by Aleda Shirley
Sarabande Books 2006
Reviewed by Justin Taylor

Semi-Illicit Love in Anthracene

In an interview which accompanies reviewers’ copies of the book, Aleda Shirley says that “Dark Familiar is, in many ways, a dialogue with death, and the elegies in the book are both elegies for specific people, but also, I hope, something more than that: an attempt to preserve times that would otherwise be lost forever and the taking of a stance of strength in the face of grief and loss…” What interests me most about this quote is the plural, “people” (the rest of what she says is QED if you’ve read the book). Dark Familiar is a book of deep focus; the images and recurring types of thought are clearly delineated at the outset, the track they will run is the concave inner curve of the skull’s dome. Put another way: the book reads as if it has a story it won’t quite tell, and seems oriented by a central event it will sometimes detail but never fully disclose: the history of the love between the speaker and the perennial “you”—an apparently deceased “you,” though the speaker’s sense of loss is so fresh and profound, so alert to itself, that one can’t guess whether the (at least semi-illicit) lover was plucked from the world last week, last winter, or decades ago. Shirley is such an effective enforcer of mood that when I read in her bio that she lives with her husband, my first thought was that he must be incredibly jealous of her book-length pine for his lost cuckold. (Spare me the lecture on the lyric “I.” Shirley’s work is so obviously personal that I’m giving myself a pass on having jumped to conclusions.)

These poems are tough and world-weary. They are written at a philosophical distance that one suspects was not earned so much as won, through much sacrifice and loss, and which, ultimately, isn’t distance but distance’s opposite—an impossible closeness. These poems are not stoic, though they might wish they were. They are shot through with want: for presence, for restoration, for love, for God. Even though resigned to fate and death, there remains an unbroken and all-too-familiar (because it is all-too-human) indignation that such darkness should be the truth of the world. This upstart notion of unconditional rejection threatens to crack the poems’ crystalline sense of certain doom with a second darkness: to supplant the dark of the grave with the fertile possibility and promise of night.

“These are poems for grownups who believe in life and death,” proclaims the book jacket (in a tone so smug and despicable that, after reading that sentence, I almost passed on the volume), but the poet is less sure. “There are more than three worlds // though two are enough,” Shirley writes in “Purple, White and Red.” In “The Minor of What We Felt” she writes, with at least some regret, that

I’ve lost my taste for the indistinct, the luminously
suggestive. I want heft, the long strands ordered
& restrained by narrow ribbons of metal grosgrain.

And yet, in “Four Darks in Red,” she describes

Along the top of the canvas a band of anthracene
that is God or the absence of God
or someone’s ingenuous belief in Him.

The “ingenuous belief” she speaks of may yet be her hardened atheist’s envy for the comfort of a purported illusion, but she still bothered herself to capitalize “Him,” besides which, the theological pretzel of those three lines is “luminously suggestive” by anyone’s reckoning; she either has not quite lost her taste for the stuff, or else just still needs her fix.

That damn back jacket again: “[r]eading these poems is like walking through a museum of priceless artifacts—at night, alone, in silence—our heels echoing down marble corridors.” This is nonsense. From “The Star’s Etruscan Argument,” which opens the book in “the hotel of a casino / on an Indian reservation in the deep south,” through the late poem “Counter Love,” which ranks “Schubert’s C-major Quintet” alongside “an Ellington indigo” and “Bill Monroe’s high lonesome keening,” mere moments before confessing that “had I the chance I’d have chosen something other / than words,” these poems are nothing if they are not light, movement, and noise: of the bright city, of the house full of drinkers, of the clinking bottle of the lonely drinker, of the swirling snows, of the inner landscape of loss and the outer landscape of The South—especially Kentucky—as it is mapped over how it was. If Dark Familiar in fact is like walking, the path it takes leads not through some museum, but along the edge of a canyon at sunset, when the crepuscular light is fierce and those who watch the day die are reminded that they are still very much alive.

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