RESEARCH General Arts

POETRY
New volume intertwines Caribbean mythology and reality

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

5/1/2000

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In his new volume of poetry, "Flight From the Mother Stone," Laurence Lieberman turns once again to the rich mythology of his spiritual home, the Caribbean Islands -- an enchanted realm, indeed, where humans and beasts slip in and out of supernatural acts as if they're molting, and where even daily life offers myriad opportunities for magic, metamorphosis, rebirth.

In these supercharged, supervivid poems, women cook eggs in hankies hung from fishing poles dipped into a "Boiling Lake," boa constrictors milk local dairy cows, and the dead and buried rise up to live long robust lives. Mythology and reality are so tightly wound in these stories that it is hard to separate the strands, and in telling his tales, Lieberman, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, offers breathtaking descriptions: Darkness "slithers over us like a molting crumpled snakeskin" and an overcast cloud "cracks open like an axe-riven coconut, and Sun pours forth its Golden Milk."

A natural tale-spinner, Lieberman draws his poetic material from his own experiences, from guide-storytellers and from his imagination. Fact in his poetry, he said, "runs anywhere from 10 to 90 percent," but the themes of redemption and rebirth seem ever present -- glorious, at times, and grisly.

These themes are never more evident than in the title poem. There, tourists exploring the great mythic Bonaire Stone seek "to hatch a new birth" through "the true gateway into a next life of Being." One man succeeds -- finds the small ingress and falls into the stone's womb -- then feels "a new outcropping emerge from his navel: the slimy tube attached him to the rock with a suction cup. Ecstasy surged through him as he shook from side to side, whereat he felt the grand moment of Shooting his Umbilicus! . He rose, as if wings drew him upward, even higher, to the roof gap he'd entered some time before." He was reborn "son of the rock, the body of the world, the planet -- the Mother Stone."

In another poem of sacrifice and redemption, a voodoo priestess bites off the head of a rooster, then "spits out the decapitated bulb, wattled silhouette twirling like a rose or red-petaled pinwheel over the crowd, and she swings the white headless trunk in widening circles, streams of blood spattered in all directions, most faces staring upward at the blood storm in motionless ecstasy."

The act of writing poetry can put Lieberman in his own voodoo-like trance.

"It's a visionary state -- almost like a kind of self-hypnosis," he said. "When the poem is going well, I feel as if some other dimension is handing me a gift and I'm riding it, as if it comes to me from another world, some other place, some place inside me that's beyond my ego, beyond my personal self."

If you are lucky enough to get to this state, "you feel like you're tapping into a very deep place in the shared communal psyche, you feel it's the breakthrough moment of spontaneity that everybody wants to tap into when they're creatively writing. You begin a poem with whatever intentions, with whatever willed plan, and I guess your secret hope is that it will be conquered by this upheaval in the imagination, or the trance of the imagination will take over and you want to let it come into its own."