Bryan R. Monte
Review of Claudia Gary’s Time and Other Solvents (Sligo Creek Publishing, 2026) ISBN 979-8-99925-687-4, 85 pages.
For at least a decade, I have been fortunate to read and to enthusiastically publish Claudia Gary’s poetry in Amsterdam Quarterly. Two of the reasons I have published and now review her work is due to its polished, poetic presentation in various metrical forms, such as the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, combined with her unique use of fresh, scientific/analytical language in these forms. The result of her many years of this approach is Gary’s new collection, Time and Other Solvents, a poetic Bildungsroman. It charts her physical, social, and psychological development from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood and the family, social, and artistic events that shaped her personality, with a later-in-life coda of poems which explains how she overcame one of her biggest personal challenges.
Most of this physical, social, and psychological development is charted in the first two sections entitled: ‘What Can Go Wrong’ and ‘If I Had Wings’. They describe Gary’s family’s at least five moves with her parents during her formative childhood and adolescent years, on US East and West Coasts and in the South, and also her own move to Francophone countries in early adulthood. However, Time and Other Solvents, is not just a travelogue. It reflects how these relocations affected Gary’s family history and more importantly, her own development and self-awareness related to her and her family’s crises.
The book’s prologue poem, ‘American Dreamers’ provides a preview of many of the important issues covered in Time and Other Solvents. In it, Gary writes in the third person in a notebook she kept to make sense of these childhood re/dislocations:
Determined to make sense of it’…
(she) scribbled in notebooks she called ‘Mobile Home’
Through the mid-70s, then doubled down
On sugar-numbed, sate oblivion
Until she clambered back to poetry.
Gary’s moves included ones to Dallas, Texas, mentioned in ‘An Awakening’ where the maid referred to Gary as ‘a scholar’ because she had only been allowed to attend ‘First Grade’. ‘Mobile Home was also a very practical way to keep things Gary felt were precious despite her parent’s frequent moves. This is described vividly in her poem ‘Somewhere in the San Fernando Valley’ where Gary writes in the second person about ‘An adobe village you built at age eight/ with six huts each the size of your palm/ along a path to a mission modeled/ on San Juan Capistrano,’ …that she’d had to abandon, …‘now buried under a swimming pool / the next owner installed.’
This Pprologue also mentions one of the effects of these frequent relocations: Gary’s development of bulimia and how she found her way back—through poetry, as Wordsworth did with his personal development and conflicts in The Prelude.
Some of the most important crises mentioned in the first two books include the pressure her artistic mother felt to become a beautifying homemaker and her mental illness and shock treatment, especially in ‘What Can Go Wrong’ and ‘Dollhouse’. This is in contrast to Gary’s father’s more practical approach to his life as an American immigrant. In ‘Antiseptic,’ Gary describes how her father, ‘after putting peroxide on my foot’ after he removed a splinter, told her ‘you will never be without / an antiseptic, if you use your urine.’ This was something he had learned from his Air Force training, to which Gary’s homemaker, artistic mother shouted from the next room, ‘Hey / don’t tell her things like that!’ her response to the transmission of this basic, survival knowledge to her daughter by her father. Inspired, the young poet relates ‘I sensed a strange / new light, but couldn’t say what it was / or whether it was pretty.’ Gary’s book’s title poem, ‘Time and Other Solvents’ takes this scientific, practical perspective even further. It describes specimen jars stored in a dark basement, whose contents, with time, dissolve and disappear into the unspecified solutions which held them, perhaps Gary’s poetic, scientific version of ‘Time heals all wounds’.
Other influences or topics of Gary’s poems include swimming and socializing in Manhattan in ‘Aunt Rose’ and or in Atlantic City in a poem of the same name, the stress of urban life in New York City including a neighbour’s suicide, in ‘The Woman Who Jumped’, and a partner’s work accident, in ‘Emergency’ and how these events affected her.
Her poem,‘Letter Space’, describes her revelatory experience of typesetting:
In setting type you must pay full attention
to space above, below, between black shapes
flashed onto photo paper. Their dimension
and style affect the meaning that escapes
their boundaries
Then she realizes that:
…Sharp focus has revealed
you can survive alone, if you’re not stirred
too often or to deeply, when you find
a letter from the one you left behind.
All in all, Gary’s poetry illustrates how her family’s characters and lives were moulded (and sometimes mangled) temporarily or permanently by artistic and practical influences.
And Gary does all this through her use of some of the most restrictive forms of poetry: the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina. In doing so, she demonstrates her mastery of these forms with highly structured traditional rhyme schemes, not just in fourteen-line, unrhymed lines some contemporary poets now call sonnets.
Where Gary’s language is most effective is in her description of her struggle with bulimia and how she overcame it. In ‘Ballet Routine,’ she describes how as a teen she binge ate with friends after their strenuous classes to satiate their twisted and tormented bodies. Later in ‘Royal Hotline, 1983’ she describes the press’s first reports of Lady Diana’s bulimia, ‘Analysis’ is a dream-like story about a baby frozen in a pond, ‘The Spill’ a sonnet about pregnancy and purging, ‘Well’ about how treating her bulimia correctly helps her become a new person unfamiliar to her partner, and in ‘Bulimia’ her victory:
Your tears well spent, your starving eye
forsakes the bowl, reclaims the sky.
The best example of this recovery is a trio of poems which closes her collection: ‘Soup in Lyon’, ‘What Loves Me Back’ and ‘Comfort Food’, a simple description of a healthy diet and lifestyle. The first describes the elements of this local diet:
A carrot, an onion, two eggs,
a baguette with a pat of butter,
maybe coffee or tea, maybe milk:
The poet also mentions travelling around Lyon on a small, folding bicycle to see the sights and how:
…I learned to be pleased by basics:
morning market, a pot on the stove
with two eggs, a large carrot, an onion,
half for now and the rest for later;
…Any more? Any more would be excess
It’s a poem about being pleased with just enough and not too much which I also think expresses Gary’s subconscious displeasure with her parents’ post-war consumerist lives as they chased the American dream across the country.
The second poem, ‘What Loves Me Back’ includes a list of simple foods Gary learned to make and eat, each ingredient or food listed in the first line of each stanza: ‘Broccoli Ex Post Facto’, ‘Yogurt Unmasked’, ‘Brown Rice, Browned’, ‘Onion Affair’, ‘Ode for Everything Bagel’, and ‘Graffiti for Grapefruit’.
‘Comfort Food’ the series’ third and the collection’s final poem describes the comfort she receives from her new vegetable-based diet which includes ‘Lentils and barley’,…‘split peas and pasta’. Gary also describes the reduction of vegetables through cooking such as ‘Greens can be added’…‘Towers have toppled / into the soup.’ and concludes with:
Cauldron of comfort
served with warm hands,
this is a recipe
crisis demands.
Since some consider good cooking to be a form of good chemistry, it’s easy to see how Gary found beautiful, poetic solutions for her troubled childhood and her bulimia in her ability to analyse and deal with her problems clearly. This poetic insight shines through Love and Other Solvents. I highly recommend it to AQ’s readers. AQ