If There is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Gazebo Books 2023.

 Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes poetry from and about the female body.

Her opening collection, First Blood was a gritty exploration of girlhood that challenged cultural expectations of ideal femininity. Her second collection If There is a Butterfly continues to centre female bodily experience, taking pregnancy, birth, and motherhood into her orbit.

D-Napoleon’s poems display a tender attentiveness to detail. This attentiveness reveals itself, literally, in the nine erasure poems created from What To Expect When You Are Expecting. Each poem is formed from the relevant chapter on each of the nine months of a full-term pregnancy: the “green olive” of the third month becomes “the serious / belly” of the fifth month; and the “little arms and legs” of the sixth month become the “trepidation” of the eighth month.

D-Napoleon’s formal poetic ability is not limited to whiting out words on the page. The rest of the collection includes ghazals, centos, haiku, sestinas, language poems, prose poems, pantoum, list poems and various manifestations of free verse. There are long lyric lines that rise to rhapsody:

My heart is set to burst open, even skin feels compassion for the biting gnat,
the ants hefting toast crumbs. Creatures make copies of themselves to love.

Home, nursing baby in arms, look up—! Natalie, what is that spreading?
A warmth for the constellation of spiderlings I cannot harm;
………………………………………………………this is a mother’s love.

……………………………………………………..(from “Ghazal to a Mother’s Love”)

 and there are haiku that capture moments of tender warmth:

With hot breath I blow
Straight arrow to little bug
Wings from book’s pages.
……………………………………….‘Little Bug’

No one, though, could accuse D-Napoloen of reducing motherhood to sentimental Hallmark moments. These poems chart the complexity of motherhood: articulating its frustrations and challenges as much as its rewards and joys:

I feel as vulnerable as a tea cup with a broken handle; as
fresh milk left on the countertop in 40-degree heat; as a tea
bag, steeped and squeezed of its last drop of liquid; as a
piece of ice that has fallen under the refrigerator’s warm hum;
………………. – from ‘On Dropping My Favourite Tea Cup After Five Hours Broken Sleep’

As a mother who has struggled to maintain a writing practice through her childbearing years, I really appreciated D-Napoleon’s poems on this topic:

I try to write
………why is there no handbook for mother—?
………………………………………………for mothers who write?

I want to write
…………………—who has time to read? My breasts leak milk in blotches
……………………………………………………..like spilt ink—the earth drinks my
……………………………………………………..Rorschach-test message—
……………………………………………………..………………………………………longing

 – from ‘Image of a Mother Holding Her Baby, Gazing into the Child’s Eyes while a Notebook and Pen Rest on a Coffee Table Nearly, 2011’

Esther Ottoway comes to mind: “As I approach mid-life, and continue to write about the unique experiences of women, I am ever more aware that my entire life has been absolutely nothing like the lives of men” (“A Series of Mirrors”). D-Napoleon knows this too and is part of a larger contemporary movement of women who write to chart this relatively undocumented terrain.

The first two sections of this book establish motherhood as its core theme. Late in the second section, the poems begin to move backwards in time, exploring endometriosis and infertility.The reader begins to understand that D-Napoleon’s poems about motherhood are set in a context of loss and a long waiting. “The Punctuation of Infertility” is succinctly poignant:

;………. [the fifteenth year]
/… / …[how I learned to live with it]

How do we learn to live with it? Life, with all its waiting, with all its pain and wonder? The poems in the latter two sections of If There is a Butterfly are more philosophical:

My God! What a terrible and beautiful place this world is!
And then the night closes in and I bleed for 25 days.
25 days—who can bleed for that long and survive?
A woman. A woman can; and the night
is terrible and dark as wine, it is viscous blood
………………………………………….– from “The Night is More”

These poems step back and ask big questions: What is it to be a woman? To be the doorway for life and also the harbinger of death? To continue to wrestle with unjust social expectations? “Time is Not an Arrow” is the most ambitious of these poems: it invokes the world of dreams and makes ontological assertions that blur the boundaries between the living and the dead. Its primary assertion, that “time is not an arrow” I take to be a repudiation of time’s linearity, though I question the strength of this assertion. Surely motherhood brings irreversible change to the female body? Surely time can be both an arrow and a circle?

The political awareness of these poems also deserves acknowledgment. D-Napoleon’s years of motherhood span just over a decade spent living in America and her Democrat leanings are evident in poems which explore, among other things, Trump’s excesses. The implicit comparison between Trump and D-Napoleon’s toddler in the book’s titular poem is nuanced as well as being sharp in its observations. “The Morning After” and “Heartbeat” are written from a stance of pro-choice feminism with an informed understanding of the role of politics in this controversial area:

You never had to deal with a heartbeat law that says the heartbeat of
a cluster of cells in your womb is more important than your own
living, breathing, thinking, feeling human heartbeat
……………………………………………………………. – from “Heartbeat”

As someone who writes from a more pro-life feminist stance, I may disagree with D-Napoleon’s emphases, but I respect her commitment to writing about this sensitive issue and value her perspective as well as the stories she tells about the lives of women.

Threaded through this collection are a number of very fine ekphrastic poems that not only give us photographs, sculptures and paintings through the poet’s eyes, but also initiate important conversations. “The Labyrinth and the Thread” addresses the complex love-hate relationship between parents and children, “The Harvest” questions the painterly idealisation of peasant labour, and “Statues” draws attention to omissions:

When I look at the statues of soldiers, cold brass rifles in
hand, chins pointed up to the sky I wonder about those left
behind, the ones outside the frame. Mothers raising children
alone, feeding scraps to the chickens, sewing school clothes
back together with black thread

This is what D-Napoleon does so well: giving us the unseen stories of women, sewing them back together with the black thread of her words.

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References

Damjanovich-Napoleon, N. 2019. First blood. Ginninderra Press.

Ottoway, E. 2023. A series of mirrors. Rochford Street Review, 38.1, n.p. https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2023/11/20/a-series-of-mirrors-esther-ottaway-reviews-who-comes-calling-by-miriam-wei-wei-lo/

 – Miriam Wei Wei Lo

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Miriam Wei Wei Lo writes because someone has to do impossible things. Her latest poetry collection is Who Comes Calling? (WA Poets Publishing), available in print or on audio at Bandcamp. www.miriamweiweilo.com

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If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is available from https://gazebobooks.com.au/product/if-there-is-a-butterfly-that-drinks-tears/

 

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