by Jessica Fox-Wilson

A chapbook is a miraculous venue for poets. It can be a remarkable publishing opportunity to showcase a group of poems that may not have found a single home together. It can also be an incredible challenge to present twenty or so pages of poetry in a cohesive aesthetic and theme. Karen Rigby’s Savage Machinery, coming in September from Finishing Line Press, succeeds in combining the ideas and craft from sixteen separate poems into a interconnected whole. Savage Machinery explores a specific area of the human condition: our relationship with sensuality and connection despite an often self-created distance.

The most intriguing aspect of Rigby’s work is the way in which her poems intensify as the chapbook progresses. Throughout most of her poems lingers a sensuality, hidden just below many of her characters’ surfaces. For instance, in the opening poem, “Bathing in the Burned House,” the housewife still lives in the house, obscured by burnt timbers but showers under the open sky. The neighboring husbands who pass by the house imagine (but never truly witness) her.

In another early poem, “Photo of an Autoerotic” is the distant sensuality of what should be explicit: a photo of a man indulging himself becomes almost scientific, an artifact of desire, rather than desire itself. Further in the chapbook are a series of food poems, which present sensuality in all of its physicality. Indulging in the smells, tastes and memories of food translates into indulging in the memories of our other carnal desires. The sense of sensuality becomes fully realized in these poems, and physical expression becomes about connection rather than distance.

Many of the poems in Savage Machinery are inspired by art. Through these poems, Rigby extends her meditation on sensuality to include the ways in which beauty, connection and identity have been defined for us visually. Rigby draws on a diverse pool of artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe and Boucicaut Master. These ekphrastic poems are well-executed because Rigby retains her own voice, while still conveying the emotional tenor and visual scope of the art.

The most accomplished poem of this series is “The Story of Adam and Eve,” which is inspired by Master’s illuminated manuscript of the same name. The poem shifts between Master’s artwork, scenes from the Garden of Eden, the process to create the illuminated manuscript and the narrator’s own experience in Paris. As the poem volleys back and forth, art and experience become blurred. The sensuality of Eden before the fall mingles with sensuality of calligrapher inscribing parchment, which then mingles with memories of a love affair. Because it addresses so many of the chabook’s themes, “The Story of Adam and Eve” becomes its centerpiece.

The beauty of chapbooks is that readers are able to discover a new poet through a brief immersion in their world, much like being transported to a foreign country and quickly acquiring the language. I found I wanted to spend more time living in Rigby’s world, where da Vinci flying machines bleed into passengers on real airplanes centuries later and women rebel by bathing in burned-out houses.

Rigby, Karen (2008). Savage Machinery. Georgetown: Finishing Line Press.

Available September 2008.