Pam Rehm: The garment in which no one had slept

Pam Rehm, The garment in which no one had slept. Burning Deck books, Providence RI. 62pp A5 (available in UK from Paul Green, 83b London Road, Peterborough, Cambs PE2 9BS). ISBN 0 930901 87 8. 1993.

This is a hard book to find a way into. Its opening statement, Base Material, works paragrammatic variations on footnoted "themes" -- "tiny I / thin / hang / in hint night" from "Anything I", for instance, and this, with later recrudescences ("Remove pun from punishment / then arrange, Men Shit // Find Live, Vile, Evil, and Lie / All within Veil" - part IV of The Remains of Plants), leaves the reader with the sense that the order of letters on any given page is only metastable, and might reconfigure at the slightest nudge. One of the stresses in the book is on maintaining balance, however that's defined ("Nearsighted / vessel; semicircular / is the space that comes between. / The canals keep / balance." - a dream sequence). The other, and at first sight the weirder stress, is that of keeping up any kind of consistent projection of self: "Cower to cover / hovel in hover to / curiosity / at points, something / goes off and I have to / re-realize myself" (p.39). This stress begins to attach some consequence to John Taggart's uncomfortably benevolent blurb on Rehm's (personal) shyness and hesitancy -- the poems do show that kind of concern with placement of the self in space ("A man in annoyance / with his disembodied existence") and with the articulation of speech ("Dared to say / "The sun is overcome" // Dared to say it / and could not" - Of the Feeling Mind ; or again: "What cannot be heard. // Embrace. Produced without the normal art- / iculation of understandable speech." - The Illusion of a Future) - that tends to go along with shyness or social uncomfort: the "self" image in these poems flickers, needs to be erased as soon as it's drawn: "Is there ever retreat / from an image // once it is envisioned / in its humanity" (p.44). [Approaching page end: pick also Rehm's take on Olsonian space, the body's chambers (heart, lungs, clothing) as places of transit, breath as a transitional object (p.58)].

This review first appeared in issue 4 of Object Permanence magazine.

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