Niagara Falling

QUEEN OF THE MIST: THE FORGOTTEN HEROINE OF NIAGARA

Joan Murray

Beacon Press

110 pp., $20

The things we won't do for a little attention. Would Harry Houdini be anything more than a nameless bum without his box, chains and death-defying stunts? Would we drop Hugh Grant's name nearly as often without his infamous exploits? Would Linda Tripp be a household name if she wasn’t' a self-professed double talking snoop? Would Annie Taylor be an enduring symbol of American ambition if it wasn't for her unprecedented trip over the Niagara Falls in a barrel of her own making? Hardly.

Yet, you astutely say, although Harry, Hugh and Linda indeed claim important places in our collective memory, "Annie Taylor" doesn't really ring a bell. A woman the first over the fearful falls? Impossible.

Not impossible: merely the forgotten truth. Poet Joan Murray, in her epic poem Queen of the Mist, details the sad life and short fame of Annie Taylor, an elderly and utterly destitute school teacher living at the turn of the century who devised and executed what seemed the perfect plan for money and fame. After building with her thin hands a barrel to enclose her body like a womb and shelter her from her fall over the raging ledge of water, Annie Taylor subsequently became the first person in history to propel herself down the length of Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Yet, as Murray painfully illustrates, this feat of daring and desperation did not have the effect Annie desired. Immediately after experiencing the shock and joy of her self-described immaculate rebirth within the Falls, Annie climbs out of the water and is greeted only by cold disbelief and disgust. Instead of a symbol of beauty and hope, the crowd gathered to see her feat finds instead "a woman, short and plain and only slightly bruised,/ moving dizzily among them/ like a fly hatched by mistake in the winter sun." To the crowd gathered and to history itself, Annie was an ugly old woman easily forgotten.

Throughout the poem, Murray sympathetically and sometimes even bitterly reconstructs what she considers are the primary reasons Annie hasn't found the place in history that she deserves, ultimately blaming Annie's age and gender for her rejection from collective memory. Old women simply don't beautiful symbols make, and memory, according to Murray, often prescribes to strict aesthetic parameters.

Although often over-dramatic and one-sided, the poem as a whole attempts to reconstruct without decoration or artifice the story of a bypassed heroine. Delicate Homeric fingers of rosy dawn definitely don't reach up to sooth the reader's discerning aesthetic; instead, Murray evocatively and sympathetically describes a woman's life that was far from beautiful. Rejecting the traditional epic techniques of plot momentum and beautiful characters, Murray creates an entirely new form of epic poetry by focusing instead upon the hopelessness of an aging woman's attempts to revitalize her downward spiraling life.

The language never rivals the story in The Queen of the Mist; rather, the spare imagery Murray painstakingly inserts allows the heartbreaking story to tell itself without unnecessary flourishes. Images of birth, death and rebirth permeate the poem's language, providing the strongest continual layer of metaphor within the poem. The barrel, Annie's self-made womb, becomes in the end Annie's self-made tomb as Annie watches herself disintegrate within the short and petty memory of history. Eventually she is even called an imposter when the idealistic collective imagination consumes memory and literally recreates "Annie Taylor" into a blonde, beautiful symbol of female youth and fertility. Perhaps if Annie Taylor fell over the falls 40 years earlier her story would have been different. Perhaps then we would not remember young and handsome Bobby Leach, the famous "first man to go over the falls in a barrel" (five year after Annie's forgotten leap). Perhaps then we would remember Annie Taylor as the courageous heroine she was. But Murray's effort is not merely to put Annie back in history; Murray's greatest accomplishment in The Queen of the Mist is exhibiting inarguably that history is only human and can be a horribly fickle monster.