by Anthony Hawley
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Broken/Beautiful

Anthony Hawley’s second book Forget Reading is an insightful, relevant collection of poems that exist in and around the sonnet form. Though many of the poems are conspicuously labeled sonnets, their distance from traditional sonnet form speaks to the overall project of Forget Reading. Many of the “sonnets” even exceed fourteen lines. The poems in the final section, “Productive Suffix,” have a great deal of space between lines, making them feel exploded. Poems from other sections, especially “P(r)etty Sonnets,” have short choppy lines giving the feeling that the other half of the poem has been deliberately torn away, leaving only the left side. Most of the poems in Forget Reading feel like sonnets in a state of disrepair.

As the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets“ suggests, imperfection and beauty are integral to each other in Hawley’s new collection. The interjecting “(r)” turns the word “petty” into “pretty,” so that both words seem to exist interdependently. While the parenthetic “r” creates the simultaneous meaning, it also creates a rupture within the word “petty” that is both artificial and disruptive. Many of the poems in Forget Reading try to achieve a similar effect. Take for example these lines from the poem on page twenty-seven from the section “Apple Silence”:

      atomized margin

      drip of glass

      stone wall reduction

      heather heather

      that obscure object

      of the flicker

The opening lines of the poem from “atomized margin” to “heather heather” contain images that maintain their identity via transitory physical states. An “atomized margin” is neither a margin, nor a collection of disparate particles, but a baffling oxymoronic combination of the two. The following line, “drip of glass,” conjures both the image of molten glass, as well as a drip of water that appears to be glass in the moment of our imagining it. And what is “heather heather,” but a girl named Heather that is simultaneously a flower? All of these images are representations of “that obscure object / of the flicker.” Like the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets,” they maintain their character through their contradictory qualities.

This collection is about more than Hawley’s unique imagery. The oxymoronic images, and the (dis)function of the sonnet form both point towards Hawley’s desire to create a collection of poems that is as elusive as it is perpetual. As the directive title suggests, these poems are meant to maintain their mysterious, contradictory qualities in order to be read again and again. Even if this is a quality most of us seek out instinctively in the poems we read, Hawley’s aim is as admirable as his book is rewarding.

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