Transitional Objects
by Claire Millikin
Unicorn Press. Softcover, $18. 130 pages.
Your family album almost certainly contains an early shot of you with a doll, blanket, or stuffed dinosaur— a sacred, fiercely protected possession providing security and easing the passage from one phase of childhood to another. Psychologists have labeled these advanced pacifiers as transitional objects. With luck, as we progress, one source of comfort yields to another. In my back pages, I smile in a rocking chair as I squeeze my teddy bear. Soon the bear disappears from the chair, which is wrecked when I ride off the porch, bleeding knees rewarded by a ball under a bush.
But what if your blanket or my ball is cursed? This fate dominates Claire Millikin’s ingenious, erudite Transitional Objects—a startling revelation of a fallen world—rife with ominous oddments such as a contaminated lunch box, scarred dolls, demeaning antiques, and a hexed signet ring. The marred assortment reflects the haunted psyche of the narrator, a latter-day Jane Eyre afflicted by dissociation and struggling for survival in a loveless landscape of shattered schlock. These debased artifacts serve as a metonymy for American culture in general as well as the child’s malevolent inheritance.
Her family is sick, its homes broken. In an epigraph, the poet invokes Andre Breton’s declaration, “Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.” Hence, time after time, the narrator finds herself in doomed houses emblematic of amputated innocence—places lacking doors, windows, or roofs, devoid of domestic comfort. Bottom-drawer motel rooms are superior to these child-traps because Milliken’s motels are located on the outskirts of town, away from the blighted heart of the family. The daughter has begun to imitate her comatose mother, explaining The way my mother couldn’t save herself / I inherit. Far worse, she is sexually abused by her father, with what seems like the complicity of relatives. A key transitional object is a bottle of medicine meant to anesthetize the pre-teen. As a young woman, she compares herself to Abishag, the Biblical beauty assigned to thaw decrepit King David, not understanding / how giving warmth to the dying harms you. Her response to damage is to damage herself further through anorexia and friction with the law.
Inured to exploitation, she wanders into destructive relationships. In “Shoe-Black,” she gives herself to a fraternity boy, whose organization is hosting a black-face party. Afterward, she bears shoe-polish stains where he touched her. She concludes the poem with Shoe-black corrosive and toxic / almost impossible to wash off. The degradation inflicted upon her by family and boyfriends is replicated by a west Georgia landscape plagued by insecticides, hazardous waste, and lead-based paint. No matter where she strays, from overseas to Seattle to the Piedmont to New Haven, she takes contamination for granted. Imminent danger is her handmaiden.
The besieged speaker can be seen as a protagonist, more acted-upon than acting. But Millikin, author of seven books of poetry, rejects the popular narrative arc in favor of an eerie, expressionistic mood conveying the young woman’s alienation. She must tell her brutal truth obliquely in diction shifting from matter-of-fact to obscure. In “The Storyteller,” a prose poem, the speaker admits that Every yarn I spin swerves at angles, becoming a weft of delicate half-truths concealing my mortal wound. The indirect approach turns the reader into a detective puzzling over clues accumulating from playgrounds, diseased fields, and abandoned domiciles.
Publisher Andrew Saulters’ innovative design for Transitional Objects is inspired by Millikin’s aesthetics. With the poet’s approval, he divided the original manuscript into four small books arranged by motif according to forces impinging on the protagonist. “Vanishing Point,” “Fakes,” “Straight Line,” and “Film” all have evocative covers suggesting the narrator’s fixations. The books act like waves of consciousness which eventually merge as they strike the shore of the reader’s mind. Because the parts do not depend on time, either straightforward or fractured, and mood supersedes drama, the separate books can be shuffled and read as you choose. Resonance is the ordering principle, manifested by subtly paired poems and echoes from volume to volume. Alarming images “ding.” A hot dog tasting of lead summons a pathetic sandwich given to the famished daughter in a previous book. The parts qualify as transitional objects connected to the relics in all our attics, lost fields, and libraries as well as the ultimate junked possession—our bones.
Millikin, who teaches art history and American Studies, is a classicist at heart using modernist techniques. She explores terrain with an archeologist’s eye. The narrator equates her personal loss with annihilated civilizations and their extinct languages. She draws intriguing contrasts between antiquity and today in sometimes abstruse language. Words like “piacular” and “subfusc” can pull the reader out of a poem’s spell and into an online dictionary. Although a specialist’s language is appropriate to her protagonist, Millkin gambles that keeping her speaker in character is worth subduing a poem’s impact.
No such risk occurs in the grievous, almost overwhelming “Barbie Doll as a Tutelary Spirit for the Too-Early Dead.” It compares an ancient carving of Melisto, a dead Greek girl holding a doll, to the protagonist’s fate when she receives a Barbie as a prelude to defilement. It hits the reader especially hard because Melisto’s doll is a maternal figure meant to help the child through the afterworld. In contrast, the Barbie doll has no wisdom to offer the beleaguered “you” when her father commands, Get in the car, / now daughter. In a world of withering paradoxes, the child is orphaned by her own family.
How does a soul survive no-exit desolation? From girlhood, the narrator is quick of foot and mind. Her precocity at math and subsequent interest in sets inform the arrangement of these poems. Telling her life, no matter how halting, becomes a saving grace. It’s no accident that Minerva and her representative the owl make appearances in the Georgia pinewoods. If the past cannot be redeemed or escaped, then perhaps knowledge and insight can build a temple to keep the ghosts at bay. A potent antidote to evil spirits is to cast them in poems. Ironically, the possibility of protection arises when the narrator quits hiding.
I’ve never become a woman / only an image of one, the protagonist claims, but as she examines objects including her own mutable self, she comes closer to wholeness. In an existential sense, bereft of nurturing, she has to become her own mother. These poems, like Melisto’s maternal doll, partially guide her through the ruins toward another life. Original in vision and design, deserving wide attention, Transitional Objects defies its title.
