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Daphne Gottlieb’s Why things burn, was published back in 2001 but I only managed to get my hands on it recently. With poems like incubus/succubus which incorporate borrowed lines like “I used to live in an old junked car in the woods, hitchhiked everywhere, got raped, oh maybe 10 or 12 times” this is poetry that makes a reader take notice. And well a reader should. Themes of rape, violence and misogyny, and masochism reoccur frequently in this collection. Not to shock, but in a candid, and bleak reminder of a society and its hypocritical machinations.

In attacquette (tips for girls), we find a bleak 1950’s enumeration of advice to women (The charming homemaker knows how to make conversation), mercilessly shadowed by a screaming satirical counterpoint: on how to avoid being raped and killed. In fetish, we find a poem addressed to Barbie, (“we wanted your life”) rapidly attend to darker subject matter “we wanted your life but you shared ours” For Barbie, whose legs were ripped “off like diners at a cracked crab feast”… “never bruised. You never cried out.”

And when morning came,
there was almost always
a new dress for you waiting at
breakfast.

A lesser poet would sick with Barbiesque metaphors. But Gottlieb has more resources than that. Nature and fate is an interesting three stranded narrative, composed of texts of accounts by battered women, and research on learned helplessness through administering electo-shock to dogs. In two of the strands, the parallels between the behavioural phenomenon manifested by the dogs, and the descriptions of suffering by the women, are striking and disturbing. As such the thesis that the we are witnessing two sides of the same coin is very convincing. But the third strand recognises another dimension: a belief held by some of the women, that fate, and its executor God, has determined how things would be. Though it can be read in more than one way, Gottlieb seems to be issuing a critique of faith and the role it plays in such women’s lives, rather than for example, suggesting religion helps them endure. Later in population 1200 the idea that a victim has “upset God” is shown to be a specious ideal of small town America. But it is not just small town Americana which we find discussed within this collection. It is all of America. In shotgun wedding we find powerful satirical and pointed verse:

The state sanctions
their union
gives them license,
pronounces them
man and gun, how the West
was one, that old
American dream.

In Sink or Swim, we see the interior world of a narrator, about who doctors would probably diagnose with post natal psychosis. But by revealing the patient’s mindset, Gottlieb forces the reader to understand that it is a human reaction to a traumatic event - and not some strange rewiring of the mind - that gives rise to such behaviour. Even in the seemingly lighter poems, the observations continue. Convertible, is a fine critique of make up (we just want to halt traffic, mouths red as stop lights…), with some interesting sociological observations on how the names of lipstick brands have changed over the years from names like Loves’ blush, to names like rebel, war and bruise.

In fact Gottlieb, has assembled a cogent critique of a society, mired in guns, violence and misogyny. The examples cited in this critique are raw and naked. And so the bruises inflicted, on the hypocrisy of a society which constantly refuses to re-examine the structure maintaining these values and behaviours, are savage. This attack, for it is an attack of its own, shows us a poet fighting fire with fire. As such it sets conscience alight. It burns, and it tells you why.

Available from Soft skull press.