The Decadent Lovely Amy Pence
Reviewed by Maureen Alsop
Through the acquisition of archetypal guardians, conversations with gods and saints, Amy Pence carries reminders of life on earth to a higher plateau. In Pence’s The Decadent Lovely, she explores the need for spiritual resolution, safety, detailing her reflections through childhood memory without the sentimentality often imbued through hindsight. Eyeing the late 50’s department store photo of her parents “who they were or were meant to believe they could be…” Pence captures the awareness of not only the passage of time as a nostalgia that may be idealized, but also the whiff of the dreams that traversed that childhood-parenthood triage. In the poem “Minimegastructures Structures Are Mostly Ducks“ Pence writes “we eat sour cherries to show something in the soul has changed…” what better image captures a sense of grounding, taint of tart flavor, to denote a shift in consciousness? In the poem “Joan of Arc 1969” Pence subtly announces the importance of iconography, and hints at the possibility of experiencing tenderness through worship: “silvered, armored,/refractory with good. In the thick of that revolution…” It is that revolution of the heart that bodes Pence’s will for the soul’s progression. Each poem resonates with a certain incredulousness toward both mystery and the mastery of all that has elapsed. Love being a physics by which time will not abide. Each of the seven sections of the collection open with a quotation on the architecture of Las Vegas. There is no mistake that cultural shifts in the landscape denote both a loss of romanticism and the acquiring of new appreciation for what lies before us. Pence in a heartbreaking elegy, “Marginalia: An Elegy” explains the sensation of the vanquished:
In the spoiled margins
everybody’s story—
In the margins
we are naked—
Our questions unrehearsed
our thoughts roaming
[calculations in Galileo’s hand
fill the margins of his daughter’s letters—
some tear-stained, some water-stained
and what of the passages Dickinson’s
supposed lover marked—was it
an admission to love, those markings?]
In the margins of who she was, she was everyone
a child in the post-war 40s—a teen in the Maidenformed, electro-shocked 50s
Trained on coyness, MGM movies: a female subterfuge
By the end, a ruin—spoiled by decades of smoking and drinking
Reclusive, pained, caring for her paralyzed
third husband with a vengeance
Las Vegas, by then
far from her small town Ohio home
That last time, helping her in the shower
all of 80 pounds: her spine around
which her body drooped
Can you believe these? She said,
grabbing her flaccid breasts—
Don’t write about this, she said,
unless Meryl Streep
plays me in the movie.
Pence connects with the universal through a personal return through childhood, and the adult-child’s most unsettling moments, those epiphanies in which, we realize our parents are human, their progression toward aging real, their mortality an affront, and in a moment of great vulnerability, Pence is able to find levity, the joy of connection. Even Galileo could not calculate the infinite of separation.