant State is an erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I kept strictly to word order but allowed myself free rein with punctuation and form on the page. The first half of the novel runs across the top of each page of Her Scant State. The second half of the novel runs across the bottom of each page. “Note” is an erasure of “Note on the Text” in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel. “Face” is an erasure of James’s 1908 preface to the New York Edition.

“The Portrait of a Lady / was in twelve parts / of thousands of small disruptive / processes, classic reader,” Tomash’s opening “Note” reads, “the / significance of some of these / is discussed [.]” Tomash’s Her Scant Suite works through an array of language erasure, description and disruption that flicks between a language and tone from the contemporary to the nineteenth-century, simultaneously existing in neither and both spaces. Through such, Tomash manages to compose an entirely new almost nether-space from which this new portrait emerges. “squandered      gambled      daughters,” she writes, early on in the collection, “a proof modified / by pain // she danced very well // the choreographic circle constituted / the limits of her own power [.]”