Paradise

“It is not true that we fled // at the end, or that it was an end,” Victoria Redel writes in the poem “You Called It Paradise.” “When we found the gate, / of course we opened it.” In Paradise, Redel’s fourth collection, to open the gates of various metaphorical paradises—those of personal origins and coming of age, those of rose-colored remembrances from childhood or a parent’s old country, even the ecstatic destinations of older people making love—is to shape the meaning of our pleasures and sufferings. In “Snake,” the reptilian pet of the speaker’s sons is also a version of the snake from the Garden of Eden, only this one—in the shedding of her skin—offers the temptation of aloofness to life’s metamorphoses:

I loved the papery, scaled ghost
I’d lift up, not to commemorate
her chance to begin again, but
the cold indifference to whom she’d been.

Poems like “Then” and “Ordinary Sight” demonstrate, with clarity and suppleness of feeling, human opposition to the snake’s temptation, by revisiting the transformations of the speaker’s past selves, and those of her parents’ and grandparents’, as well as of historical figures like the philosopher and lens maker Spinoza, whose “beshert” or destiny was never to look “for transit / to a next world” but to polish “ordinary sight.” While Redel’s style is mostly straightforward and her subjects are familiar, in the beautifully imagined “Occupation,” such “ordinary sight” becomes insight into history’s precariousness and the mind of the exiled. The subject is the speaker’s mother as a 9-year-old refugee in occupied Paris, who encounters a German soldier on whom she develops a crush as her first period stains her underwear, the sight of innocent blood leading her into the false paradise of fantasizing salvation from Nazi violence:

It’s part of their beautiful tragedy, to hold her bloody &
      bandaged 
in his arms as she confesses, I’m a Jew.