The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Proper Name by Bernadette MayerAlystyre Julian
Bernadette Mayer. Proper Name. New Directions, 1996. 144 pp. Paper: $13.95.
Bernadette Mayer is one of the truly unabashed individually voiced bards of our time. This culmination of Mayer’s particular flow of language, initiated in her early work decades ago, remains outrageously pure and phrased with pleasure. Proper Name is her latest collection, made up of poetry and prose funneling into narrative composites. Each piece is its own variation of content meets form. Mock-forms include “My Excellent Novel,” “Noun Pile-Up of Travel on M15 Bus,” and “Essay: How Carefully Do We Tend?” A lucidly fervent language expedites her marked terrain, that of a shifting consciousness. Mayer triggers/tracks essenses of enamored thought/vision with inimitable spirit, breadth, and desire.
Mayer’s process is as present as the imprint of her perceptive, spontaneous modes of poetic traveling. She is both seamstress and sultan, with a magnanimous facility for telling and a radical stretch of lyrical language. Her writing puts personal iconography into passionate and ironic relationships with memory and the continuous present. Mayer’s voice is demonstrative, animated, witty, and questioning. Her considerations are philosophic and deeply psychic. One senses that she must interplay her own limits of perception, that it is an impulse toward investigating the flux of language and the experience of emotion.
Chatacteristic is Mayer’s interweaving of a fictive community with autobiographical and literary references. Readers may know that “Marie” is Mayer’s real daughter, but when did it ever matter what was truth and what fiction? In an homage to Stein, “You Don’t Aggressively Soothe the Butter,” Mayer channels her forebear into a collaborative grammatical treatise. She gives the end-all on Hester Pryne in “Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
Mayer’s exhortations are delightfully bawdy and rampageous, not unlike Angela Carter’s. She stages her lines, often outright, but never overlooks the hilarity or the poetics of the page. Her “fruitful full fast feast” emits glee. Any lament in her work is expression of the lived, reflected moment. Mayer is palpably provoking, a generous host. She is alchemist to a universe where wisdom gleams and pretense is stripped. Her explorations into a territory of open contexts is magnificent. [Alystyre Julian]