by Kathleen Graber
Princeton University Press 2010
Reviewed by John Deming

“Loneliness, our one defendable Empire.”

Kathleen Graber is an incredibly serious, intelligent and technically-gifted poet. She moves forward into the lonely present by associating deeply into the serious past, and finding how much of human endeavor has been predicated upon Imaginative need. “Our sacrament,” she writes, is “to chase what has vanished &, finally, to vanish / ourselves.” We live in the physical world, and we live in our imaginations, and our brains are physical too, and we wish desperately to link all of this:

                                                                          …The Eternal City,
Brodsky writes, is like a gigantic old brain, one that’s grown
a little weary of the world.

(from “The Eternal City”)

The Eternal City is a city in the clouds, your head in the clouds, leaping into imagined memories and plans, stitching them to the caricature of their realizations. In his long prose poem “The System,” John Ashbery points to what could be considered the Great Flaw of fundamentalist religion:

The great fright has turned their gaze upwards, to the stars, to the heavens; they see nothing of the disarray around them, their ears are closed to the cries of their fellow passengers; they can think only of themselves when all the time they believe that they are thinking of nothing but God. Yet in their innermost minds they know too that all is not well; that if it were there would not be this rigidity, with the eye and the mind focused on a nonexistent center, a fixed point, when the common sense of even an idiot would be enough to make him realize that nothing has stopped, that we and everything around us are moving forward continually, and that we are being modified constantly… … so that merely to think of ourselves as having arrived at some final resting place is a contradiction of fundamental logic…

He goes on from there, essentially pointing to the common delusion that things can only be one way, and that chosen humans can comprehend one specific, unalterable truth. Graber’s poems often allude to the obvious risk inherent in this kind of certainty: sometimes, people are willing to kill or die for it, are willing to suppress the freedoms of ‘non-believers’ in its name. So dutifully they fight to protect the Kingdom of the Imagined Specific, because without it, what is life? What is death?

Graber does not look to Christian history, or to the many thinkers that she cites (there are many), for a fixed point or absolutely explicable end result. Instead, she sees the history of human thought, and its correspondence with human action, as patchwork — a work in progress at best. For her title poem, she summons Philosopher King Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180, “was in love / with Wisdom.” But Wisdom “married him off to Duty instead.”

Aurelius is important because he embodies the fantasy of the leader-philosopher, one who, looking down upon his civilization from the height of meaningful power and success, finds “that all of this has been for nothing.” A leader who realizes his nation’s struggles and loyalties and beheadings take place in the name of sinister fictions. Would that he could contemplate all the day long, and arrive at powerful ideas that would buttress meaningful legislation and create a freer and more tolerant world. But alas, he has an Empire to defend, to expand, to cater to.

The title poem consists of twelve short “Books,” each with an epigraph from Aurelius. Her narrator is an associative philosopher, matching epochs-old philosophy and history with day-to-day autobiography. She doesn’t try to justify the present, or make it seem too cute a resting place; nor does she speak of it with suicidal gravity. She is both austere and conversational:

How slowly time seems to pass when we’re waiting.
When we return from a walk, my dog begins immediately
to wait for the next. If you are waiting, Reader, I can tell you only
that somewhere it is still summer. That there are a dozen books
in Aurelius’s Meditations, written in his old age, in his tents
on foreign battlefields as he waited through the last decade
of his life to die. Do you know Jack Gilbert’s poem about a man
carrying a box in his arms? He balances his burden, shifts it,
so he will never need to set it down. My cellar is full of boxes.

(from “The Eternal City,” Book Four)

Graber is engaging in measured association. She sees in her present not ends, but opportunities for association and metaphor: openness and change. Her book presents a relentless need to prove the whole that unexpected and disparate parts can constitute. She seeks and finds patterns. The same section concludes:

                            …Archimedes gave numbers to the spiral
of the sailor’s coiled rope, but the nautilus waited centuries
for Descartes to decode its elegant equiangular whorls.
Without shells, the cycloid arc, Christopher Wren concluded,
the spire would not be possible. The dog stares at the door & sighs.
We carry our waiting & our calcium carbonate cage.
We wait for the future to divine for us the past. I think of Aurelius
who thought of Epictetus: Thou are a little soul bearing a corpse.

(from “The Eternal City,” Book Four)

The narrator is a researcher or reporter. She threads the thinking of a variety of heads and establishes them in the abstract as somehow present in the room with her and her dog. Her poem follows a format used to great effect by Natasha Trethewey in her long poem “Native Guard” — each separately titled section opens with the line that closed the previous section. As a result, she is able to constitute new associations, find further metaphor. “Book Seven” concludes with a quote from Aurelius:

                 …Aurelius, opening another day: Nature will soon change
all things which thou seest…in order that the world may be ever new.

The succeeding book, “Book Eight,” begins:

In order that the world may be ever new, my brother & his wife
are going to have a baby. Earlier this month they heard
the tiny heart: out of the whorl of the mother’s organs, suddenly,
a galloping, celerity, hooves. And yesterday, they saw their child
somersaulting in the unlit paddock of the womb. It turns
its animal face to the camera it cannot possibly imagine,
raises its arms as if to wave. Gibbon traces the beginning
of the end to Aurelius’s brutal son. Aurelius, who turned his back
on the blood of the Coliseum, has sired the Secutor, who straps tight
his helmet & buckler to kill naked, unarmed men before the crowd.

In order that everything be questioned, Graber develops an interplay between her family life and the life of Aurelius and his son. It works, because the analogy is not literal; surely, she is not presupposing that a new nephew will bring about the fall of the Roman Empire, or whatever the equivalent. Aurelius is her subject, and so is life and human action, and she is open to the innumerable patterns that relate things to each other. Her very style presents an honest and open-ended conception of meaning. Everything is connected. Everything is separate. Contradictions must be permitted.

In his book The Condition of Man, Lewis Mumford diagnoses the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:

Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.

A fear of change from the status quo — from an established idea, loyalty or conception of God — can lead to obsessive, and in due time, sloppy security. A Roman Empire yields a British Empire, a British Empire an American Empire. And the whole while, the need for security or fixed point sameness has makes it hard for any potential meditative philosopher king to do the work of the future. Strict loyalism and fundamentalism (be they a devotion to a God, to a person, to any belief) are aimed at eliminating surprise, change and newness. They mean a devotion to security and meekly “holding on.” Change comes anyway. As Graber states, “We fill our hands when they are / empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.” Not with a bang, but a whimper.

A fair criticism could be made that Graber relies too heavily on complex ideas developed by other individuals, and that she only really adds to them the specific nuances of her narrator’s life. A few of these meditations become labored, lack surprise, or simply work to reaffirm the concept forwarded by whichever philosopher supplies the epigraph. The poem “The Magic Kingdom” concludes with an image of children at play:

                          …They turned each other into princesses
& super-girls & then, they pretended to change back.
Oh, no. You forgot to say forever! they took turns repeating
with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,
their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.

The poem is otherwise quite serious, and includes a cancer scare; as a result, this conclusion lands with undue dramatic force. The fact that these girls cannot stay princesses forever is treated as the tragedy that it is not. Nevertheless, the poem raises appropriate questions about human Imagination – how an imaginary excuse-making that begins in childhood too easily follows one into adulthood. And how it might be there to distract from the fact of how little we are truly able to control.

Graber’s book concludes with the exceptional short poem “The Festival at Nikko.” It is a meditation rooted soundly in time that is passing, and in undying curiosity and wonder:

Would I like things to be better? Yes.
But what does it matter? Intent seems so small
a part. And will. I have come a long way
to stand before this window in a harsh light
above a tap of undrinkable water. I pass daily
through the town’s old gardens to see the peacock
in its cage. In the cold, it turns its back
to the opening. It holds its magnificence close
to its sides. And whatever this resembles—
shyness or restraint, greediness even—it is not.

Fetishized Christianity is probably mostly about loneliness. Graber’s system of worship, if I am to limit it, would best be defined as Pantheistic, or a worship of Nature. Nature is seen as adaptive to circumstance, self-contained but always changing. In these lines, the peacock hides its feathers. An onlooker might see this, and upon acquiring a resounding urge for metaphor, determine for certain that all such peacocks are greedy, and ought to be punished.

Probably not – but a lot of contemporary fundamentalist thinking reaches that level of absurdity. The Eternal City demonstrates that humanity’s religious fictions have led to moments of astonishing philosophical clarity, but more often, to a meek protectionism rooted in undying fear. Yet in stitching history, ideas and experience, Graber demonstrates the power of the imagination. To that end, she seems most staunchly an advocate of what might be termed honest imagination: open-ended imagination that hints at liberation, but only insofar as we don’t allow the imagined to become a literal certainty that must be defended at all costs.

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