Poetry

Dorothea Lasky, The Shining (Wave Books), 88 pp. Paperback, $18.00.

In “A Fierce and Violent Opening,” the first poem in Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Dorothea Lasky’s last poetry collection, blood gushes out of the elevators and children are murdered with an ax. “The whole hotel is overtaken with blood.” We’re clearly in the world of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of The Shining, set in the fictional Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Lasky’s poem gestures to “that woman / Who seems so much older, and isn’t.”

In a recent interview with Kate Wolf, Lasky explains that she has been obsessed with that woman in Room 237 and especially with her evil laughter. “I like to think of this book as a love poem to that character,” she remarks of her new poetry collection, The Shining.

The thirty-five new short poems here all bear some relation to The Shining, either the novel or, more typically, the film. Some—“Red Rum,” “Snow Maze,” “The Ax”—are more obvious than others. The haunting of Room 237 plays an outsize role in the book’s mythology. And Lasky is not alone in her obsession. While Kubrick’s film received poor reviews upon its release, it gradually became a classic with its own obsessive fan base. A 2012 documentary, Room 237, explores popular conspiracy theories now attached to the movie, such as the notion that Kubrick placed clues in his film to acknowledge his own role in faking the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In “Rugs,” Lasky nods to the belief that an iconic hotel carpet pattern in The Shining offers such a hint: “They say that the rocketships live there.”

Lasky’s lyric subjectivity (she has called it her “metaphysical I”) floats from character to character (“an action figure that had no set box”), taking on different perspectives within and without the haunted hotel. Sometimes she is the woman in Room 237: “Rising from the bath / Body decaying within the stanzas.” At other times she is Wendy Torrance: “My husband is trying to kill me.”

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eileen G’Sell refers to Lasky’s book as a “feminist project of dismantling patriarchal power.” Certainly the attention these poems pay to murderous men with axes comes across as a critique. But what is most appealing in this book is what Lasky calls its “strange humor.” She often finds something to smirk at: “They saved every sex scene / For a weird green bathroom.” We are given to understand that living in the haunted hotel can be terrifying but also, simultaneously, quite pleasant. “It was still beautiful,” she writes in “The Ax.” “Every last moment / Of this completely / Inappropriate love.” One might actually want to spend eternity here.

In “Blue Hallway,” one of the collection’s stronger poems, we are told that everything is all right: “I was just waiting for this moment / All my life I was just waiting / To be in this hell here.” The stanza echoes earlier creepy lines about a person or force lying in wait (“There was always something there / That was waiting”; “I’m still waiting”). But it also gestures to a 1985 poem by Alice Notley:

All my life,
Since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
To be in
This hell here
With you

Lasky has written appreciatively of Notley’s poem, pointing out its dual effects as spoken-aloud declaration at a poetry reading and as a silent address to the reader on the intimate space of the page (the hell of other people, the hell of the imagination). And the verses in The Shining occasionally suggest the notion that the Overlook Hotel is a metaphor for poetry itself—as in the Marianne Moore-inflected poem “Poetry Hates You Too,” which admonishes a conservative male critic who only values “poems that denounce emotion or real feeling.”

It is somewhat odd that Lasky barely mentions telepathy, the quality of “shining” that Danny possesses in the book and film. Poetry, one might argue, offers its own form of telepathy, a silent communication between poet and reader or between those in the know, those who might pick up the hints and allusions often enriching various verses. The floating “I” of these poems inhabits different personae but keeps them at a distance, rarely suggesting anything like silent conversation.

While not Kubrickian, these poems nevertheless create a Room 237 of their own.

Lasky is clearly drawn more to elements of isolation and enclosure, of being trapped and haunted (or hunted). In this regard, it’s not hard to imagine The Shining as a COVID book, a reflection of being stuck inside the house with your family for a year—equal parts domestic and claustrophobic, maddening and supportive. And if the pandemic gave people more time away from work, more time to write, it also gave people more anxieties about getting writing done—as with the terrifying writer’s block that destroys Jack Torrance.

Fans of Kubrick’s film should perhaps be warned; Lasky’s book is not a rehearsing of the plot or a set of descriptions of individual scenes. It is a collection of short poems inspired by characters and images. The verses are stripped down and suggestive rather than analytical. With small stanzas and short lines, Lasky’s poetry is also spare on punctuation—a total of thirty-one commas throughout the entire book (ten of them appearing in the collection’s final poem, “Going through a Mountain”). While not Kubrickian, these poems are nevertheless captivating in a carefully curated style. They create a Room 237 of their own.