Weapons Grade
Terese Svoboda, University of Arkansas Press, 2009
1-55728-906-9, $16, 96 pages

“WEAPONS GRADE”–Notes from a 21st Century Sybil

The Oracle and the Sybil are moments somewhere along the way in history that mark institutional attempts at the preservation of the tradition of wisdom and truth telling. Neither is directly transparent. In 2009, Terese Svoboda’s throws a new set of her poems, Weapons Grade, into the mix.

The book is divided into four parts. The poems in the first section are overtly political, very dark, and very impressive. In one, there is a convoy of body bags. In another the litany of O’s weave from Suzie Wong’s nipples to nooses—but in fact are the zeros of records of African-American GI’s secretly executed by American Forces in occupied Japan—assumedly for the crime of rape. There is a conflation of history. King Henry’s dogs tracking in the blood of hanged men balances with the white gloves of American GI MP’s. The gloves are as white as the record of executions is blank.

In another poem, “Code Name: 731” Svoboda spells the connection between the almost unbelievably, horrible Japanese science experiments of WWII and the Tokyo lab, which in the 1990’s distributed AIDS-laden blood for the transfusions of unknowing patients. Our darkest corners are not mirages; they are gruesome historical facts. The poem begins with a land developer unearthing one of the grizzly WWII 731 labs. Files follow. At the close of the poem, the notions of secrecy and the horrible nature of things buried away hitting the light of day are jarringly simple: How much cold can a body take? / How little liver? / The boys’ bones turn up in the Tokyo lot.

Svobda splices a line: Say Can You See? what the century is made of.

In the first section of Svoboda’s book heartland patriotism and bravado are flaunted by a provincial adolescence. It is a macabre song of misguided innocence:

In another poem, the tone is more prayerful, more plaintive:

The poems of Sections II, III, and IV shift away from the military themes of stealth, abuse, and fear and into a question of balance as set into a personal landscape, or as Svoboda references it—to the glen of the heart. In Section II, the theater is marriage. There are tracks in the snow and messages in the camp ashes. Intimacy get misplaced and recovered in the balancing of the equation of X and Y; the day’s / global position ratchets / into place with a purse click. The balance of power languidly dreams while the colonial teapot gleams and steams.

The poems in Section III shift to domestic issues of the nuclear family—the mystery is love not fear. Grief, damage, and fear, as a kind of death, re-surface in this section. In one poem, a woman loves her beater. The kitchen and abuse conflate. Things appear—and disappear. “The fury and majesty of a mind’s death” is featured in “the loss” of a brother. It is only the people with navels (“evolutions blind trajectory”) that have issues:

And in Section IV, grand design and doom join hands. In one poem fluid massing on the lungs appears as a warning of what is to come. In Section IV, there is a path, a widow, an evening of sailing on a lake, a glacier, and a bargaining:

There is also a road taken by two bicyclists who are overtaken by a car driven by Death. It hits–and disappears.

Svoboda’s poems are rewarding. She is brave–but the road she travels is not easy or for the faint of heart.