"Words on Poetry," reviews of poets by Miriam Sagan from the Santa Fe New Mexican.
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Lisa Gill, Mortar and Pestle

The poet Keats, in a letter, spoke about “objective correlative.” T.S. Eliot picked up on the idea--which is that basically every poem has an actual event that triggered it--and made it a literary concept. The poems in Mortar and Pestle (New Rivers Press, 2006) by Lisa Gill have a forceful objective correlative, which is the poet’s diagnosis of MS.

Albuquerque-based poet Gill was first known for her poems to Thomas Merton. Her first volume, Red As A Lotus also had a strong organizing principle. But there are at least two major concepts behind the new collection--disease and diagnosis and the healing properties of herbs. Gill, in her poetic autobiography, responds to an attack of MS and diagnosis of the disease with the usual level of worry and depression--she makes no bones about it. But she seems to reach almost immediately for her pen or keyboard and seek meaning--transformation even--in the power of words. She writes: “If one person’s wound is another's breakthrough, we all choose what to cherish, what to blot.”

What follows is the central section of the book, entitled Fifty-Two Consolations. Each poem is based on a herbiferous plant. Informative notes at the back of the book serve as a compendium of herbal allies. Yet the poems stand separately. Take, for example, "Yarrow:"

I’m looking for my great weakness
I see a thousand things.

I suspect my entire body
is composed of Achilles’ heels.

(....)

A plant can make me sweat
or break a fever.

I am perfectly vulnerable
as if dipped in the Rio Grande.

I suspect my body is composed
of everything discernible

and undiscernible.
I overlook a thousand things.

And in the note on Achillea millefolium, commonly called yarrow, the poet notes that the plant supposedly derived its name from Achilles who used it to treat the wounded during the Trojan War.

Each poem and its companion note explores, informs, and inspires. Gill seems to have truly digested each herb--the information always seems integral to the poem. Evening Primrose speaks of dissociation and suffering:

When I was sliced in half by a mirror
and my body turned against my body,
you were my sun drop.

How could I say stay?

Four breasts and two heads. Disease
slated every night for another bruise
to my nerves and ego.

And yet fascinatingly, Gill adds in her note: “Evening Primrose oil is one of the supplements I take for MS.”

The literature of disease is not new. The Japanese poet Shiki wrote extensively while completely bedridden for years. And Keats himself wrote while ill with tuberculosis. In fiction, huge novels come out of confrontation will illness, from Magic Mountain to Cancer Ward. In these, the confrontation is also with society, and the self. Gill’s journey takes her into the natural world—on daily walks where she can discover some of these plants and and also into a botany which is part story and myth, part healing.

Mortar and Pestle is a highly original work. It may well speak to some readers who don’t naturally gravitate towards poetry—but who are confronting an autoimmune or any other chronic disease. Those who normally read poetry will find this an unusual book—one with a very wide circumference that travels out into worlds both seen and unseen.

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