Archive for December, 2006

Strong is Your Hold

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

by Galway Kinnell
Houghton Mifflin 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

5

A Firm Grip

kinnell_strongTen books of poems, Galway Kinnell wrote before Strong is Your Hold, and ten years it has been since his last book, Imperfect Thirst, was published.

All Yoda-speak aside, the title is actually better than it sounds: a line borrowed from Whitman, it’s a rather apt title given the book’s recurring notion that anyone or anything which is still alive—including poets who turn 80 in a month and a half—is as alive as anyone or anything else.

And to have a hold on life for now, regardless of how alive you are ten minutes from now, is a fierce and remarkable thing. As is the notion of simply holding someone else’s hand for dear life, whether you are elderly in bed, or on the verge of jumping from a burning tower.  More on that later.

As consumed with his own end as he is in this book, in a sense Kinnell has never been more alive. In fact the most moving experience I had with this book occurred while playing the accompanying CD—on which he reads all 25 poems comprising the book—and listening to an American Great in all of his romantic splendor: “Greetings to you my listeners,” he announces in his deep-gruff at the onset of the disc, and I find myself double-checking my apartment to see if it has a fireplace.

Kinnell would have to square off in a deathmatch against Donald Hall for greatest living reader of poetry, greatest presenter of grandfatherly solace and cavernous articulation. If I had a million bucks, I might offer it to either of them to read “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” at my Mom’s house this Sunday night. Hall’s collected (earlier this year, also from Houghton Mifflin) included a CD as well, though Kinnell might have the edge on him because he engages the listener in conversation before his poems, giving some insight and context not present in the text, and evoking from the listener an earnest “I really do appreciate that fact, Galway, and I anticipate hearing your poem.” Some of it is in fact of more interest than the book itself.

The book itself. That it’s flat-out not Kinnell’s best work is okay. Its slow narrative and metaphorical naturism will undoubtedly delight Kinnell fans, ex-Kinnell students, and anyone excited by the prospect of hearing more from one of America’s last poet-poets. Desperate romantic obsession guided his best books, specifically Body Rags and The Book of Nightmares, and the fact the poet has slowed down this much—has in fact developed a believable resolve that the world is hard but that being alive is good—is soothing at the least, and the best poems drive home some powerful post-9/11 humanism.

Slowing down is nice. But some of these have a way of going on. “Pulling a Nail,” for example, is a 6-page, 14-stanza narrative about…pulling a nail. Maybe half-a-dozen metaphors are attached to the nail, and we learn he’s dissembling a house his father built, which makes for some evocative meditation:

Slipping for leverage
a scrap of quarter-inch wood
under the hammer, I apply
a methodology I learned from
unscrewing stuck bottle lids:
first, put to it the maximum force
you think you can maintain,
and second, maintain it.

All other thoughts about the nail are as interesting, or less interesting, than this, while a metaphysical notion he’s in a kind of tug-of-war with his father works best. But there’s too much description, over-explaining—too many ideas about the nail for a poem about a nail. It’s difficult, at this kind of pace, to read more than one poem in a sitting. Some might see this a strength, but me, I’d rather finish, absorb, take my enchantment into the next poem—not keep waiting for the nail to be pulled, then bookmark my page and go buy another coffee.

The book mostly contains poems about plain and rural experiences. It’s virtually all straightforward narrative, some fascinating (burning a brush pile and later finding “a small blackened snake, the rear half / burnt away, the forepart alive”), some dull (a “she” releases into the wind pillow-feathers which “net zero on the scale of materiality”). But all of the pillow/snake/nail meditations, while carrying a soft pace, are written into the ground. The “strength” or urgency with which one holds onto one’s life translates to many of these poems; he stays with each a bit longer than need be, narrating and questioning until he can narrate and question no more.

“When the Towers Fell” is an important exception. It’s unlike anything else in the book, and the back-story he tells about it on the CD—one involving students he had to meet just after the incident—is compelling. The poem first appeared in The New Yorker and in The Best American Poetry 2003, and has been neatened up since then. He brings in several other voices, among them Paul Celan and Hart Crane, and splices some cultural implication and personal meditation with absolute terror:

I thought again of those on the high floors
who knew they would burn alive and then, burned alive.
As if there were mechanisms of death
so mutilating to existence that no one
gets over them, not even the dead.

“When the Towers Fell” is not the best 9/11 poem, nor the most subtle, but it is among the most affecting.  Its picture of people who are alive but consciously on the verge of death finds an eerie link to the more pedestrian but equally real struggle with impending death our narrator engages elsewhere in the book—however terrified the instant, strong is the hold a person has on life a split second before he or she dies.

A terrifying sensibility. But the very sound of Kinnell’s voice might sooth you a bit. He invokes the oft-recalled image of 9/11 victims jumping hand-in-hand from the tower to avoid burning to death: “Some leapt hand in hand that their fall down the sky might happen more lightly.” Surely Kinnell would be the first to admit he had no idea why some people have the fortune to ease into old age, to slow down and reflect, while others face almost inconceivable terror. And to admit that at the same time, the notion of his own death is haunting nevertheless. It’s “all but certain” he will die before his wife, he notes, but,

I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.

He possesses a deep understanding of the importance of companionship, and the terror he’s seen flush with other deaths makes him frame his own death with classic Kinnell romanticism: “I, who so often used to wish to float free / of earth, now with all my being want to stay.” Kinnell’s best earlier work is urgent in a similar way, which slips Strong Is Your Hold under “lesser” Kinnell; the slow rural poems are nice, while a bit too long, but they also distract from the manic link between self, horror, and redemption-through-companionship that emerges in the best poems. Look at the last poem: “Why Regret?” After a lifetime of questioning through poetics, he decides again to close with a question and a resolution:

Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

*

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Swallows

Monday, December 18th, 2006

by Martin Corless-Smith
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

7

Six Nights at Nonsuch Palace

Corless Smith CoverHouses can make you act oh so romantic. Years after you’ve moved from an old home, there might exist the compulsion to stare at it like it’s some old friend or dog or food-find. If it used to be brown but has since been painted yellow, it’s not the house’s fault.

So how about looking at a library. A great big one, one housing as best it can the entire history of human composition, imagination, thought, and language. Even the books that aren’t in there are in there because the idea of books and their importance is in there—the idea, at least, that there have been great minds willing to bend themselves around questions most knew very well couldn’t be answered because the discovery of ineffable clarifications were perhaps clarification enough.

Exeunt library and books. Return “house,” but not the kind you can watch: the kind constructed entirely of the language you’ve read, will read, have written, will write. It’s a house you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving to take a nostalgic glimpse at, anywho, because it’s always around in the same way: one part self, one part everything not-self, two parts the complete annihilation of both: the moment something resembling truth has been arrived at via language, we’re reminded in Martin Corless-Smith’s fourth book, it has little to do with the lucky poet or his body, and instead becomes a shingle on a more universal house of language that has kept us warm for a couple of millennia now.

With a seriousness that can only be described as “British,” Martin Corless-Smith takes two steps back from the house of language to genuinely watch it; in doing so, he’s able to discover that it’s at once futile and vital to sidle up and slap on a little vinyl siding of his own.

Ok, house as metaphor, got it. But while one idea is scarcely enough to anchor a whole collection, Corless-Smith’s fragmented, phrasey, lyrical, almost awkwardly ambitious attempt to grapple with—well, everything— sustains this, his fourth book. A poem segment (it is, in many cases, difficult to discern what is a “poem” and what is a part of another “poem”) might begin with generalization (“We wish to prolong what we can see and touch and talk of / We can do the work of the universe), but end with dazzling and evasive lyric:

The coombes breed whole families
daintiest snails in saxifrage & moschatel
the spurge and spurge laurel
saffron-heared primrose greenish in the light of its own leaves

Corless-Smith makes it clear early on he intends to remove himself from things as they stand for the sake of lyric exploration: “My quarrels I dissolve, and my former deeds.” The exploration itself is all over the place; he goes to the beginning, so to speak, searching for the Sabine Villa, the physical location from which Horace wrote. He emerges, however slightly, as skeptic rather than cynic:

Happy enough in my Sabine farm
the grave lends an ear to free the poor man
I shall quit the towns of men
Even now the winter gathers over my shoulder

We’re also taken to a remote Hebridean island where the house/language metaphor is its most explicit. A brief note at the beginning of the section notes that “During WW 2 the poet William Williamson worked as a radio operator on a remote Hebridean island. A series of poetic fragments and long prose pieces were later found written on the walls of his weaver’s cottage.” The section transcribes some specific Williamson lyrics, and offers some of the book’s most lucid concepts:

Now, in this poetry of fragment after fragment we
experience more than just the poem and its outside,
we experience the simultaneity of many poems, all
poems, with their own ends and their beginnings—
their readings—intersecting—their lives in the space
of being read—on the page just now we see self-
consciously noted a fourth-dimensionality.

Corless-Smith is up and down over his various fragmented series, inhabiting both inspiration and torment, most commonly caught in the hopeful/desperate middle:

choked with a toad in its throat
the snake was unable to swallow
the toad was unable to die

He’s captivating when analytical, when lyrical, when mentioning swallows or the act of swallowing, when quoting an abundance of great writers, and when slipping almost completely into obscurity. For all his depth and density, though, on occasion some heavy notions are settled with weaker ones, or with weak metaphor, as when “the cost of the journey” is “now part of history / leaves to a tree.”

Which reminds us of course that writing great lyric is painstaking. On several occasions Corless-Smith seems almost obsessed with his own limitations, presenting cross-outs and revealing the indecision involved in realizing a poem—whether outlining an idea is necessary, or letting it lie implicit with fragment presents a truer truth. So those who’ve done it well are to be celebrated, and that they can be celebrated by exiting the limitations of the flat reality of things as they are and inhabiting the impossible house of language they unwittingly constructed. In the end, the book—the poet too? Up to you—possesses a mania that leaves you feeling you’ve been there to return.

*

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Thirst

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

3

Another Year, Another Mary Oliver Book

oliver cover

It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another cog on the massive machine that is Oliver, author of the current top-selling book of poetry in the U.S. (who clocks in elsewhere on the chart at numbers four, nine, ten, eleven, twenty-one, and thirty).  It would be simpler to just brush Thirst off as more dazzled ruminations about light, peonies, and the pleasures of waking early in the morning to watch some specific genus of snake do something mildly interesting.

But what separates this book is the anguish she exhibits over the death of her longtime partner, Molly Malone Cook, who graces yet again Oliver’s dedication page. Cook died in 2005 and Oliver spends a good chunk of Thirst addressing a higher power in a struggle to repress anger at this death. The trouble is, the elegiac poems mostly come across as wounded; they grind this anger with awfully forced resolutions.

Thirst also offers a more fiercely Christian Oliver, who turns to God in nearly every poem and relegates the wonderment she used to offer dogfish to the consecration of bread and wine:

They are something else now
from what they were
before this began.

So is Oliver. Perhaps the cynicism of the poem title “The Poet Reflects on Yet Another Spring” says it all; she seems a little affected here, and it results in some rather shrewd, reactionary didacticism: “Everything is His.”

There is some redemption, particularly in the title poem, which is also the last in the book.  Historically Oliver’s best work—particularly in the Pulitzer-winning American Primitive—was fixed in an inspired medium between suffering and transcendence, but her work in the last ten years or so has been too consistent a didactic celebration. In the finale, however, she seems reminded that death and suffering beget confusion, a loss of stasis, and that these proffer the most genuine urge to bow before beauty: “I am slowly learning.”

*

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On the Side of the Crow

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

by Christien Gholson
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

7.5

Double Daggers

gholson coverOn the Side of the Crow is Christien Gholson’s first book, but it reads like the work of an accomplished artist.  The book is a series of loosely related, tautly written prose poems, all titled like works of art in a museum.  Though I’m not convinced that the titles consistently illuminate the poems they head, Gholson proves a compelling curator, an enigmatic guide to our passage through his vividly original underworld. 

The poems feature recurring themes and characters, including Mae Sistore, a mysterious, goddess-like underground radical hiding from the FBI.  Though incognito, she has inspired a huge gathering of protesters protesting nothing.  TV pictures are beamed worldwide, but each person must find out the meaning of this protest for themselves.  Mae’s underground nature is almost too literal, as she is presented as a force of nature more than a realistic character.  As she tells us in “Thieves: Abstract in Silver and Red,” “The rocks beneath your feet are telling you it’s time,” and later,

“your own blood knows,” she said.  The sax imitated the sound of blood and the couple danced around the room.

If Gholson limited himself to conventional narratives or character sketches, this obviousness would wear thin, but he knows how to use our expectations to his advantage with the professional efficiency of a street performer. Though seemingly improvised, these poems are highly formalized and the action is carefully controlled.  What seems on first read to be a lightning bolt turns out to be the carefully timed triggering of a flashbulb.  The characters are often puppets, sometimes in the most savagely literal sense.   One poem ends “an invisible hand slips up through his bowels, pulls a cord of tiny bells the length of his body.”  More sympathetically, “Swimmers Beneath the Street: A Cave Painting” starts with a cinematic description of truck lights crossing “the wall behind a caged basement window.  Two figures on a bed.  Gutter water overflows into a window well.”  Then Gholson sets the show in motion: Zak is dancing behind the dumpster “like a puppet in the rain.” When Zak finds himself watched, he says,

“do you want to kiss me?” That is what Zak always said when he caught someone watching him dance… To his surprise the little man walked up to him, rose on tiptoes and touched his lips to Zak’s neck.  Nothing more.

Zak is surprised by the man’s response, even though Zak has asked his question many times.  The opening frame suggests that he has found a lover, though the “Nothing more” suggests that Zak is doomed to isolated moments of contact.
The poem ends with a single line recalling the initial still life, transposing it from sight to sound: “The room rings with the constant shock of water against iron.”  This helps make the poem a description of a cycle as well as a touching character sketch. In this light, the painting, the artwork and the character are all manifestations of nature caught in tragically momentary forms, spirits achingly real, but doomed to be returned to the material they were made from, like Pinocchio in reverse.  The effect somewhat recalls Keats’s Grecian Urn or Dante’s description of Paolo and Francesca in hell, but Gholson does them one better by multiplying  the frames: the simple wooden proscenium of a puppet show, the formal frame of the camera shot, and the natural processes of water rusting iron.  This is not the mindless multiplication of the picture of the boy holding a can of Dutch Boy paint on which is a picture of a boy holding a can of Dutch Boy paint ad infinitum.  Our viewpoint is complex but not untenable.  The juggling of visual and sonic clues, the contrast between the framing of a photograph and water’s eternal, erosive flow helps to create texture and depth in the poem, an unexpected ledge just wide enough to keep us from falling.

Because Gholson also insists on the mundane realities of nature, including worms flushed out of holes by the rain, his formalized scenes don’t harden into distant, classical marble, or melt under the garish lights of a wax museum.  Another recurring motif is the tumbling of a jumbo tub of popcorn thrown across a movie screen, backlit by the opening credits.  In “Saturday Matinee: Collage Made From the Refuse Found on a Movie Theater Floor,” (pace, mad Curator!)  the audience (mostly children) realizes that this moment is “the most beautiful thing that will happen to them in any theater.  Ever.  And they know it.  The walls of the theater shake with ear-ringing screams of pure joy.”

A poem describing a night of magnificently drunken self-pity by two fucked-up characters in a weed-choked junkyard ends on an unexpectedly redemptive  note: “In the morning, the air is as sharp as sun on water.” Given that the sentence is separated from the body of the poem, we will never know if those characters have learned anything.  Maybe their drunken declaration of magnificence is only true if they are absent from the scene.  The author does not save or damn, reminding us that nature is unknowable.  Though you can talk to her on the phone like an old lover, Mae Sistore can never be found, she has been dead for a long time. 

Though sometimes overly telegraphed, Gholson’s effects are almost never cheap. If he pushes us over a cliff, a parachute may or may not deploy, but his basic honesty ensures that we don’t escape unscathed.  These poems are as grotesque, brutal and touching as a circus, and as natural as tree bark.  Highly original, both natural and tightly controlled, On the Side of the Crow demonstrates the continued vitality of the prose poem, both individually, and as part of a sequence.

I can’t close without a nagging quibble about the typeface: what’s with the periods shaped like crosses?  And the colons shaped like the double dagger symbol for deceased?  It’s disconcerting to see what appear to be diamonds turning into crosses before your eyes as you zoom in. Why should the punctuation call attention to itself here?  In a different mood, I might be persuaded that this helps Gholson’s poems by increasing your awareness of the surface of the page, just as coming too close to a painting increases your awareness of the surface of canvas and paint.  I admit that most people don’t look that closely at the printed page, but some of us are wall-eyed, and we should not be ashamed of looking at the world that way.

*

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Scar Tissue

Monday, December 4th, 2006

by Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

5_5

On Impending Twilight

scar tissueCharles Wright is certainly prolific and while many might expect him to recede into redundancy his latest, Scar Tissue, is a testament to his unwillingness and inability to do so. The natural successor to 2004’s Buffalo Yoga (which was the natural successor to A Short History of the Shadow, which was the natural successor to Appalachia, and so on down the line to Black Zodiac), Scar Tissue is yet another gratifying chapter from Wright, whose every collection seems to add an impressive and necessary facet to his life’s work. Scar Tissue—portions of which were collected in a chapbook last year unfortunately titled The Wrong End of the Rainbow—does just that, with a bit less command than the aforementioned collections.

Wright continually mulls over subjects like time, memory, death, genesis, landscape, and love, and manages to chronicle a single consciousness through such impermeable topics. His foci never become burdens; rather they are his avocation. The book begins with a farewell—“Appalachian Farewell”—in which time presents itself as a preoccupation and an obstacle.  But the speaker is dominant and matter-of-factly bemoans time’s insistence on passing:

If night is our last address,
This is the place we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive.

He is not intimidated or afraid; he merely is. And so the book begins.

In the following poem Wright offers his mode of reconciling time: “There is no end to the other world…” thus the idea of eternity leaves us with no enemy, nothing to fight but our own memory. “Inland Sea,” one of the finest in the book, inspires one to resist nostalgia, to allow time to pass and to continue moving forward with it. He writes, “Better to stuff your heart with dead moss / …Than to watch those waters rise…” And in a later poem more of the same: “Let go, live your life, the grave has no sunny corners.” The only problem here is that “live your life” is lackluster, used up, too explicitly sentimental.

And unfortunately Wright is, on several occasions, explicit where he should be implicit. One of the greatest living American poets, Wright has consistently succeeded at fusing image with wisdom. Scar Tissue resembles very much his other recent work, but isn’t quite as pristine. As he once wrote in the essay “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” “Each line should be a station of the cross.” At times in Scar Tissue it seems he wants to find quick fixes to skip quickly over the duller stations. He employs sometimes predictable images such as the moon in “Waking Up After the Storm,” and ends with a rather obvious comparison between the moon and an eye. Or as in the second of the book’s title poems, “Scar Tissue II,” when he writes, “the snake’s tail in the snake’s mouth.” Eh.

However, where some images fall short Wright’s language picks up the slack and the resulting sounds become a major transport for meaning. “Images from the Kingdom of Things” contains the line “Night, in its shallow puddles, still liquid and loose in the trees.” The repetition of double letters or letters that come in pairs such as “d” in “puddles” and “l” in “shallow” and “still,” allow all the words to meld together creating the visual effect of “liquid” along with the sounds of the o’s and e’s of “loose” and “trees” which sound like the lapping of water at land. The entire poem is constructed in this manner and becomes a sort of puzzle for the reader.

What is most impressive about Wright’s lyric is its reflection of an acute level of awareness. Wright is perhaps one of the most conscious and consistent minds American poetry has seen. In “Against the American Grain”—recalling his great poem “American Twilight”—he discusses the substance of absence, an incredibly dense and elusive concept to own. And yet, he gives a definable shape to empty space:

The absence the two
                                horses have left on the bare slope,
The silence that grazes like two shapes where they have been.

In the end, Wright defines Scar Tissue’s confident focus with this uncharacteristic but masterful rhyming couplet: “New skin over old wounds, colorless, numb. / Let the tongue retreat, let the heart be dumb.”

*

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In the Middle Distance

Friday, December 1st, 2006

by Linda Gregg
Graywolf Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

6stars_7

Fragment Rock

Gregg Cover

Do poets still employ whatever fearless political wit they can summon and work towards earning Right of First Refusal from The New Yorker? Either way the fact that nine of the poems from In the Middle Distance appeared in the magazine say something of the unique category Linda Gregg is in. Not that New Yorker ink = good poem, but it does imply a certain degree of a certain brand of smarts and political dalliance. And whatever Gregg’s done, she’s done with smarts; accordingly, In the Middle Distance is one of the most self-contained, coherent things I’ve read all year.

The 58 poems comprising the book are not separated by section numbers or titles. Though most poems function on their own, they also emerge as a larger, abstracted series of romantic meditations: imagine emptying out a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece fits into every other piece. Every poem or numbered section of a poem is only one little brick of a stanza, and poems seldom stretch onto a second page. Nevertheless, each piece implies the poem that follows it, and implies the book as an autonomous unit.

The meditations are often emotive, sometimes too much so, which accounts for the book’s only consistent flaw. In “Arriving Again and Again without Noticing,” Gregg’s speaker reminisces about “all different kinds of years” before closing with the suggestion she’s self-actualized: “It’s strange that my heart is as full / now as my desire was then.” Yucky-sweet as that is, she makes up for it; like any good series, Gregg’s poems contradict each other from time to time, and the excellent last poem, “Highway 90,” shows that continued confusion and indecision are seamless with life at any age, regardless of one’s level of “desire” or fullness of “heart.” Here it is in its entirety:

An owl lands on the side
of the road. Turns its head
to look at me going fast,
window open to the night
on the desert. Clean air,
and the great stars.
I’m trying to decide
if this is what I want.

Her romantic assertions—many of which involve the word “heart”—don’t resonate because they detract from a dazzling thread of chance and indecision. In most cases Gregg allows the fragmented pieces to dictate and reveal themselves to her, each poem title becoming more or less the “topic” of the poem. The best poems begin with abstract ideas and fuse them with imagery, the handsomest arrow in her quiver. These poems are also chiseled, often employing sentence fragments for rhythmic punch, as in the opening to “The Problem of Sentences”: “A sentence is an idea. An idea with urgency. / A feeling for the sun before it rises.” Another fine idea/image fusion occurs in “Beauty”:

When my father heard his beloved dog
had chased and killed the rancher’s sheep,
he went right out and shot it. Because,
he said, once they ran with the pack
and tasted blood, it would never stop.

Perhaps the most telling lines in the whole book occur in “Parian Marble”: “I would like to hold / something up against ruin.” The word “something” implies she doesn’t know what, and improvised-yet-focused lyrics of In the Middle Distance are a stab at that something. The book, which Gregg explains in the notes took her five years to write, is an inquisitive quarrel with the divine; she allows herself to build fragments with the confidence that fragments—questions—can cohere. Here, they do. So it’s easy to get sucked out of her world when lines like “It fills me with tenderness” and “To make the day rise / out of the heart’s darkness” (both from the same poem) hand you a lollipop and beg you to confirm that God is Good. There are maybe one too many of such “sweet” moments to make the whole thing a slam dunk, but it’s awfully close. The great poems are many (“Surviving Love” and “Quietly” to name a pair), and when Gregg is good, she works like a punch in the gut you probably deserved.

Finally I’ll add this. We know Linda Gregg is smart. Academic even. But nothing new can be said about Orpheus. Especially in poems. Please stop; this goes for everybody. When Gregg brings in Orpheus in “I Do Not Need the Gods to Return,” it’s fitting cause to simply turn the page, because face it, who among us can stand another poem about Orpheus. I guess everyone wants to write the “ultimate” Orpheus poem. Sweet. Here’s what I recommend: write a book called Orpheus Poems in which Orpheus does everything from buy his Mom a birthday cake to throw Eurydice over his shoulder and, sword in hand, battle his way out of hell; Make him jump beside a trampoline and sleep with a transvestite hooker. Then we can finally put the Orpheus thing to rest—“No Orpheus to sing again” indeed.

*

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