The Sliding Hour

How Do You Uncook An Egg

The Sliding Hour, a review of How Do You Uncook an Egg, by Ann Christine Tabaka. Impspired. 2024. $8.00 paper.

—“I write my life one word at a time.”

Time moves forward. No one can undo what’s been done. In How Do You Uncook an Egg time is day and night, seasons, memory, dream, felt time (as opposed to clock time) and irreversible. Days are where Christine Tabaka lives, in the moment. The introductory quote is from “Starlight Fading,” the book’s last poem. It’s a book about being here. All of its poems are sensual, structured, and spiritual.

Tabaka’s sensuality is evoked by images and a blend of concrete and abstract language. Time in “Waiting to be Saved” is personified. “Time walked off…taking me by the hand. The speaker, on “a woodland trail” approaches “a covered bridge…its lattice bared like an immense wooden screen.” The thingness of the bridge, its being there, predominates. In the following poem, “Erasing Away the Pain” the “morning fog” is “White / like the petals of a Calla lily falling gently from dawn.”

The walker comes to the bridge (built from wood). Tabaka’s structures are built from words. “Waiting to be Saved” has a structure of chiasmus. In the beginning, time took the speaker “by the hand;” in the end, the speaker “took time by the hand.” The poet uses different repetition with variation in “Walking Step in Step with Time,” which begins with “Walking on a needle” and ends with “Needle pricked — my finger…” Imagery patterns “Evening into Night,” which begins with “I sweep today under the rug,” and ends with “I walk away — broom in hand.”

Spirituality bonds self with nature, the cosmos, the other, and ultimately the self. “I Stand My Ground” evokes this bond, and time’s sliding hour.

“You” in these poems is open-ended. In “I Stand My Ground” you could be maternal. In “Waiting to be Saved,” “I was alone again / even with you there,” you could be the self. Similarly In “Charade, “I must…learn to live without you.” Still, it’s open-ended. And in “The Soul Has No Gender,” “the ocean is not he nor she.” There’s spirituality in sea and sky, and within individuals. “How Do You Un-cook an Egg?” begins with a note of clarity, a realization. “Our lives go in one direction … always forward — never back.

Another thing is clear, Tabaka’s voice is unmistakably feminine. In that regard and in her concerns about women, individuality and freedom she is similar to her friend, the poet Lindsay Soberano Wilson. In her textures, her poem’s concerns with memory and dream, she is similar to the poet John Drudge. While Soberano Wilson and Drudge write from Canada, Tabaka, across the border, writes from the United States, poems elegant and well crafted, made things to which she brings her whole life. She is…herself, and contemporary poetry is all the richer for her presence. How Do You Uncook an Egg is a book to buy, read, and savor.