Young Tambling
Kate Greenstreet
ISBN 9781934103357
Poetry, pbk, 176 pp.
Ahsahta Press 2013
$20
Proper Dark
As in all of Greenstreet’s books (I have not yet read the chapbooks), one has to consult the end notes to make sense of the text. Even the chapter titles are a randomized list: Narrative, Act, Memory, Forbidden, Sung, We. Stray parts of speech: Noun, Noun, Noun, Adjective, Verb, Pronoun. Reading becomes a scholarly pursuit, a scavenger hunt. The notes are often compelling, but following them is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, sliding the pieces from one side of the frame to the other. One of the most interesting clues here, especially in relation to places where the nonlinear narrative resists explanation, or refuses interpretation, is literary critic Frank Kermode’s statement: “the narrative inhabits its proper dark, in which the interpreter traces its lineaments as best [s/he] can.” The story is elusive and the reader is clearly expected to be the fully engaged interpreter.
Greenstreet’s first book, case sensitive (2006), used a mystery story format—a quest with only the barest traces of narrative. Its title is a play on both Internet text-matching operations and the classical murder mystery. The question is what is missing—what has been “purloined,” to use an old-fashioned word—and there is no “case solved” moment. Young Tambling is also a mystery, possibly an “experimental memoir,” as Scott Wilkerson’s blurb suggests. In this case, the mystery is linked with the “Tambling” tale, a 16th century Scottish legend that has lived on in ballad, an episodic form characterized by “alternate leaping and lingering,” as music critic Francis Barton Gummere describes it, as well as “dialogue and action”(3). Why the “Tambling” legend? Early on, there are suggestions that the speaker(s) of the poem may have shared some of the young woman’s experiences.
“Tambling” is the story of a “headstrong girl” (3)—called Margaret or Janet/Jennet in various versions, but unnamed by Greenstreet. The young woman’s eventual rescue of Tambling, her lover/seducer by whom she is pregnant—after she has considered trying to abort because she does not know who or even where he is—and the trials she undergoes to free him from the Queen of the Fairies who captured him, make her a “hero,” according to the speaker (though the text is polyvocalic enough to complicate the single speaker’s voice). The initial reference to the ballad describes the encounter as at least partly consensual: “He pulls you down. Is it wrong? When it’s done … you turn to ‘ask your true love’s name.’ But he’s gone” (3). The young woman is defined as a hero because she undertakes and succeeds in a quest: she saves Tambling’s life and he then owes her his life. The speaker says she has chosen this version because it overrides the ubiquitous 16th century warning in ballad after ballad, as outlined by feminist scholar Polly Stewart, that “a man will take from a woman what he can and will punish her for being his victim” (4). There are foreshadowings, e.g., the speaker’s wish to be seductive — “I wanted to have a figure” (69), and frequent mention of a young man who later became a “soldier.” But a different version of the ballad, cited much later in the text, describes the encounter as closer to rape than seduction: “he askt no leave” (92). That line is followed by the speaker’s own statement: “I knew he was my enemy … That was the summer I turned 19” (92). The enemy’s identity remains elusive. It is unclear whether he and the beloved are one and the same.
Other mysteries include: who has been shot? Who are the 2 brothers (a sort of Cain and Abel story)? Are they twins? The notes say the name Tambling is a version of Thomas, which means twin. What crimes have taken place? Most of all, there is an underlying sense of a woman trying to resolve her part in an early seduction and/or rape and possibly a shooting, related or unrelated to it? Her feeling that she was guilty. Her inability to say whether it was consensual. The answers flicker, unresolved. The fragmentary text forcefully conveys confusion, fear, and sadness. And what of the idea that the young woman is a hero? Our curiosity is heightened by the speaker’s uncertainty; mulling over the past, she sees in tiny, rushed glimpses like someone on a merry-go-round, her memory sampling the ballad so that the actual events remain hidden by the dark, the “proper dark.”
Gail Hanlon’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Stand, Iowa Review, nthposition, Verse Daily, and Best American Poetry, among other journals and anthologies, and a chapbook, Sift (Finishing Line). She was a recent finalist for the Iowa Review Award (2013) and lives in Portsmouth, NH.