Kate Bolton Bonnici, A True & Just Record

 

Sick, they drink. This isthe order of desire.

What can be seen:seeking.
What cannot:

In search of needs aburning to go from.

The fairy tree Spencerwill call warlike, in May
makes beauty thronged bydemand,

Belonging by custom not
by calling nor by name.

Is a walk with girls proximate

to the walk of the sickand which is other? wreaths
left nearby for thenearby image of one blessed

and one blessing

The near enough to hear,far enough to split
sickness, girlhood. Sad fringeof fairy belief.

She hears too from thoseso-called of bodies

Politic and church,having seen the there-gathered.
But what’s said is stuckat proving

a statement made, not anyother truth. (“Joan of Arc: Third Public Session, February 24, 1431”)

Thesecond full-length poetry title from Los Angeles-based poet Kate Bolton Bonnici,following Night Burial (Fort Collins CO: The Center for LiteraryPublishing, 2020) [see my review of such here], is A True & Just Record (Norwich UK: Boiler House Press, 2023), a collection originally prompted by andthrough the author’s interest in researching 16th and 17thcentury pamphlets during a period of time that quickly fell into the onset andinfluence of Covid-19 lockdowns. “Late March 2020,” Bonnici writes in herintroduction, “Witch Stichomythia: Chances, Changes, & Strange Shapes,” “I triedover the phone to help my grandmother—97, already living alone, and nowentirely isolated due to COVID-19 restrictions—figure out how to operate a laptopcomputer so that she could send emails and read the news online. Meanwhile inmy own reading, I toggled between doomscrolling hyper-current headlines andresearching English blackletter pamphlets from the 16th and 17thcenturies. Some of the latter fittingly concerned plague, such as the remarkablepamphlet attributed to Thomas Dekker—The Wonderfull yeare. 1602. Wherein isshewed the picture of London, lying sicke of the Plague. Through prose andpoetry, The Wonderfull yeare navigates that earlier mirabilis annus,as Dekker calls it, ranging from Queen Elizabeth’s death to the onslaught ofwidespread illness, by “tell[ing] only of the chances, changes, and strangeshapes that his Protean Climactericall year hath metamorphosed himselfe into.”

Composedout of twenty-four poems, each piece in A True & Just Record unfoldsand expands, akin to the ripples of water from a pebble thrown into a lake,offering rings upon further rings beyond where the piece might have begun. “LittleRed Cap holds a lesson / on endings.” she writes, as part of the poem “Story ofGrandmother.” The narratives of many of her poems are pulled, spread apart andstitched from a multitude of threads, stitching together dire warnings with wisdoms,concerns and seemingly-impossible questions. “Imprimis,” she writes, invokinga sequence of firsts as part of the poem “Upon Information, Belief,” one of thefew poems in the collection under a page in length, “a painting of Mary &Jesus hosts the Three Living & the / Three Dead. / Imprimis, do youknow the evening prayer for getting my kid to bed?” Bonnici focuses herattentions in this collection on a conversation around the English witch trialsand a sequence of women through archival texts, weaving medieval language andtext from a variety of pamphlets into poems such as “Joan Cason: Executed forInvocation, 1586,” “Elizabeth Fraunces: Executed for Witchcraft, April 1579,” “ElizabethSawyer: Executed for Witchcraft on Thursday, April 19, 1621,” “Joan of Arc:Third Public Session, February 24, 1431” and “Elizabeth Stile: Executed forWitchcraft, 1579.” Connecting those isolations and those readings, she turns thecombination into a response that can’t help come through as writing, as sheoffers in a further part of her introduction:

            Reading sometimes turns to writing when one wantscommunion. For writing begins, as Michel de Certeau explains, in loss. This losslies not only in the impossible distance between presence and sign. Writing beginsin want, which means both lack and desire. Writing into the want of and forcommunion (with far-away family, long-ago literature, past and presentscholarship) necessitates chances, changes, strange shapes.

Itis curious to see Bonnici examine the threads of that particular mirabilisannus, that “marvelous year,” given the related (or opposing) phrase utilizedby Queen Elizabeth II, “annus horribilis,” or “horrible year,” offeredas part of her Ruby Jubilee speech in November 1992, referencing the previouscalendar year across the Royal Household. Just as the first Queen Elizabeth ofEngland died during that earlier period, so, too, her contemporary namesake,who fell ill and died during the Covid-era (just beyond the temporal boundariesof this particular collection, I would presume), which do make a curiouscorrelation between eras. “The Wonderfull yeare is a pamphlet of princes& plague,” Bonnici writes, near the end of the collection, “all the waysone can be / worm-written written in blackletter (font & as to the law—whatis) // how some come from the maw of disease & others— […].”

Thereare elements of this particular work comparable to the work of Philadelphiapoet Pattie McCarthy, also known for folding in medieval language, as well as focusingon women of that era, from mothering to childbirth to healthcare (or what passedfor such during those times) [see my review of her 2021 collection wifthinghere]. Bonnici, in her way, approaches her collection from two different tethers:the language and content of medieval pamphlets around the witch trials andplague, and contemporary considerations through the Covid-era, acknowledgingthe wisdom of grandmothers, specifically her own, across the other end of thattelephone line. Whatever medieval implications might run through thecollection, the book opens and closes with grandmothers, framed against allelse that may exist within. As she writes as part of the poem “Story ofGrandmother,” a piece very close to the opening:

which means speaking thebody of an old wives’
tale, the one where thewitch

spun is a girl, twelve,spinning herself this claim: witch,
which is what opens theart
of want, the audacity todemand: sheep, wealth, wife,
a promise if she would fyrsteconsent. But spell love with blood,
and the bargained-forbreaks down (learned
once desire’s

been given to) […]