FINKELSTEIN, Caroline

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City. Education: Goddard College, Plainfield Vermont, 1976–78, M.F.A. 1978. Family: Three sons. Awards: Vermont Council on the Arts award, 1979; Massachusetts Artist fellowship, 1981; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1984; Duncan Lawrie prize, Arvon Foundation, 1989; Anna Davidson Rosenberg award, Judah L. Magnus Museum, 1992; Amy Lowell Travelling fellowship, 1997–98. Address: Box 402, Westport Point, Massachusetts 02791, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Windows Facing East. Port Townsend, Washington, Dragon Gate, 1986.

Germany. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995.

Justice. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999.

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Critical Studies: In Virginia Quarterly Review, 69(3), summer 1993; by Stephen C. Behrendt, in Prairie Schooner (Lincoln, Nebraska), 70(3), fall 1996.

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"Everything is something else," writes Caroline Finkelstein in the opening of the poem "Relatives," and she continues, "grit once bone and flesh, dog and master / a lover and his bride / wishing that the sky be night forever." Throughout her collections the poet amplifies this concept, that everything is something else, and the connections between the "thing" and the "something else" are for the reader to create. In a deft but often mystifying sort of "word-slinging" (to use beat poet Gregory Corso's term from the late 1950s), Finkelstein in some earlier poems offsets contrasting images and ideas, juxtaposing them in a way that seems not to fit, and, then, in the reading they suddenly come together to create a flowing new image or idea. Consider the following lines from "With Fox Eyes":

   the weather was lousy in New York
   in Berlin Nanking Rio someone swallowed whiskey
   while the convoys idled leaking oil
   then the shaky trains bled and there was crazy surgery
   but the lindens anyway bloomed the chromy marigolds

Poems like this one gain their strength from the significance of what is not said as well as from what is. The poems leave a lot out, hence lending themselves to deconstructionist criticism. It is as if the poet were creating the skeleton, asking the reader to supply the flesh, as if she had perhaps written many intervening lines between two lines and then erased them.

In other poems the continuity is strict and organized, as in this segment from "The Dwelling":

   And in the bedroom, so many times,
   I was sure you didn't hear me because I couldn't read your looks
 
 
   But listen, I was like that then, even the dog resting on the rug
   Worried me; maybe he was a sick dog.

Here and elsewhere Finkelstein reflects upon the inevitability of misunderstandings, of missed connections, of the oversensitivities that can muddle a marriage.

In much of Finkelstein's 1995 collection Germany she sees with a childlike innocence, reflected in the flow of her words and in the vivid pictures she paints, the scars of the Holocaust on Jews everywhere. In "1950" she writes of a nine-year-old in Riverside Park in New York City:

   I skate after school; it is four o'clock on any afternoon
   Of traffic and slight shadows and the tailor on the corner;
   These are small, sober hours where I move and I stand still.
   I have no name for the passion in the air like smoke.
   And the defenselessness (don't stare)
   Of the human traffic and the repetition of pledges of allegiance
   Left and right and the spies, spies everywhere …

Finkelstein's descriptions of sounds are uncanny, for example, ":… women / braiding bread: the hushed thud of that dough—" ("You Must Not Mix Milk with Meat"), and the visuals she creates are like still life paintings: "and the clams on the plate are cooling / and the fork beside the plate is absolutely clean / and pronged like a silver trident" ("To Fairy Godmother").

Some poets have difficulties with endings, but not Finkelstein. The final lines of her poems are strong and emphatic, and they often move the poem in a new direction. The poem "The Soul in the Bowl" ends this way:

   when I look into my child's
   face, I see
   fine lines like writing
   and like fracture.

Finkelstein's 1999 book Justice contains her strongest work. The language she employs is lyrical, forceful, tormented, and ultimately optimistic. Much of it is born of the distress of a bitter divorce, the agonized disappointment that arises from the failure of a once flourishing relationship. In the central section of the volume is a series of poems (curiously interspersed with poems seemingly unrelated to, or perhaps footnotes to, the series itself) with legal-sounding titles such as "Brief," "The Collusion," "An Opinion," and "Argument." They are poems that explore animatedly the tragic movement of love to disillusionment and outright dislike. In "Confused Figures" we read, "I colluded once with you / to become the absolute same body," and in "Her Testimony,"

   for instance, I don't remember the exact
   moment of betrayal when I learned
   faithlessness was the silence
   he called blessed

   solitude and I called silence
   like when children are awake in rooms
   all night alone.

In "Statement" the speaker says, "I flung you hard / from my outstretched hand." It sounds as if, from Finkelstein's perspective, justice was ultimately served.

Then, in an expression of the spirit of ambivalence that follows broken relationships, the poet glances back with a bit of nostalgia at the failed marriage in a poem called "I Have His Look": "never mind what happened later; / I have his look inside my body, his eyes / / like agate blue, shattered vases his poor hands."

Finkelstein's poetry is richly present, alive in the moment, and fresh in its use of language, even though, especially in the earlier works, it is occasionally terse. She is a talented writer whose work appears to grow and develop into greater coherence with each volume.

—Judy Clarence