Liberian Literary Magazine
Book Review
Antidote for Night Marsha
de la O Poems
Book Review by:
Elizabeth O'Brien
Antidote for Night
Poetry by
Marsha de la O
BOA Editions LTD
September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1-938160-81-3
Paperback 104pp $16.00
Marsha de la O situates
her
poem
“Crossing
Over” in time and space
as follows:
This time of year, gold
lingers
in thin
autumn air
ether-light shining
crossing over [.]
Promoting Liberian literature, Arts and Culture
Evoking the Day of the
Dead, when the veil
between the living and
the dead is especially
thin, the poem nicely
encapsulates the book’s
mood. Antidote for Night
is filled with omens,
dreams competing with
nightmares, and fears
and questions of fate as
much as it is a book
about the family unit and
hardship and joy and
struggle.
The book is ostensibly
set in modern day
California, but aside from
occasional
place
markers
and
setting
details—orange groves
and earthquakes both
appear in the book—the
poems tend to feel more
unrooted and spectral
than anything else. de la
O may be a California
poet by virtue of her
location, but the terrain
of her poems is far more
spatially fluid than this
categorization suggests.
The poems are rooted in
lived experience, but the
perspective nonetheless
feels otherworldly.
Antidote for Night is the
winner of BOA Editions
2015 Isabella Gardner
Award for Poetry, and it is
a rich collection, with
poems of varied forms
but a consistent tone
holding
the
book
together. The diction is
surprising and precise, as
10
when de la O writes in
“His Burning Cloud” that
“A bee drills its zero / into
wood, and oleanders,”
the use of the word zero is
immediately strange and
spot on. Later in the same
poem, the speaker’s
mother urges her children
to pray, “in a ropy / Voice
to a full quiver of kids[.]”
de
la
O’s
preoccupations
are
universal and haunting:
she revisits childhood
fears and her mother’s
superstitions,
and
continues to be touched
by them into adulthood.
So, too, the speaker’s
minor betrayal—with her
siblings
and
father—
when they go tubing
against their mother’s
wishes—seems almost to
be paid for by the
mother’s
subsequent
illness and death, later in
the book, and in the
speaker’s life. Guilt, worry,
and the fear that what is
precious will be stolen
away function here as
necessary
counterweights
to
satisfaction and joy.
Are our lives fated? Or is
what happens to us
random? The question
appears over and over
again
in
different
contexts, until finally, the
speaker concludes, “it’s
ravishing, that sense that
fate is upon us.”
.