Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

The Guilt Gene: Poems

By Diana M. Raab

Buy on Amazon

Published September 21, 2009 (Paperback) Plain view Press

I wasn’t going to entitle this blog We Girls Named Diana Have A Secret Club, but I read Diana M. Raab’s book of poetry, The Guilt Gene, and I had to.

Girls named Diana always laugh together about how rough we are on people who try to call us “Diane,” and how girls named Diane don’t mind being called Diana.  Diana – the Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt – means divine. To be fair, the name Diane is a French derivation of Diana.  Diana Raab doesn’t write about our shared name in her poems – just about our shared moments.

She got me with her poem The Library.  It begins:

In the happy moments

of my childhood

a public library sits

nestled between a department store

and a post office,

the only place I could find peace

from the yelling and screaming

at home

and the fallout shelters at school.

The poem ends:

In the end books would save me.

Knowledge is the only thing

that cannot be stolen away.

The poems she writes in The Guilt Gene aren’t always autobiographical for her, but they often are.  Hell, they often are for me.  My public library was a tiny dot of a building in the four-hundred year old East Coast town where I grew up.  It was a sanctuary, maybe a mile from my house by bike.  Once home, I climbed a tree just beyond my backyard, carrying my books up a tree where I would read – and hide.  And, Diana’s story is mine – falling into books, I also couldn’t hear the violent chaos.  Until I was pulled into it by my stepfather’s huge hands and angry voice,”Get your goddamn nose out of that fucking book and go do the laundry/take care of your little brother and sister/help your mother.” Or I would be commanded to sit in his lap, where I would try to ignore his large hands roaming all over, and in, my young body.  I wrote my poetry at night, and in secret.  Diana is right, “In the end books would save me.”

I quit writing poetry about three decades ago, reasoning incorrectly that the drama I wrote only intensified the trauma I experienced – that I should slam the door on all that.  The last time I recall writing a poem, was at a Cub’s game in the searing heat.  I felt the passion from the field, and compelled, grabbed a pen.  Mostly, my poems were secret vessels to store my pain.  I should have kept on writing them.  Maybe then I would have stayed aware, so that when my children were three and five – the same age I had been when those most violent of times began – I might not have been surprised when the door I’d slammed closed against my past, exploded open.

I am grateful to Diana Raab for writing her poems, painting scenes from her life that feel so bloody familiar.