Delivery, Sandra Thibodeaux.  PressPress.  ISBN 0-9580367-6-4.  Price: $7.70 RRP.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Thibodeaux’s new chapbook contains some poems that have been published before or broadcast on ABC Radio National.   She has written widely for the stage.  This fact is not surprising, as her skills with the spoken word are evident in this book.  She may become famous for her plays and perhaps turn to the novel as a means of expression.

One can imagine Thibodeaux could write great film scripts.  Look at this description, and imagine how it would relate to film: “It had been so long since someone / had seen her breasts as flesh” (“What, Exactly?”).  Listen to this character sketch: “Sunita,round and dimpled as her name, is reviewing Goa’s attractions / that are all too good for her five-day holiday” (Sunita”).  How about this depiction of action: “She licks his flesh to satisfy her craving / without which she is condemned / to any old suburban death” (“The Sound of One Hand Clapping”).  These would have to be very special films, though: all the senses would have to be employed:

She was beyond looking at the train
and its ludicrous passengers.
Her face indifferently averted,
she stared at the passing air
with the sadness of knowing
her intelligence and burnt beauty
were being wasted on ballast.

(“Too Much”)

Anything is likely, but for the time being we have her poetry, which is brave and honest, full of pain and rage, but also a tenderness, which is not sentimental, but deeply moving.   Of course, you could say that some of the things Thibodeaux writes about would be impossible to write about in a dull way.  The poems are rooted in the poet’s past or in her present: she is the lover, the cynic, the analyst of present world problems, the human voice, dominated by her belief in a poetic world. 

In the poem “Alms”, the poet addresses the President of the United States: “This is what I’d like you to do: / lay down your arms / for Ali Ismael Abbas; peel / the skin from your flesh / and wrap his pupal form; drain / your blood into a cup / and hold it to his lips” - one feels the verbal and physical cruelty in this particular context as the poem here seems to want to leap off the page; at times as though Thibodeaux wants the reader to inhabit the poem.
 
In the title poem “Delivery”, it’s as if we, the readers, are partaking in the scent and fertility rite of gathering the ripe mangoes:

   The sticky scent swells in our veins,
    the bursting fertility floods our pulses,
    and the sun-drunk mangoes crowd
    and suffocate rational leaves.

In a further poem, “Anything but Milk”, she writes about motherhood and follows the mother’s life with an energetic toddler.  This becomes a place of discovery, a source of knowledge: “The human skull has become something else. paul / kelly’s, for instance – how did his mother squeeze that out?”  In “The Sound of One Hand Whipping” the games that people play follow the rules of denial.  Certainly bizarre, it would also be slightly absurd if it weren’t so truthfully disturbing: “This is sickness / and it lives too close”.   “What Exactly?” has hidden within it the true rhythms of motherhood and the gradual decline of one’s innocence and femininity.    Music also plays a part in these poems.  “Murder You Can Move To” and “Barefooted Tip-Toe Dance” carefully handle the rhythms reflected in their titles.

Although modest, Thibodeaux never sells herself short.  There is no doubt about the strength of her voice, its liveliness and “no-holds-barred” approach.  She has a sure touch with the rackety world, a spare precision and a lyrical elegance; proof, if needed, that words can make “The whiskers of this audience, / nonetheless, twitch”.