Sivvy, by Lauren Davis
Published by Whittle Micro-Press
Review by Risa Denenberg
In her newly released and vividly imagined chapbook, Sivvy, Lauren Davis interrogates Sylvia Plath’s state of mind in the days leading up to her death by suicide in 1963 (with footnotes to 1940 and 1956) by distilling letters she wrote into anagrams of her deepest feelings through erasures. In her note on the text Davis says, “These are erasures of the letters of Sylvia Plath” to which “I have not altered her word order.” Her sources are the two volumes of “The Letters of Sylvia Plath,” published posthumously in 2017 and 2018. This small volume is that rare combination of both the scholarly and the dazzlingly innovative.
Sylvia Plath is and will continue to be a touchstone for so many. I entered her work, and her inescapable and tragic life story as a poet and feminist, but also as a mother. In my case, as a mother who lost custody of her son when he was six. Naturally, I’ve always viewed Plath’s work as a poet who was also a mother.
In fact, Plath has a lot to say about being a being a mother, in both poems and prose. In her poem, “Morning Song,” she describes her newborn as a “fat gold watch” while comparing herself to a biologic function.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.
–from “Morning Song” Sylvia Plath
This image is echoed in a letter dated February 4, 1964 in Davis’s Sivvy: “The upheaval—I see the finality, / From cowlike happiness into loneliness.” Could I help thinking of how new mothers so often feel abjectly alone following childbirth?
Another of Plath’s poems points to a newly post-partum mother’s dilemma at the moment of accepting or renouncing responsibility for another human being.
I wasn’t ready. The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn’t ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence–
But it was too late for that. It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.
from “Three Women,” Sylvia Plath
In her auto-fictional novel, The Bell Jar, Plath describes a college-aged girl who makes a suicide attempt. The protagonist recognizes that her ambitions and dreams will be constrained by the cultural expectations that always seem to privilege marriage and motherhood over career and creativity. There is still strong societal pressure on women to have children, despite the lack of support for raising them or the cost to a woman’s personal goals for herself.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor. … I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.” –-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Having to choose—or more often, having no choice—between raising children and having a fulfilling career is a quandary faced by many women. Was Plath uncertain if she wanted children at all, knowing it would be at the cost of her writing life? It might seem unfair to question her motives or desires; but such questioning is quite familiar to women, if not always voiced. It seems clear, however, that being a single mother with two young children was an enormous challenge for her. For me, this broadens the too-easy interpretation that Plath committed suicide due to mental illness.
In a letter dated, February 4, 1963, Davis allows Plath (whose death occurred seven days later) to give a nod to her earlier suicide attempt (“I fought my way back—”) in a conflagration of language that perfectly reflects the undoing of Plath’s enormously rich inner life.
I fought my way back—
I wanted to get it over with—God is a wish—
maybe—I would go—I have been alone
I need a tonic—I am dying.
I’m using my entry point into Plath’s work, as well as my entry point into Davis’ Sivvy, to acknowledge how thoroughly and intimately Plath enters the imagination of her readers. One of many ways that Davis expands my way of knowing Plath is how entirely in love she was with Ted Hughes from the beginning (“I can’t be with people // that aren’t you.” … “I don’t want to eat until I taste / your mouth again.” Dated October 1, 1956) to the end (“My husband— // he is beautiful. / The whole world // now has him.” Dated January 22, 1963).
I highly recommend this book to you, reader, that you may enter Plath again and anew.
Lauren Davis is the author of the forthcoming short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed When I Drowned (Kelsay Books), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press), The Missing Ones (Winter Texts), and Sivvy (Whittle Micro-Press). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a former Editor in Residence at The Puritan’s Town Crier, and she is the winner of the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest. Her stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. Davis lives with her husband and two black cats on the Olympic Peninsula in a Victorian seaport community.
Sivvy by Lauren Davis
Published June 2024
PDF Micro-chapbook
Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder of Headmistress Press and curator at The Poetry Café Online. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently, Rain/Dweller (MoonPath Press, 2023). She is currently working on a memoir-in-progress: Mother, Interrupted.
The Poetry Cafe 