Reviewed by John Ruff
Raku by Patricia Wixon, edited by Vincent Wixon and Amy Miller
Cyclone Press, 2024, 73 pages, $15
ISBN 9798340757456
Available on Amazon

Raku, Patricia Wixon’s fifth book of poems, was unfinished when she died at her home in Ashland, Oregon, this past July after a prolonged illness. Just days prior to her death, she asked her husband Vincent Wixon, also an accomplished poet and editor, “to finish putting [it] together.” In his foreword for Raku, Wixon describes the state of the project when he took it on, which I imagine as a last great labor of love, after their having worked as collaborators on a variety of projects for forty-plus years. Together they were awarded the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award in 2014 for all they contributed to literary life in Oregon.
Some of the poems in Raku are very personal. Personal and painful, physically and emotionally. Some deal with rape, others with child abuse. A cluster of poems deals with a failed marriage, and, for a book of this length, the death count is high in the family history it records. In his foreword to the book, Vince Wixon urges readers not to take the poems as strictly autobiographical.
However, the woman we meet in the first poem, “Hello, Mother,” which reads as the title and as the first line, does sound like Patty and looks like Patty looking at herself in the mirror:
Hello, Mother
With the pandemic here, we stay at home.
I look in the mirror and there you are,
my age today. Our hair a mix
of gray and brown, not streaked ...
It goes on in direct address––the first short quiet epiphany––to introduce an extended reflection in many parts on a long, beautiful, exemplary, but often hard life. Not just hard but kiln-fired: that is how I explain to myself the meaning of Patty’s title for this, her boldest, bravest collection, and also explains the beauty of her poems. The surface beauty of raku ceramics is the result of a firing process where the clay objects are subjected to extreme heat followed by sudden exposure to the cold. Read “Cologne,” the first poem of the second section of the book, entitled “A Former Life.” “Cologne” is a coming-of-age story in three stanzas that will take your breath away—as would a sudden blow to the solar plexus. And that is exactly how the last line arrives. It is the best example I can think of as a kiln-fired poem in the collection. Here’s the last stanza to demonstrate the effect I am referring to:
In late May, I came home from sixth-grade baseball practice,
ponytail tangled, dirt smeared on my face from wiping off sweat
with my arm. Father said, You aren’t taking care of how you look.
In case you aren’t a pretty woman, you must develop a personality.
I asked, What’s a personality? He seemed without words,
shook his head and said Oh you know what it is!
That July he died and I had to figure it out for myself.
In “Swing High, Swing Low,” a five-year-old writes her first poem and sends it to her Great Aunt Bertha who sends her back a quarter. In the very next poem, “The Wilson School Janitor,” a little girl, perhaps the same little girl, is sexually molested. The sixth poem of the collection, “During the Hearings: Grandma Answers,” reads like a transcript to remind us, I believe, of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The poem recreates the speaker’s interrogation by the senators, in which she tells her mostly old, white, male interrogators the whole story of her rape, which ends with her explaining to the only female senator why she ended up telling her mother. That’s Patty in her late eighties, joining the Me-Too Movement, naming names and not just once. A younger version of this speaker appears as the stay-at-home mother in “A Former Life” who bravely rescues her children from their alcoholic and abusive father by divorcing him, but not before contemplating how she might murder him.
There is so much to say about this book: how brave it is, how wise, how beautifully written, and how carefully arranged. Earlier, I mentioned coming-of-age stories. The coming-of-old-age stories in the first section are brilliant, formally adventurous, and not for the faint of heart. However, there is humor and irony and attention to detail that reminds us how precious life is, how beautiful even in in its more ordinary and quotidian aspects, all the more so as one experiences one’s own life coming to its end. Patty never blinks, and never indulges in self-pity or lament. As her body fails, her perceptions sharpen, her imagination broadens, her appreciation of the natural world deepens, nowhere more poignantly for me than in “Early Spring.”
I do not know how much of a hand Vince and Amy Miller had in arranging these poems, but clearly, they did nothing to mar it, and likely made great decisions in sequencing it. No page spread stunned me more than “Numbers of the Day” on the left and “The Bag Lady Takes a Shower at the College Gym” on the right. It suggests to me that through the crucible of her suffering from an early age, Patty Wixon became capable of seeing that homeless woman, of responding to her vulnerability with incredible grace and empathy, because she too had been vulnerable, suffered loss, and survived. In these poems an appreciation for the sweetness of life not only endures but is seasoned and made wise by its fragility and bitterness.
Raku is a portrait of the artist such as I have never read before. I am grateful my friend Vince Wixon asked me to review it. It is the crowning achievement of a great life by a great woman.
Addendum
A memorial for Patty Wixon on October 25th in Ashland doubled as the book launch for Raku. Poet Amy Miller, Patty’s friend and editor at Cyclone Press who helped Vince finish the book, served as emcee. Oregon poets laureate Kim Stafford and Lawson Inada were there with other friends and family members to read from Patty’s works as a way of celebrating her life. After the reading, friends and family members honored Patty’s baking skills and sweetness by serving dessert: cookies, bars and cupcakes prepared from Patty’s own recipes which she published in her wonderful third book of poems, Dear Spoon.
Leah Pepper, one of Patty’s granddaughters, a financial planner now living in Southern California, read a poem from Raku entitled “Noodle Lesson for a Seven-Year-Old.” I sense that Leah was in fact that seven-year-old to whom the grandmother in the poem gives an apron in the very first stanza “with three colors of peppers, like your mother wore”—wonderful, gentle word play that grown up Leah and her mother likely enjoyed, as three actual Peppers are mentioned in the poem and more Peppers than that were in the audience. It is a sweet poem, about a woman performing three roles which Patty relished and excelled in: grandmother, teacher, and cook. The grandmother’s directions are so clear, and though the girl never speaks, we can begin to conjure her from what her grandmother says to engage her in conversation as she kneads the dough. “Do you still roller skate every day? Your mama says you fix your own braids.” In the first poem of Raku Patty looks into a mirror and sees her mother’s face as an old woman. Here an image of her younger self appears in the person of her granddaughter.
Reviewer Bio:
John Ruff serves as a senior research professor of English at Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana. In a former life as a high school teacher, he taught sophomore English and radio broadcasting at Crater High School in Central Point, Oregon, and worked as a consultant for the Oregon Writing Project directed by Patty Wixon, who with her husband Vince Wixon taught him most of what he knows about teaching writing. He is himself a poet and a reviewer. His teaching interests as an Americanist focus on American ethnic literatures especially Asian American literature and the literature and art of the Japanese incarceration during World War II.