Kate Bolton Bonnici, A True & Just Record

 

Sick, they drink. This is the order of desire.

What can be seen: seeking.
What cannot:

In search of needs a burning to go from.

The fairy tree Spencer will call warlike, in May
makes beauty thronged by demand,

Belonging by custom not
by calling nor by name.

Is a walk with girls proximate

to the walk of the sick and which is other? wreaths
left nearby for the nearby image of one blessed

and one blessing

The near enough to hear, far enough to split
sickness, girlhood. Sad fringe of fairy belief.

She hears too from those so-called of bodies

Politic and church, having seen the there-gathered.
But what’s said is stuck at proving

a statement made, not any other truth. (“Joan of Arc: Third Public Session, February 24, 1431”)

The second full-length poetry title from Los Angeles-based poet Kate Bolton Bonnici, following Night Burial (Fort Collins CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2020) [see my review of such here], is A True & Just Record (Norwich UK: Boiler House Press, 2023), a collection originally prompted by and through the author’s interest in researching 16^th and 17^th century pamphlets during a period of time that quickly fell into the onset and influence of Covid-19 lockdowns. “Late March 2020,” Bonnici writes in her introduction, “Witch Stichomythia: Chances, Changes, & Strange Shapes,” “I tried over the phone to help my grandmother—97, already living alone, and now entirely isolated due to COVID-19 restrictions—figure out how to operate a laptop computer so that she could send emails and read the news online. Meanwhile in my own reading, I toggled between doomscrolling hyper-current headlines and researching English blackletter pamphlets from the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Some of the latter fittingly concerned plague, such as the remarkable pamphlet attributed to Thomas Dekker—The Wonderfull yeare. 1602. Wherein is shewed the picture of London, lying sicke of the Plague. Through prose and poetry, The Wonderfull yeare navigates that earlier mirabilis annus, as Dekker calls it, ranging from Queen Elizabeth’s death to the onslaught of widespread illness, by “tell[ing] only of the chances, changes, and strange shapes that his Protean Climactericall year hath metamorphosed himselfe into.”

Composed out of twenty-four poems, each piece in A True & Just Record unfolds and expands, akin to the ripples of water from a pebble thrown into a lake, offering rings upon further rings beyond where the piece might have begun. “Little Red Cap holds a lesson / on endings.” she writes, as part of the poem “Story of Grandmother.” The narratives of many of her poems are pulled, spread apart and stitched from a multitude of threads, stitching together dire warnings with wisdoms, concerns and seemingly-impossible questions. “Imprimis,” she writes, invoking a sequence of firsts as part of the poem “Upon Information, Belief,” one of the few poems in the collection under a page in length, “a painting of Mary & Jesus hosts the Three Living & the / Three Dead. / Imprimis, do you know the evening prayer for getting my kid to bed?” Bonnici focuses her attentions in this collection on a conversation around the English witch trials and a sequence of women through archival texts, weaving medieval language and text from a variety of pamphlets into poems such as “Joan Cason: Executed for Invocation, 1586,” “Elizabeth Fraunces: Executed for Witchcraft, April 1579,” “Elizabeth Sawyer: Executed for Witchcraft on Thursday, April 19, 1621,” “Joan of Arc: Third Public Session, February 24, 1431” and “Elizabeth Stile: Executed for Witchcraft, 1579.” Connecting those isolations and those readings, she turns the combination into a response that can’t help come through as writing, as she offers in a further part of her introduction:

            Reading sometimes turns to writing when one wants communion. For writing begins, as Michel de Certeau explains, in loss. This loss lies not only in the impossible distance between presence and sign. Writing begins in want, which means both lack and desire. Writing into the want of and for communion (with far-away family, long-ago literature, past and present scholarship) necessitates chances, changes, strange shapes.

It is curious to see Bonnici examine the threads of that particular mirabilis annus, that “marvelous year,” given the related (or opposing) phrase utilized by Queen Elizabeth II, “annus horribilis,” or “horrible year,” offered as part of her Ruby Jubilee speech in November 1992, referencing the previous calendar year across the Royal Household. Just as the first Queen Elizabeth of England died during that earlier period, so, too, her contemporary namesake, who fell ill and died during the Covid-era (just beyond the temporal boundaries of this particular collection, I would presume), which do make a curious correlation between eras. “The Wonderfull yeare is a pamphlet of princes & plague,” Bonnici writes, near the end of the collection, “all the ways one can be / worm-written written in blackletter (font & as to the law—what is) // how some come from the maw of disease & others— […].”

There are elements of this particular work comparable to the work of Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy, also known for folding in medieval language, as well as focusing on women of that era, from mothering to childbirth to healthcare (or what passed for such during those times) [see my review of her 2021 collection wifthing here]. Bonnici, in her way, approaches her collection from two different tethers: the language and content of medieval pamphlets around the witch trials and plague, and contemporary considerations through the Covid-era, acknowledging the wisdom of grandmothers, specifically her own, across the other end of that telephone line. Whatever medieval implications might run through the collection, the book opens and closes with grandmothers, framed against all else that may exist within. As she writes as part of the poem “Story of Grandmother,” a piece very close to the opening:

which means speaking the body of an old wives’
tale, the one where the witch

spun is a girl, twelve, spinning herself this claim: witch,
which is what opens the art
of want, the audacity to demand: sheep, wealth, wife,
a promise if she would fyrste consent. But spell love with blood,
and the bargained-for breaks down (learned
once desire’s

been given to) […]