Mama Dada: Songs of the Baroness's Dog
by Jan Horner
Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2009, ISBN 9780888013446, 84 pp., $17 paper.

As subject for her third book of poems, Jan Horner has chosen the colourful and eccentric Baroness Else von Freytag Loringhoven (1874-1927), a woman whose life and art astonished, offended, titillated and drew a wide range of responses. A summary of her life is included at the end of the book.

At the end of her life, reduced to selling newspapers, she says: "I come and go in awful freedom" (68). Insisting on freedom in love, art and thought, the baroness lived extravagantly, dramatically, uncompromisingly and sometimes desperately on two continents, in three marriages and at the cutting edge of the art world. She paraded her body, performed her art and wrote poetry in Munich, New York and Berlin. Horner captures the story of this unusual woman in poems that vibrate and snap with life, opinion and passion, just as the baroness did.

In "Goldelse" the narrator links the baroness with the angel Viktoria on top of the Berlin victory column:

. . . both likeable gals
with fancy names, they move towards us
on muscular feet, reclad, restored, re-storied
phoenixes freed from the rubble of time. (30)

In freeing Else from "the rubble of time" Horner sketches in her childhood in Germany, her escapes from home and marriage, her alliance with Felix Paul Greve (aka Frederick Philip Grove, ex-con) and her place in the New York art world, where someone dubbed her "the first American dadaist."

The author comes at her subject from various angles, places her in a variety of settings and allows diverse voices to enter the conversation. The result is a collage-like, kaleidoscopic portrait in vivid bits and pieces, not arranged according to chronology or any predictable pattern. A bit like the provocative, fractured art of modernist Marcel Duchamp with whom she collaborated in New York.

Horner's combined poetic skill and research have paid off. The poems do not simply present a humorous caricature, though there is plenty of fun here. The portrait becomes complex, inviting not only the readers' curiosity--or voyeuristic tendencies--but also their sympathy.

Whether recounting details of Else's life or reflecting on it, the poems employ sharp images and a wry wit. In three small stanzas Horner makes short shrift of the baroness's three husbands, one of whom "exit[s] downstage/ chased by a bear" while another is seen "massaging the story/ plundering the word hoard/ talking up his product" ("Where's the husband?" 61). In other poems Else finds herself, hilariously, surrounded by contemporary advertising at a soccer game, where she "runs about writing her own rules" (20) or at a 2001 Berlin gay parade where she "join[s] the fun in a tomato can bra" (21).

By the end of her life the fun is over. One narrator describes her like this:

She could have exterminated rats
as she went to the dogs,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . indigent, aging
godless, diseased, a wretch
with dubious papers,
a worthless title, for all I know ("For all I know, 27)

In the collection's final poem, Horner gathers a group of Else's contemporaries--Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Felix Greve, et al.--around a parodic communion table:

We find no body but this last supper
a woman made of bread
her nakedness the colour of wheat
a flesh loaf, life-sized
laid out on a stark table.
We are invited to cannibalize
her as we had done in life.
Aghast, and even needled by guilt
somehow everyone manages to eat. ("The wake" 72)

The baroness herself could not have wished for a more startling and evocative tribute.

Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg poet, fiction writer, editor and, occasionally, teacher.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


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