Book Review of Matthea Harvey's "Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form"

In her book of poetry Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, Matthea Harvey works with lyric poems that utilize great imagery, creative descriptions, and explores captivating themes, such as confinement, freedom, and their respective interplay in human interactions. This book is a single project, aimed at exploring freedom and confinement in human relations and interactions. In the poems “Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form,” “Ornamental,” “A Need for Consistency,” and “Frederick Courteney Selous’s Letters to His Love” to name a few, explore the theme of confinement. In these pieces, Matthea Harvey explores how we are confined within ourselves, our surroundings, and our relationships. Although we seem to yearn for freedom and release we ultimately seem to need confinement. While desiring freedom people also attempt to contain it. The freedom that attracts us is liberating yet scary and dangerous. Love seems to be the ultimate trap, a trap that while pains us is also something that we yearn for with our utmost desires. Matthea Harvey however, paints no clear picture or definitive ruling on the place of our desire for freedom and confinement. In some poems, such as “A Need for Consistency” confinement is paralleled to repetition and consistency, both sought for to gain a sense of safety. This need for safety ultimately brings about more chaos, as one of the character’s relationship falls apart due to the desire for confinement. In the poem “Frederick Courteney Selous’s Letters to His Love,” confinement is at first depicted as something stifling, restrictive, and monotonous, whereas freedom in wilds of nature is liberating and sheer joy. However, near the end of the poem, the speaker admits that although he used enjoy the thrill of the chase he now knows that he really wants the relationship with his lover, to be confined. The contradictions in each poem some how make sense however. It can be read that people need, love, yearn for, fear, and hate both confinements and freedom. The characters distant for the most part, the speaker being an observer, with some exceptions being in the case of the speaker in “Frederick Courteney Selous’s Letters to His Love,” who is a character in the poem. Many of the characters are cold and distant in one way, but then close and familiar in another. This is most likely due the fact that such characters do things that alienate the reader (such as killing rare animals in Africa (“Frederick Courteney Selous’s Letters to His Love”), forcing plants to bear a certain shape (“Ornamental”), and losing loved ones through rigidness (“A Need for Consistency”)), but experience fears and desires that are familiar to us. Almost every poem has consistently high tension, due to a heavy use of enjambment. Lines are broken in such a way so that sentences blend together making it difficult to tell when one line ends and the other begins. These qualities do not allow the reader to rest, and therefore, significantly raises tension. In some poems the first letters of the first word in each line is capitalized. This helps with the double meanings of lines that combine together. Some poems do not have any periods at all and no capitalization, greatly increasing tension. Many poems start out very abstract but over the course of the poem the reader is able to discern the author’s arguments and theme based on recurring imagery and less abstract and more analytical descriptions. Especially in the poem “Nude on a Horse Hair Sofa by the Sea,” there is an intermingling of very abstract and imagery based descriptions with that of more literal descriptions. The abstract parts raise tension and impart vividness imagery while the more literal parts help to contextualize the abstract, making it that much more vivid while also decreasing tension and giving the reader some reprieve. The book Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form has complex themes and ideas that are both enticing and intimidating, while also incorporating a variety of different situations that put new twists and perspectives on the author’s themes.