Kim Fahner : The Bad Wife, by Micheline Maylor

The Bad Wife, Micheline Maylor
University of Alberta Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

Read Micheline Maylor’s newest collection of poems, The Bad Wife, and you will feel as if you’re overhearing something private and intimate. The confessional tone of the speaker is honest and fresh. Maylor opens with the powerful poem, “How to Become a Bad Wife.” The suggestion is to start “with the archetype of innocence,” but then to “Turn dark after the vows. Wait until after the first born and the second born./Secure your sweetness in their DNA.” After the marriage begins to fall apart slowly, there is “the rock-slide of your own heart” and the speaker recognizes that she has become “an unreliable narrator.” In “The Crow Gives a Body,” the reader realizes that a marriage can be “gone, speckled shrapnel in clover” and become a “set of telling ruins.” After the affair, “Divorce Sudoku” speaks to the unexpected fall out after the end of a marriage. There are “columns of expenses,” “new shoes for daughter,” and “gym credits for son.” Soon enough, there is a bird in the house, friends asking questions, and “the bad wife” is left trying to figure out how she should begin again.

Throughout the collection, the poet writes about what it means to live a more vivid life, to live in the moment. In a marriage that has become stale, with partners no longer communicating, one or the other might feel compelled to dabble in infidelity, or to leave, or both. In “Your Motto,” the story of how the speaker is hit on by a man other than her husband. She says: “I wanted you to love me so hard,/that he didn’t have space to demand I go home with him./I wanted you to love me, but you were too busy laughing.” In “(N)ever Thought,” there is tell of another party and the speaker says: “Over there in the corner, you eye the trespasser./He drives right into your marriage and you watch.” There is a sense that this husband is oblivious to the rather wretched state of his marriage, perhaps having taken it for granted for too long. Everything wears down and, sometimes, things are irretrievably broken. If spouses can’t even talk with one another, or hear one another, or laugh, or make compromises, it seems almost impossible that a marriage could—or should—survive.

There must be both sadness and relief in knowing that it is best for a person to leave a relationship that no longer feeds them spiritually, mentally, emotionally, or sexually. The chaos leading up to it, the demise of a marriage, must be wrought with confusion. Then, to emerge as more of oneself, as a woman, must be like having walked through fire, and then to be reimagined in some way, shape, or form. In “Prologue: On Our First/Last Toast,” Maylor writes three astute lines: “Here’s to you, to me,/If ever we should disagree,/Fuck you, and here’s to me.” Overall, The Bad Wife speaks to the importance of how we take time to come into ourselves, and how we navigate the destruction of relationships that once fed and nourished us, but now no longer do so. How does a person manage to stuff down their true self to suit a societal convention that may no longer suit most people? How are they brave enough to think of themselves, and of how short life actually is? There will always be collateral damage, which is what The Bad Wife seems to say.

A beautiful long poetic sequence, “Omen: Calla Lilies,” fills up the last part of the book. The poems in this section spread out across the pages, taking up space and stretching out in almost yogic fashion. The speaker says, “I tried to be a good/communicator./I said, I need you to love me.” Their spouse’s lack of response is answer enough: “I asked you to love me and you said,/no./You didn’t say no with one syllable.” Instead, they “took many more,/pantomimed when necessary,/acted it out, one complacency at a time.” The speaker gives voice to what’s been unspoken for too long: “loving me was what you should have wanted./What you should have been capable of.” Maylor writes, tellingly, “Call it the snow globe year./The year I cracked the big glass ball with all the people inside, my people” and they “fell in with all the shards.” One of the most brilliant lines of the collection is: “Say goodbye to the electric panel of my heart.” At the end of a marriage, the speaker says “it’s the difference between a good life and an exceptional one,” while their spouse says “I’m guilty of nothing,/except complacency.” The reader is left pondering dehydration and longing for sustenance.

The voice of the speaker in Micheline Maylor’s latest book of poems is clear, true, and honest. So much feels illusionary in the world these days, and honesty is fleeting. When you see a spoken truth or honesty so skilfully embodied in poetry—in poems that are naked in their revelations about how the mechanics of a marriage rust and decay—it feels refreshing and vibrant. The poet’s quick wit, too, adds another bevel to the prism that forms The Bad Wife. This is a collection that draws the reader in, perhaps because of its confessional tone. This isn’t a series of poems that makes excuses for infidelity, but instead is a gathering of poems that freely speaks to how things fall apart if one person in a marriage does not feel valued, and if communication is hampered. It is, to be sure, a book that you won’t be able to put down.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com