Posts Tagged ‘8.5 stars’

One Neither One

Friday, September 11th, 2009

by Shane McCrae
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Steven Karl

“One of us had to save the other one”

mccrae cover Throughout the years poets have written about identity and its intersection with race. Many volumes of poetry and anthologies seek to demonstrate or recapitulate either the hyphenated-American or immigrant experience. Nella Larsen, who wrote the novels Quicksand and Passing, is perhaps the most famous writer who had attempted to tackle something even more complicated: the “bi-racial”* or multi-ethnic experience. In 2006 it was reported that there is a minimum of 6.1 million U.S. citizens who identify their ethnicity as bi- or multi, yet comparatively little has been explored in the landscape of poetry. Shane McCrae’s chapbook, One Neither One, sets out to give a voice to this other other.

McCrae wisely uses surrealism to obtain intensity and reveal poignancy. His chapbook contains seven poems. The first, titled “That’s Entertainment,” deals directly with the concept of white half vs. black half:

White half the white half mule the black half black / But more
pleasing to either eye more hav-
ing neither but the black half eye more hav- / ing neither
which which half

McCrae sets-up a lexical, almost Dr. Suessian employment of language by the sly use of repetition which seeks to both hammer in the words and to force the reader to re-examine each word in relation to the other. When McCrae writes, “which which,” I think first which white, which black, but then when I reread “which which” it becomes an impatient question or demand. The following five poems are titled “Mulatto.” Instead of simply using people, McCrae utilizes the animal image (mule, horse, donkey) in “Mulatto,” thereby achieving the surrealistic trick of making anew a topic which has been a long historical abhorrent in American history and blurring the distinction between animal and human.

The first “Mulatto” poem begins, “Half-donkey and half-human being half-horse/”; the second “Mulatto” poem explores the old adage of one drop will do you, “Not even half three-eighths one drop of blood/ Is blood is blood is blood my blood is not/ My mother’s blood my body in her body/”. Anyone who has lived the experience of being bi- or multi-ethnic will easily tell you that the “one drop” does not allow you belong to one side or the other, in fact, this mixed identity often finds you neither accepted by the white or the black community. The fourth “Mulatto” poem deals with this by recalling an experience where a black girl is being sexualized by white boys—she exists in their eyes not as a black person, but first and foremost as an object of sex: “The white boys licked her breast it was a game / It had a name and that is how I knew / It was a game.” The white boys are in the position of power, so they have the ability to name and then to define the game. The speaker of the poem decides he wants to be in on the game:

I got in line    and all the white boys saw

There was a nigger in the line    a mule
But none of them could tell    and the one black girl
Called me a nigger made   the white boys laugh
One of us had to save the other one

The last poem in One Neither One is entitled “Ghost,” and it deals with fragmentary ideas of self and memory, that other hiding, ghosting inside and caught in this in-betweeness. One Neither One excels not only for its subject but also for McCrae’s poetics: his inventive use of line breaks, how he works the space on the page, and the ability to effectively incorporate surrealism. My only disappointment with this chapbook is that it feels too brief and left me wanting to read more.

* I used “bi-racial” in this review because it is a term common to readers, but decided to put it in quotes since race itself is a construct and politically speaking, some of us chose not to empower the word and its antiquated definition.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Octopus Books, Shane McCrae, Steven Karl
Posted in reviews

World’s End

Monday, August 24th, 2009

by Pablo Neruda
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“I am an obscure professor: / I teach classes of light to the earth.”

neruda worlds end cover Pablo Neruda’s World’s End has finally been translated into English 40 years after its initial publication in Spanish. Translator William O’Daly does a wonderful job of keeping the language palpable and rhythmic. Written five years before the end of Neruda’s life, this eerily relevant book is also a wonderful introduction to Neruda because of its balance of image and representative message.

If you look for Neruda in the bookstore, and you should every now and again, you will generally find multiple collections and repackagings of his romantic verses or odes. Neruda wrote some of the finest romantic poetry ever put on the page. However, remembering him as a romantic poet would be like remembering Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets who also did some stuff on the stage. Neruda is political, a fierce and essential critic of 20th century international affairs.

World’s End, the last installment in Copper Canyon’s long effort to publish all of Neruda’s final books (The Hands of Day is reviewed here), is very heavy on two of Neruda’s most valuable contributions to literature – political commentary and humanism. For Neruda, the two go hand-in-hand. There are no political associations or events without personal associations and events. Our amazing ability for denial that allows us to wear shoes made by starving children is cultivated by the little, personal denials we make in our everyday lives. But Neruda does not indict his readers; he empathizes:

Memories do not nourish me,
and I embark on the life before me
moving the plaster of the century
and the shoe of each day,
suffering without a cross the torment
of being the one most crucified,
torn to shreds under the wheels
of the false, victorious century.

(from “Time in the Life”)

We lied to our friends
In the sadness or the silence,
And the enemy lied to us
With a mouthful of hate.

It was the cold age of war.

It was the quiet age of hate.

From time to time a bomb
Burned the soul of Vietnam…

(from “Know It Know It Know It”)

He often refers to the close or end of the 20th century (still 1/3 of the century left to go) as being the end of a global shame fueled by blood, miscommunication, greed and convenient and destructive ideologies:

A century with shoe shops
filled the world with shoes
while feet were cut off
by snow or by fire,
by gas or by ax!

At times I remain bowed
by all that weighs on my back,
the repeated punishment:
it took a lot for me to learn to die
with each incomprehensible death
and to bear the remorse
of the wantonly criminal:
because after the cruelty
and even after the vengeance
Perhaps we were not so innocent
given that we went on with our lives
as they were killing the others.

Perhaps we rob our better brothers
of their lives.

(from “The Wars”)

Neruda repeatedly slams the war in Vietnam, even accusing Gen. Westmoreland by name (“Vietnam”). He views Cuba and Fidel Castro as shining stars held up to the world as an example of the true future. Neruda was heavily criticized for his support of Castro, but the beauty of World’s End is that, as you read some of the greatest literature of the 20th century, you also receive a lesson in what it means to experience and interpret history as it passes. Neruda’s words are always global in scope, and pointed towards certain ideals that Castro represented to many.

There are eleven sections to the book and it becomes more focused on individual experiences as it progresses. As always, Neruda is heavy on natural imagery. Fortunately, Neruda is the only person who can use “sea” 1,000 times in a single book (he doesn’t, but he could have if he had so chosen) and truly evoke the purest experience of that breathtaking phenomenon every time.

I learned the why of misfortune
in the school of water.
The sea is a wounded planet
and the breaking is its greatness:
this star feel into our hands:
from the tower of salt
scatters its heritage
of living shadow and furious light.

It has not married the earth.

We still do not understand it.

(from “Seas”)

He uses nature for imagery, but obviously derives significant meaning and purpose for a place through its landscapes. He viewed Chile as his motherland and that land had a character wholly independent from, but essentially influential to, the people:

There is a cemetery of bees
there in my land, in Patagonia,
and they return with honey on their backs
to die of so much sweetness.
it is a stormy region
curved like a crossbow,
with a permanent rainbow,
like the tail of a pheasant:
the falls of the river roar,
the foam leaps like a hare,
the wind cracks and expands
in the surrounding solitude:
the meadow is a circle,
its mouth full of snow
and its belly ruddy.

there they arrive on by one,
a million with another million,
all the bees arrive to die
until the earth is covered
in great yellow mountains.

I will never forget their fragrance.

(from “Bees (II))

The only form absent here is the ode. You won’t miss it. You love Neruda; you might not know it yet due to limited or biased exposure. World’s End is a perfect in-road to him, with a balance of politics, romance, genuine human experience and more mind-altering simplicities than most poets conceive in a lifetime.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Matt Soucy, Pablo Neruda
Posted in reviews

Selected Poems

Monday, July 13th, 2009

by Geoffrey Hill
Yale University Press 2009
Reviewed by John Deming

Required Reading

hill cover There are, by my count, 106 stray hairs down the centerpath of Geoffrey Hill’s horseshoe pattern. Britain’s best poet is in extreme hi-def on the cover his new Selected, and you can count his hairs, you can match paint samples to the pink of his nose, you can even return the stare of a pair of eyes set two ticks left of murder (or, if you prefer, set to Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II). Hill looks in charge here, and I wonder if he is the only living poet who can pull off such a book cover with what might be the total absence of irony. Geoffrey Hill is serious as hell.

Serious as hell, and he’s looking right at you. Well, not at you, if you are most readers. As Hill-champion William Logan states in a review of Hill’s 2008 book, A Treatise of Civil Power, “Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him.” And Hill’s frequent inscrutability, his ostensibly exclusionary intellect, are often accused of bullying readers out of his work; his committed, if nebulous relationship with Christianity is blamed for alienating them. Over the course of Hill’s Selected Poems, a reader finds countless obscure historical, literary, artistic and religious references rendered almost casually in the midst of thick, lapidary verse. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you don’t.

But more important than any of this is the fact that Hill is, above all else, a first rate musician. In the same review, Logan threads Hill’s reliance on allusion and reference with those of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound:

Modernism asked just how far the poet could expect the reader to mole about in old books to make sense of a poem. Eliot provided notes to “The Waste Land” as a casual afterthought, to fill out a slim volume; and Pound buried so many moldy allusions through “The Cantos” that scholars have been hunting the truffles ever since. Both poets felt that poems could survive obscurity without help from the slush of footnotes we expect in the Norton Anthology; yet, without explication, a poem like Hill’s is hardly a poem, just language at war with itself.

Fair enough. Did Eliot and Pound expect future audiences to get the allusions even without footnotes? Or were the poems to survive on mystery, music and metaphor alone? If we are to avoid ad hominem silliness, their intentions shouldn’t mattter at all. The issue is how much knowledge one must have to access a poet or poem.

The statement about Eliot and Pound calls to mind a statement made by another purportedly “difficult” poet, John Ashbery. If Eliot and Pound are right, and a good allusionary poem can survive without footnotes, what are the allusions there for? They are a platform for further discovery, or for the making of music. Ashbery has stated that he likes music for its “ability to be convincing, to carry an argument successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.” He went a step further: “I would like to do this in poetry.” If unknown quantities are okay, then it seems that he is philosophically in tune with Eliot and Pound, who believed that their poems could “survive obscurity without help from…footnotes.” (If you have a hard time buying any link between Ashbery and Eliot, put Four Quartets and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” side by side.) In a recent essay on Ashbery, Stephen Burt assesses the ways that Ashbery, too, makes use of obscure references:

Critics make heavy weather of the flow of information through Ashbery’s poems—almost any piece of news or slang, as well as any shard of old high culture, may turn up, as if brought in by those tides. But Ashbery’s sustained interest lies more with the tides than with anything they bring in…to seek allusions, or to seek a continuous tradition, is to miss the point. Where other poets ask us to look everything up, or berate us for not being as learned as they, Ashbery implies that life is too short for him to expect us to learn what he knows.

Ashbery and Hill are very different poets, and Hill might even be among those who would “berate us for not knowing what he knows.” But again, the notion of assigning value based on the author’s intentions needs to be squashed. The poets are different because Ashbery’s references map the unpredictable associations of a mind in motion, while Hill’s references are often the subject or inspiration of the poem. But Hill’s best poems are not good because they are allusionary. Where Eliot was often liberated by allusions and used them as a platform for creative invention, Pound was regularly stifled by them, using his education in many cases as an end rather than a means. Hill’s allusions provide significant depth and value to his poems; but they can also convince as Ashbery’s “unknown quantities,” perhaps even inspire the research it takes to learn of them.

The point is that one can listen to and enjoy a symphony without being able to name every harmony. If the music is “convincing” enough to warrant deeper examination, the listener’s understanding of the music becomes much more sophisticated. But the listener will never be able to play a C# on his violin and then say clearly what the note “means.” This is the important thing that poetry and music have in common: they present us with the opportunity for interpretation, while the original article (the C#, the poem) stands as the only real—and the most convincing—explanation of itself.

This is why we should herald the publication of Geoffrey Hill’s Selected Poems in the United States (it was first published by Penguin in Britain in 2006). By assembling this fertile, ever-changing body of poetry, editors have created tremendous potential for readers to find a way into his music. The history of humanity is important because human beings are responsible for countless atrocities performed in the name of God, of ideology, of country. Hill mines history; he doesn’t let things sleep, yet he tends to avoid any specific moral code. He mines it for truths that, if they exist, exist beyond specific events that pointed towards them. Imbibe these four lines, which begin the fourth section of “Funeral Music,” an eight-part elegy from his second book, King Log:

Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not
Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,
Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly
Indestructible. That I can believe.

“Soul,” or the idea of soul, is less precious than mind, because mind is temporary. The undeniably religious Hill reverses religious and intellectual bromides like no one else in the game, and has here arrived at an important, inventive, lyric. But let’s back up; before the poem even began, the poet informed us he is in fact elegizing three people:

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483

Does this knowledge change your reading of the previous four lines? It might, but only in a way that enriches the lines, gives them a ground to stand on. These specific deaths served as a platform for poetry; the poetry is what is left. To read these names and be turned off—to say I’ve never heard of these folks, so this poem is not going to be for me—is to miss out on Hill’s devastating enjambments (“it will not / Endure.”), on the precision of his bewildering, melancholy establishment of the constitution of the mind:

…I believe in my
Abandonment, since it is what I have…

the voice in this poem tells us, and speaks in the end to anyone who is

Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

Maybe next you land on Wikipedia, getting some background on de la Pole. Maybe then you’re back to part one. Maybe not. The other important thing about Hill, or any good poet, really, is the way his poetry unpacks itself with repeated reads. Nobody knows that their favorite song is their favorite song the first time they hear it. Investigation is a symptom, not a prerequisite.

To feel excluded by Hill is to misread him; surely the internet is no guarantee to provide adequate or even accurate context for every poem (and surely Hill buries some allusions so deep, you can not even know to look for them), but the point is that a reader can be “convinced” before doing a stitch of research. The voices in these poems are deeply haunted; they are plagued by memory and by the history of human vileness; they are philosophical; they are both ecstatic and petrified and the beauty of the natural world. Speech! Speech!, a book-length poem published in 2000, is regularly maligned (even by Logan) as over-written, inscrutable and verbose, and is about as close as Hill comes to drunken confession. Yet there are passages that blend his sharp eye and sharp mind as well as any he’s written:

First day of the week: rain
on perennial ground cover, a sheen
like oil of verdure where the rock shows through;
dark ochre patched more dark, with stubborn glaze;
rough soggy drystone clinging to the fell,
broken by hawthorns. What survives
of memory | you can call indigenous
if you recall anything. Finally
untranscribable, that which is | wrests back
more than can be revived; inuring us
through deprivation | below and beyond life,
hard-come-by loss of self | self’s restitution.

The poet is poised, serious, purposeful. Loss of self is self’s restitution; people are deprived and deprive each other, all the while held by memory, even as it vanishes. The notion of restitution also closes a shorter poem from 2006’s Without; here is “Offertorium: December 2002” in its entirety:

For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard
admonitory sparse berries, atrorubent
stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light:

for late distortions lodged by first mistakes;
for all departing, as our selves, from time;
for random justice held with things half-known,

with restitution if things come to that.

That’s a pretty big if. The title implies an essentially Christian ode, but the offertory reads as a toast to whatever happens, to whatever we have the power to make happen, if we can summon any will. Is it in God’s hands? Ours? Hill seems unable to put faith in either fate or free will. Lyric seems about the only certainty; the poem is carved in stone. By addressing himself to “late distortions lodged by first mistakes,” he identifies human folly: our unavoidable propensity towards mistake and incompletion. As with the previous passage, there is a sense of dense unknowing which sinks further under the weight of constant separation and destruction: destruction of epochs and of individual minds. Hill is never crystal clear, and importantly, never states for sure whether all human efforts are futile—they may very well be—but he’s equally willing, if only subtlely, to hint at redemption.

This Selected Poems is flawed, because it contains no index, and because the Table of Contents only lists the pages on which the selections from each book begins; to find specific poems, one must do considerable hunting. Also, it entirely excludes his latest and possibly best book, 2008’s A Treatise of Civil Power, only because this is a regurgitation of the 2006 English Selected. Generally, a more thorough Collected would do the poet more justice. But I think of other ostensible weaknesses in this volume – the lack of any footnotes or of any editor’s introduction – as a plus, because they don’t force feed a particular reading of the work. Better that the verses convince on their own, because to the steady-eyed reader, convince they do. He identifies social patterns and patterns among the powerful; he debates morality; he holds everyone, and himself, accountable; and he does so with lyric thunder. Call it music. This is one of the most important books published this year.

Serious as hell in an age of irony: it’s not a curse. And to call elements of knowledge a prerequisite is to spraypaint a door on a brick wall. It’s to tell little Janey “no” when she says she wants to learn the violin: she’d be better off already knowing how. Hill’s allusions can become hilarious in their obscurity, but simultaneously provide richness and depth to his poems; these poems ultimately are splendid because they outstrip their references and find metaphor.

Stephen Burt uses the “wave” metaphor in talking about Ashbery. It is a metaphor that has been used by Ashbery himself (“A Wave”), and also by Wallace Stevens (“The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”) and perhaps most ablely by Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self-Reliance”: “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.” It is important for Hill to troll old horrors. In the process, he finds a universal music. So, he’s not looking at you, exactly. But that’s okay. He’s looking at everything else.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Geoffrey Hill, John Deming, Yale University Press
Posted in reviews

With Deer

Monday, April 13th, 2009

by Aase Berg (translation by Johannes Göransson)
Black Ocean 2009
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

Gnawing Intellectual Animals

berg cover Swedish poet, author and literary critic Aase Berg has risen to the upper tiers of her native country’s contemporary poetry and surrealist art worlds. She has published five full-length collections and throngs of innovative fiction, as well as writings on surrealism, popular culture and artistic theory. Her first book, Hos rådjur (With Deer), was initially published in Sweden by Bonnier in 1996; a new translation by Johannes Göransson, Berg’s first into English, was released last month by Black Ocean.

With a few exceptions, Berg’s poetry is composed in prose-block formatting with which she attempts holistic movements and interpretations through repeated words, forms and sounds. The result is a book-long, desentisizing plunge into the “water bottoms” of the underworld, a place she knows all too well. With Deer allows English readers to witness firsthand the impetus of a brilliant career while validating the tremendous praise Berg has garnered and so clearly deserves. Operating thematically social taboos such as witchcraft, cannibalism, and necrophilia, Berg’s poems comprise six sections of nightmarish fugues narrated by characters with distorted consciousnesses and reflected in settings that celebrate the brutality of nature.

In the first section, “In the Guinea Pig Cave,” Berg snatches at the “black vein” of consciousness; the opener, “Still,” pulls us into her cavernous world. We are forced to be still and to focus on the repetition of lines in pieces like “Water Bottoms,” where Berg works cyclically with birth, life and decay, portraying these processes through the lens of a forest marsh scene. After setting up the environment with roots, trunks, snakes, water, and insects, Berg employs language that is haunting and fresh:

The sweet stalk will bend backwards toward the pain.
And here a feather moves toward the river surface, as she who
loves water sinks back through the bottoms of light.

Though her fluency in biologic vernacular is impressive, Berg’s narration is not the voice of a scientist, nor is it merely an objective portrayal of nature’s dark side. The final two poems describe a visceral attraction not only to human corpses, but to animal remains. Berg expounds on a peculiar spiritual fulfillment in a wicked form of transubstantiation, yet she is never quite disgusting, never shocks for the sake of shock; she is instead surreal, mystical and otherwordly, channeling a voice that is not quite human, each description perfectly articulated, each image stamped with the clear and memorable print of a true poet.

“Fox” initiates the second section (brutally titled “Flesh-Shedding Time”) and is one of the first narrative poems in the collection. In a beautiful conglomeration of emotion, animal paramour Berg presents the violent imagery of animal mutilation as the initial stimuli, and she responds with a calculated and detailed human fluid secretion. The repetition of particular words and phrases such as “monstrosity” is particularly powerful, especially when we consider that it is the male human being referred to amidst this plethora of external grotesqueness. With Berg, all emotions, expressions, and memories are expressed not through conventional explanation and nuance, but through poetically-direct descriptions of anatomical functions and processes.

As our poet moves more overtly into the realm of sexuality in pieces such as “Gristle Day,” she provides a chilling account of a squirrel’s demise; an unspeakable ecstasy in the animal’s death culminates when “the squirrel screams.” This practically orgasmic catharsis—extreme, unspeakable—isn’t unlike the conclusions of many of her sensually explicit pieces such as “The Red Kiss,” “Mass” and “Mastiff.” “Fox Heart” is a playful allegory in which she redefines the processes of stimulation, erection, fellatio, ejaculation, and as always with Berg, the aftermath. These poems reiterate her fascination with the unsightly, unsanctioned desires of humanity. She not only reveals them for our inspection, she screams them out, obliterating the masks they hide behind, peeling up rocks, shoveling aside brush, digging deeper, showing us what we are, at our core, intellectual animals.

Section III, “Seal Bound,” evolves into dream sequences in which the poet is inspired by palpable tragedy to express orchestrations of hallucinatory removal. Berg utilizes recurring phrases and images with great effectiveness, expounding on various interpretations of the ideas of flesh, dough, heat, and blood. Indeed, these are not only the primary components in the world Berg creates, they are the tools Berg uses to whittle away at our perceptions of reality.

In “Seal Mutilation” (more ironic than brutal), the naturally occurring processes of birth, feeding, living, and dying are severely distorted, while the sentences themselves are distorted. There is feeding through vomiting, living through decaying, drought through rain, and birth through death, as exemplified in pictures like: “miscarriage river.”

“Breast Horses” anchors the fourth section of With Deer and includes great emphasis on lungs, breasts, and eyes, particularly, the eyes of the other character in the poem, an image which is repeated to conclude each line. Berg employs electrifying grammar in which adjectives interchange with nouns and replace one another throughout. Her composition maneuvers itself in a highly tense, tightly-spun structure.

“Harpy” and “Wroth Snakewrought” round out this section and serve as great examples of why its far more constructive to talk about the sounds and feelings created in Berg’s syntax and diction than it is to dwell on the multiplicity of metaphorical implications in her poetry. Berg is unique and exploratory. In these poems, particularly in the final stanzas, we get an amazing musicality which taps outward from the darkness, a dream-like echoing that is distant and beautiful (a musicality maintained with apparent ease by translator Göransson). Berg (and Göransson) spin sounds fiddlers, creating a riddle-like, nursery rhyme effect which culminates with multiplication and constant perversion of patterns in the natural world.

Section V, “Inside the Deer,” includes ghostly renditions such as “Shard,” “Deep Inside the Rock” and “Doll Doll” in which our poet portrays a post-apocalyptic environment perfect for the passionate contemplation of her simultaneous, combative roles of passive observer and active healer. In “Jam,” she returns to her fascination with the paradoxes of feeding through killing, discharge through intake, and living through dying. In a meaningful conclusion, the animals get revenge on their human tormentors as the asp bites the speaker, and she overboils a dragon fly. Yes? Yes.

“Song Lake” contains beautiful language while conveying stark scenes of decay. The poetry is so majestically musical, the reader has no choice but to give in to Berg’s eloquence and become completely entranced:

She lies leaned back across the stone at a strange angle, as if her
backbone was broken. The white bones glimmer through the
veil of water, and at times there is glittering from glass shrimp
and mantle animals, from the scales of mother-of-pearl fish.

By this point in the text, we have been sufficiently exposed to the shock of Berg’s subject matter (the broken backbone is a clean, almost pedestrian description, not shocking or frightening), and the revolving images of life and decay that she portrays are no longer alarming, but are indescribably moving and memorable. Appropriately, Berg concludes the poem with the lasting image of an “almost inhuman smile.”

“Iron-healed” begins the final section, “September of Glass.” This poem represents the closest Berg comes to a shift in tone, expressing a kind of a prayer that acknowledges the brevity and shortsightedness of physical reality and asks for a release of pain brought on by difficult choices in human integration. “I Walked Out in the North” continues this progression towards self-examination. It concludes, “I walked out in the North / toward the torment, followed by the heavy fragrance through / midnight. And there even I at last, dark with sap, allowed / myself to be touched.”

While the book’s last installment is comfortably occupied by the delightfully horrific perversity that oozes from the lines in the previous poems with pieces such as “The Hypotenuse” and “We Thread up Lizards,” a genuine attempt at forgiveness for humanity on the part of the poet cannot be overlooked. In the final work of the collection, “Logging Time,” Berg juxtaposes the need to survive and the need to destroy before concluding her meditation with hopefulness:

Now it is time for the cutting
to slowly start to heal.

Alone, the words are plain. In context, they are a gut-punch. If one attempts to find meaning by reducing the world and its things to their impenetrable cores, one finds patterns, even beauty; there is, then, an indelible contrast between dissection and mutilation, between curiosity and fury, between fusion and separation.

***

Berg’s poems are equivocal in meaning and evasive in interpretation. They generate tremendous discussion and stirring within the reader: something ancient about the human intellect, something integral to our desire and need for poetry, or the process of describing and detailing surreal emotions and strains of the human existence that result from angst and brutality. This is what Berg does best, and she accomplishes this by detaching herself from predictable human intellect. Her voice is a hybrid of biologist, tribal woman and philosopher-poet, while her poems are dreamy, hallucinatory and ever-moving. Berg’s work gnaws slowly at the surface of the psyche, opening it up to a sublime rarely experienced in post-post-modern literature. Goransson’s translation is both clever and transparent, Berg’s images are rapturous and With Deer is a harrowing symphony.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Aase Berg, Black Ocean, Johannes Goransson, Rick Marlatt
Posted in reviews

Human Dark With Sugar

Friday, March 6th, 2009

by Brenda Shaughnessy
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Cate Peebles

Fast Into You

In the poem “Replaceable Until You’re Not,” Brenda Shaughnessy writes, “You are not broken. You break again / and again because // that’s what breaking means / To be whole…I am yours. I am still I.” Throughout Human Dark With Sugar, her long-anticipated second collection of poems, we meet with an assertive but vulnerable speaker. This is a book of many sections, subsections, titles and subtitles, all held in place by a spine and a name. To be human is to be a whole mess all bound by flesh and etcetera into a freakish, thinking, feeling thing — one that relentlessly, joyfully, picks itself apart. Shaughnessy draws attention to the contradiction of being made up of so many parts while appearing to be one single body.

The book is divided into three sections: Anodyne, Ambrosia, and Astrolabe. And within these sections, the poems are further divided into parts—couplets, tercets, numerical sections, and named numerical sections. For example, “This Loved Body” is divided into 20 parts. But the writing in no way feels calculated or stilted by the breaks. The movement from part to part, poem to poem, is seamless. The poems explore these typographical divisions lyrically, with an intensely self-aware speaker; take these lines in “Why Is the Color of Snow?”:

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
to the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

…

What is constant is white…

Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self…

What is constant here is the insistence in the speaker’s voice. She consistently craves a closer look at the transient moment and the individual’s–her–passage through it.

The joy in these poems is found in their humor, and there is humor everywhere. Shaughnessy is clever without being obnoxious about it and her wit keeps the poems moving. In “Breasted Landscape” she describes Autumn as “scrambled math and nipples.” And in an anti-ode to the moon called “I’m Over the Moon,” she writes,

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone.

She doesn’t shy away from raunchy either, as in the next lines:

I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand…

I won’t give away any more, but it gets even dirtier. It’s this mix of humor and directness that keeps the writing from ever slipping into the ho-hum. Shaughnessy hits many notes, from angry to horny to wistful. Reading these poems you run an emotional gamut, but you do so with someone who doesn’t sink and drag.

I’ve heard many of these poems read aloud on several occasions, and I have now read the book about three times, and I still find it moving, erotic and intellectually engaging. If you get a chance to hear Brenda Shaughnessy read, you should go. Of course, if you are unable, the book itself stands up to multiple reads and does not fall flat. It’s the kind of book you might want to read when you’re in a sulky mood, because you can identify with the longing and pain and then laugh at yourself and long some more. The sugar and the darkness are inseparable.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Brenda Shaughnessy, Cate Peebles, Copper Canyon Press
Posted in reviews

The Ghost Soldiers

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

by James Tate
Ecco Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

“What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.”

ghost soldiers A winter ago, I drank beer at a bar with a literary critic. He told me that he had all but given up on James Tate for a pretty credible reason: he’d been let down too many times by story-poems that started with cleverness of purpose, but meandered into what seemed a series of arbitrary whims. His disappointment in Tate was like that of a dog owner shocked when his “good dog” bites a neighborhood girl and has to be euthanized. Like that of a ten-year-old whose divorced Dad always calls eight minutes before their weekly visits to Applebee’s to say “too busy, but definitely next week.” After a while, I suppose, one stops believing.

But believe me, The Ghost Soldiers is going to linger. It’s true that sometimes, the suspension of disbelief one must employ when entering a Tate tale doesn’t pay off; the poem ends, one feels duped. Both The Ghost Soldiers and his last book, Return to the City of White Donkeys, are bulky and so include such poems. But all of Tate’s new poems are refreshingly chancy, and the lesser poems martyr themselves before their more marvelous battle-buddies. His most fully-imagined poems crystallize as they proceed, and present an otherwordly quality that no contemporary writer can match. Living in Tate’s world has to do with waking up and realizing you can’t remember your own name. For the reader, too, it means waking up on a battlefield in civilian clothes with a loaded M-16 at your side and no idea which side you’re fighting for. You enter, in Tate’s best work, a dream world. Or, in the case of The Ghost Soldiers, an Orwellian nightmare.

Tate is brilliant about war (has been since The Lost Pilot), and war is everywhere in The Ghost Soldiers. Which war? All of them, none of them. The roots are what matter: the fear, confusion, and powerlessness that impel individuals to become members of a group that means to destroy another group. Yet in The Ghost Soldiers, battlefield poems blend seamlessly with poems set in living rooms and kitchens on the homefront. Human interaction is everywhere, but nearly every conversation involves some kind of misunderstanding; everyone’s anxious, ripe with forboding, but hardly anyone knows why.

Tate’s men and women live in purgatory. People are accused of things they can’t say for sure they did or didn’t do; anyone can be perceived as both innocent and guilty, and everyone constantly, constantly forgets. Fear abounds: fear of death, fear of pain, fear of war, fear of trust, fear of Big Brother. In “The Goldfinches,” an average man is accused of plotting to bomb a building. He is innocent, so the charge feels outrageous. But the powerful can do whatever they like: “They are masters of illusion. The can make / you believe anything is real.” The man’s life was one thing, and now it is something else:

My lawyer says there
is no use fighting it, they always win. He advised me to plead
guilty and plead for leniency.

With such a ruthless power structure in place, it follows that the bulk of the public will work to serve their Leader; if confusion leads to fear, and fear to powerlessness, wholesale devotion is a way to route all three. Tate penetrates the grave consequences that can result from such blind devotion, to the extent that The Ghost Soldiers is the most violent thing he’s written. The chilling “Long Live the Queen” is told from a torturer’s perspective:

…I threw him back against the wall,
then smashed him in the face. When he fell to the floor, I kicked
him in the ribs. He laid there moaning and sputtering. I lay
down beside him. “You’re quite a remarkable man, you know,” I
said, “with many admirable qualities. The Queen would like to
meet you for tea. She’s a single lady now that her husband,
the King, has died. She’s very attractive for her age, which
I believe is the same as yours. I don’t mean to put any ideas
in your head, but I hope you’ll think it over,” I said. “Over
my dead body,” he said.

Smashed him in the face, however. Human reason only takes us so far, Tate offers; people need to find what, if anything, they can control. The torturer is validated by serving the Queen; the prisoner sustains himself by maintaining some abstract moral high ground. We readers don’t know the stakes, so beyond perhaps a general disapproval of torture, we don’t even know which side we’re on. It’s trancelike; life, we’re reminded, is a waking dream. War itself seems the enemy, but war is initiated by the same sense of confusion and powerlessness it generates.

So in Tate’s world, Big Brother too is a symptom. Perhaps people need government conspiracies in order to feel that something is being controlled. Someone has power. Perhaps we create problems for ourselves, if only so that we can control them, or let them control us:

…I want to have my wits
about me to know what’s going on. Maybe nothing’s going on,
just mass hysteria, waves of it sweeping over the country, people
whispering, then screaming, something is invading their lives,
stripping them of everything, covering them with spiders. The
fear grows and crushes them. They barely have the strength to
visit their doctors, who give them pills that make them happy.
And then they become addicted to these pills, and are terrified
of running out or being cut off.

Maybe the people are afraid and crazy; maybe the best way to control them is to keep them feeling afraid and crazy. Either way, it’s bleak, so it helps to align oneself with a cause, sidelining innate anxieties about living a meaningless life. Power structures come and go, but the urge for power will never leave us:

“This World Peace stuff is a load of crap,”
I said. “Men are killing each other all over the globe. That’s
what they do. They hate each other over land, religion, money,
whatever. It’s a way of life. What are we supposed to do, take
that away from them?”

An impossible war for peace, then, is the human predicament. And folksy Tate offers plenty of humans; you’ll meet Clifford, Joaquin, Mavis, Darcy, Jasper, Lester, Jones, Kimball, Jennings, Jaffee, Brian, Uncle Raymond, and dozens more, even Phongsri, who “lived in a very tiny world / but he knew how to blow it up.” Even from the relative safety of the homefront, individuals are thick with impending horror. In “Honey, Can You Hear Me?”, a confused husband thinks he and his wife have plans to go out for the evening, and says, “It will be wonderful to be there tonight”:

“We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “I meant here. It
will be wonderful to be here tonight,” I said. “A little romantic
night at home,” she said. What did she mean by “nomadic?” A little
nomadic night at home. There were times when I worried about
Alison.

There is confusion and miscommunication here that only the omniscent reader (or writer) is privy to. Perhaps the husband could reroute his confusion by joining the military and fighting for an ideology. But sometimes, even loyalty to a cause can’t deceive someone long enough for him/her to forget s/he too is confused. Confusion permeates the battlefield, too; in “The Enemy,” a man confesses that his life had been “squandered” until he joined the army: “I was an ideal / soldier… There / was nothing I wouldn’t do to please my officers.” Yet when we see him in battle, “right” and “wrong” break down:

I said to Kansas, “What are we doing wrong?” He
said, “You still don’t get it, do you? We’re the enemy.” I was
confused.

In The Ghost Soldiers, war tries, but can’t but provide what, say, professional sports provide: battle lines. Meaning, clearly defined. A war vet in the supermarket is interrupted by a woman who claims he “saved her village.” He’s hard pressed to see it that way, or to see it at all, but she insists:

…“No, that’s not true. You
were so brave and courageous,” she said. “That was a long time
ago. I have forgotten many of the details,” I said, and tried to
push past her.

Perhaps he’s right; the next person he bumps into says, “I ought to break your neck / right here in front of everybody, you low-down, vicious killer.” Rightness then amid nothingness and confusion has to do with perspective, and little else.

This tension is also implicit with Tate’s forward-minded formal considerations. Each poem is indented, and has the look and feel of a prose poem, but is in fact broken into lines. There a slow swell at work; while individual poems maintain singular line-lengths, line-lengths from poem to poem swell gracefully, and tend to get longer as the book proceeds (as they did in Return to the City…). Here we have the ebb and flow of tension, tension too shy and fearful to step out of line and become rage. They are poems of strong and secretive rhythm, poems as hidden and fearful as Tate’s narrators. Lines disguise themselves; they break at odd moments, the result of a mysterious compliance to order. Tate is the only poet of his stature that insists upon yet conceals invention in this way.

I should note again that The Ghost Soldiers is not exempt for the meandering I mentioned in the beginning. Does Tate make it up at random as he goes along? Charles Simic seems to think so: “To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate’s genius…just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry.” Some poems become boring or inconsequential as they progress. In others, the poet too plainly writes himself out of the poem; in “Map of the Lost World,” for example, our narrator describes interesting objects that he finds while cleaning his house. He then sits down to think, and concludes by likening his contemplation to “pulling a yak over / a mountaintop, hauling water and rice to a dead wise man, / who knows nothing, says nothing.” Literally, the man is sitting on his couch. Early on, the poem is tastefully peppered with nostalgia. But Tate’s poems are so deeply metaphorical by themselves that when a narrator starts making his own yak and rice metaphors out of the blue, the results are uninteresting.

But the improvisational vibrations in these poems tend to arrive flush with their subject matter, as if they too are written purely from powerlessness and confusion, and stand as an experiment; the poet sits as scientist creating hypotheses, looking for something–and somehow maitains his charm throughout. What he finds is what Wallace Stevens found: imagination (incidentally, Stevens supplies the book’s epigraph: “The paratroopers fall and as they fall / They mow the lawn.”). He creates a world and controls it the best he can. Sometimes his findings are insignificant, but in more than a few cases, they are as palpable and meaningful as the sacs in your lungs, as whatever it was you dreamt last night. In the end, the ideal answer to Tate’s challenges is a form of personal responsibility: “What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.” Man, not men, woman, not women. Individuals may seem powerless, but the extent to which they can control their own actions is the extent to which they can control anything at all.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Ecco Press, James Tate, John Deming
Posted in reviews

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse

Friday, April 18th, 2008

by Darcie Dennigan
Fordham University Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Hart

Atom Smasher

It’s a beautiful Spring day here in Ohio. Things are turning green and bursting. And finally, once again, the sun is upon us after months of “winter events” and gray skies/cold rain. I’m typing in the dining room, and through the windows to my left I can see Melanie outside planting pansies, hyacinth, and mums. Meanwhile, our nearly two year old daughter is “helping” her mother—picking up dirt, pointing at birds (singing “bird bird bird”) and pulling the petals off the flowers where she can. Earlier, as I was trying to bring her inside to eat lunch she wouldn’t let go of the handful of purple petals she had clinched in her hand, no sir. A little fit ensued. The terrible twos. Definitely not a big deal, but her fist would NOT open. Thus, the purple petals now strewn about my living room and kitchen floors.

Of course, this is not a disquisition on parenting, nor is it a description of the Midwest in Spring. This is—will be—as the title promises—a “review” of Darcie Dennigan’s debut book of poems, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, which won the 2006-2007 Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize—and which, by the by, I have been waiting to read for quite some time.

I plan to argue, here, (among other, unplanned things—we shall see!) that more than with a lot of other books, the title of Dennigan’s Corinna sets the stage—provides an associative backdrop and atmosphere—that when unraveled can provide a useful way of thinking about the book both as a whole and in terms of its individual poems.

Given this, I should perhaps connect the tissue of my initial domestic anecdote, as tenuous as it may be, to the book at hand. At the heart of Dennigan’s book is “A-maying” (both in its title and its content), which my daughter without any prompting is doing right now—that is, celebrating the end of winter via the gathering (and beheading!) of Spring flowers. Of course, it’s important to remember that at the heart of a-maying is May Day—and its various festivities: gathering spring flowers (yet again), the crowning of the May Queen, dancing round the maypole, and in more recent years parades and celebrations in support of labor and workers’ rights, a whole host of left-wing (“bird, bird, bird”) political demonstrations. In other words, to go a-maying is to demonstratively spring into Spring.

However, I can’t also help but be reminded associatively that “May Day” is “mayday,” the international radiotelephone distress signal used by ships and aircraft—as well as by fire and police departments (in “mayday situations”) to declare the commencement of search and rescue operations. Associatively speaking, then, a-maying has its darkside. In fact, “mayday” is a shortening of the French venez m’aider, which means “come help me”. And as long as we’re going out on associative limbs, looking at the French m’aider makes me think of the English “maiden” of which Dennigan’s Corrina is one. Her name is in fact a version of the Greek “Korinna” which is derived from kore meaning “maiden,” and furthermore is an epithet of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (the Greek goddess of agriculture) and Zeus (head honcho of the gods).

The story, which I’m sure most everybody knows, goes that Persephone, herself out a-maying with her attendant maidens, was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. He had apparently taken a liking to her and wanted her to be his queen, so he opened up the earth and essentially swallowed her. A May Day mayday indeed. However, this didn’t sit well with Demeter, who was so forlorn over her daughter’s disappearance that she failed to tend the crops, and thus the first winter came to the earth. By all accounts it was a TERRIBLE one. So bad in fact that Zeus eventually intervened, ordering Persephone to spend half the year in the underworld and half up top with her mother. Thus, explaining the changing of the seasons. And now for a brief hiatus.

I can imagine already people saying: well, if you have to do all of this associative research-y type work just to get the backdrop and atmosphere upon which Dennigan’s world turns, the poems must not stand so well on their own. On the contrary, it’s that they stand so well on their own—they’re rock solid! in fact—that allows them to fly. Spitting associative sparks off both real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Corinna invite readers to excavate, associate, and riff off of what’s given. As Dennigan writes near the end of “The Virgins,” which moves deftly in its first 15 lines from a loveseat on a New England porch to a “porcelain Mary three towns over” that “cries type O blood from her eyes” then onto the myth of Clytie and Apollo and finally to an avalanche scene on Mount Blanc in the French Alps:

…See how
I have gone from home to mythology
to the Alps & nobody has moved.

Love, when I say I want to be close
to you I should say more
about avalanches & bleeding out,
how we will move through eons
& hemispheres in a white clapboard house.

In other words, for me, these poems demonstrate both an incredible groundedness (in terms of form AND content), “nobody has moved” and an associative leaping, inter/woven-ness, “avalanches & bleeding out,” which is immeasurably interesting not only for what the poems say, but for what they point to as well. In a way, these poems work in the tradition of Keats’ Odes, which remain stable (because they’re actually about things) while sliding from one idea to another exploratively. Dennigan’s poems thus demonstrate a 21^st Century imaginative engagement with actual life, which is not only fantastic, but compelling. As Dennigan writes near the end of the book’s title poem:

All the front door keys to all the places
I have ever lived drip from the dogwood tree
& chime in the wind

—which makes me want to read and re-read and also do my homework. But back to the book’s title…

Many people will surely note that the title of Dennigan’s book directly references, and plays on, the title of 17^th century poet Robert Herrick’s “Corrina is Going A-Maying,” a poem that argues against keeping one’s maiden self cloistered away in the protective custody of decorum when one can be out frolicking among the daffodils, etc.

And while Herrick’s poem may not go as far in suggesting/arguing for physical good times (or more darkly, terrible ones) as, say, Andrew Marvel does with his coy mistress, there’s certainly enough ambiguity in Herrick’s poem to suggest that the speaker may have ulterior motives for getting Corinna and her posse out into the wildflowers.

This is a theme that Dennigan herself picks up in several of the poems in her book, including the aforementioned “The Virgins” and the title poem. However these themes are even more acutely tackled in “Orienteering in the Land of New Pirates,” where she writes, “…isn’t adventure always better than stagnant water?/ —I say this standing waist deep in a swamp.” Then later, “I wouldn’t want my boy to think the world is kind./ Wouldn’t want him to think his games have no dark side.” What’s great here and different from her 17^th Century models is the way she takes both sides of the argument, as both the persuader and the persuaded, for better or for worse. Another example of this occurs in “Eleven Thousand and One,” where the speaker, after weaving together the story of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgin martyrs with a contemporary Boston bar scene of five young women, who she’s rather voyeuristically watching through the bar window, she apologizes to “mom, god, you there” for allowing herself to be lured into connecting the dots and then, more importantly, connecting them to herself. Ultimately, the poem builds to its one unimagined momentous climax. Choosing expression over decorum, the speaker, who’s been leaning against a dying sapling for much of the poem, finally stops imagining the lives and purported lives of others and bursts out with, “I need to make love to something.”

Finally, besides “Corinna” and her “a-maying,” there’s also the apocalypse to contend with—a sense of universal or widespread destruction. In this As Dennigan writes in her poem “Interior Ghazal of a Lousy Girl,” (a poem which indeed does contain a ghazal in its interior:

Kingdom come.
Bring rum. Come

Sling, strum, come.
Stinging crumb, come.

Dennigan mum. Come,
my sobbing plum, come.

), “I am the excess of exuberance,/ one crummy girl swallowing ruin.” That is, the book contends with the apocalypse by eating it (the way Hades made the earth to swallow Persephone) again and again. How does one eat the apocalypse? Very carefully, but also as the interior Ghazal above demonstrates by not giving up in the face of it and by going to the party no matter come what a-maying (“Kingdom come. Bring rum.”). In other words, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse is powered by conundrum, surprise, imagination, recklessness, wonderment, earnestness, and above all giant playfulness and smarts. Even as it plumbs the depths, it refuses to take itself too seriously—from the palindromic “Sit on a Potato Pan Otis” to “The New Constellation” (which begins, “I loved the Starbucks”) to the amazing prose poem “The New Mothers” (which tells the story of orphan hospital nurses who invent new mothers for their patients out of cheap wind-up clocks, even as the poem deconstructs its own un“metered” language into a tick-tocking new mother tongue). Just as Corinna A-Maying plays against the Apocalypse that follows it in the book’s title, Dennigan is also careful in the poems themselves to play playfulness (both in form and content) against the book’s more devastating/earnest moments. No place is this more apparent than in the poem “Sentimental Atom Smasher”, which uses the opening of the greatest bar joke ever told as a way to talk about longing, stasis, and feeling:

So this guy walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Sorry,
               the bartender says, I only sell atom smashers

                And the guy says well isn’t that America for you–
every happy-hour Nelson’s a homemade physicist and no thank you,

just an ice cold one, but it’s too late–suddenly, he’s on his butt
                in a ballfield where handsome men are chasing a ball over grass

                sad grass, yellow like the hair of his once-young mother!
and again he says, no thank you–I’ve seen this movie before

And the bartender says it’s a joke and you’re inside its machine…

It’s funny ha-ha in spots, and also funny strange/funny not. It’s a joke alright—the joke’s a “joke,” because it’s actually poem—a sort of ode to Jokes and their shadows, and the poem itself’s a joke, because, well, “a guy walks into a bar,” and as a result we are immediately sucked into its wonderful machine:

A guy walks into a bar,

–actually just the beer-drinking bleachers of a ballfield–and says
                is this some kind of joke?

                 Well, says the bartender who has observed the little lamb
and the tyger burning bright and tickled their particulates,

because your life has lately been stagnant, we have yoked you
                 to a joke and we await the gasp that will gas up the cosmos…

                 Just then there’s a hit at the plate–and it’s going,
it’s going–gone to smash the guy in the skull

                 And since baseballs are made of nostalgia atoms, the guy,
with concussion, says I want to buy a coke for a nickel

                 I want to install applie pie perfumemakers in the crotch of every
                              tree
Bartender, bring me dried nosegays! Start the stalwart pageants!

Who hasn’t been cured of what ills them by getting hit in the head in a joke inside a joke inside a poem? Yes, of course, but what’s the punchline/final line, you ask? Is it an atom smasher that blasts away sentiment or a smasher of sentimental atoms? Well, as it turns out, neither is correct—the punchline is one that no doubt would make Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Koch, and even Robert Herrick proud: “the moonlight and the moonlight is curdling into freon…”

Then again, “If we only stay careful and awake—if we are good people—/ Ha. Then nothing.” Then “The Feeling of the World As a Bounded Whale Is the Mystical.” Then “I killed my heart to feel it.” “…a geologic instant…” Then “The Chrysler Driver blows his horn,” and Darcie Dennigan has this amazing new that you should read right now. Here in Ohio, the sun is going down. It’s a different day. Tomorrow, “There will be a loud report.”

Tags: 8.5 stars, Darcie Dennigan, Fordham University Press, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

Inflorescence

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

by Sarah Hannah
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

“The outraged exodus of birds”

hannah cover It’s easy to understand that matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be rearranged. Let’s claim for argument’s sake that the same can be said of the massless abstract consciousness that each human possesses. Is death as “end of all things” a logical fallacy, even if brain-level awareness is relegated to silence and space? I don’t mean “afterlife”; I mean that if time on earth is an abstraction relative to the rest of the universe, perhaps to have lived at all is to live eternally.

It would be simpler to talk of Sarah Hannah’s troubling second book in relation to an Elie Wiesel quote, part of which has become an easy cliché: that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. The rest of the statement is: “The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. The opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Life and death are not opposites, Sarah Hannah concurs in Inflorescence; they are entwined. To die in one stratum is to be born into another more abstracted stratum.

Inflorescence chronicles in piercing detail the sickness and death of the poet’s mother; our first person narrator tends constantly to her mother over the book’s first two sections, in part because of what feels like unswerving devotion, and in part because her mother seems to have no one else. “Westwood Lodge 1980-1990” pictures her mother in a mental hospital following a suicide attempt:

One day I arrive early, to your delight; I’m the only one,
After all, who comes. I’ve packed your acid-free
Papers and watercolors, though you didn’t ask. Forgive me,
You say, I’ll paint planets. Best thing I could have done.

These lines reveal a sense of accord between mother and daughter; they both seem drawn to the modernist notion that a person can make their own reality (“I’ll paint planets”). Years pass, and the narrator devotes herself to her mother as her mother slowly dies from a malignant brain tumor.

The beauty of this book starts in the imaginative distance that the poet, and perhaps her mother, keep from a conventional fear of death. “Common Creeping Thyme (Serpillum á Serpendo)” seems at first a trite play on the sonic fluke of “time” and “thyme.” It becomes disturbing rather quickly; the poet proposes her mother name every herb in her garden as a means of distraction as the doctor provides diagnosis:

His baby’s breath, annunciates: “Metasta—”
Rosemary! You holler, Rosemary! as your arthritic hand
Smacks down in triumph on the piled white sheets—

But what separates this book from other versified accounts of cancer deaths—and there are many—is the poet’s insistence that her mother wants to die, and not because she is old or ill; she has always wanted to die, and has in fact attempted suicide numerous times:

“Sized,” he concludes, then speaks slowly to my face.
“It doesn’t look good.” I turn to you, repeat
The clause. You beam. You’ve always wanted

A brain tumor, some definitive (read: physical)
Disease people will breathe above a whisper,
Some Bette Davis blight that brings Claude Rains

To your side, or better, your ex-husband from
His wife, and I’d go along with you laughing,
Waving Hi! to all who scurry past;

It is heartbreaking to imagine a woman who has willed her own death for a long time, romanticized it as a means of enacting self-against-the-world pathos, and taken pleasure in the effect that it will have on her ex-husband and others. This is compounded by the fact that the daughter feels included in the equation (“I’d go along with you laughing”). But how can devoted-daughter be an equal partner if she’s not actively dying? This presents a considerable amount of pressure. The relationship between the poet and her mother ought to be considered among the most complex in contemporary poetry.

However much her mother wills death (“We watched and watched the screen after the test / Was through. Oh yes! you almost shouted…”), make no mistake; it doesn’t come without severe physical pain. Earlier, her mother’s “arthritic hands” struck the sheets in triumph when she learned she would die. More difficult is the climax of this struggle at the end of the second section; the book’s almost perfect title poem depicts the death of the poet’s mother:

We’re worn through, paced out like this second-hand
Persian rug beneath the rented hospital bed
And commode (no longer any use). Your fists
Strike the sheets. There’s nothing I can do.

Yet however intimate a relationship the poet forms with death over the course of Inflorescence, she is still amazed by life. “Alembic” opens the book’s second section: “From three hundred thousand spawn, five minnows. / That one brilliant salmon who flew out of the stream.” In two lines, Hannah offers the infinite complications central to the abstract notion of “life”: to be alive at all is a lucky and amazing thing. At the same time, the hundreds of thousands of spawn who didn’t make the cut offer the inherent cruelty and capriciousness of living and dying.

And both the poet and her mother are enamored of flowers and herbs; they tend carefully to living things that can’t feel physical or emotional pain. The word inflorescence is defined before the start of the book; it means both mode of development and axis upon which flowers bloom and it means “the budding and unfolding of blossoms: FLOWERING.” In a sense, her mother’s slow death might be likened to a flowering; she is slowly being born into something else, into death, however mysterious or abstract.

The book’s final section maps the years after the poet’s mother has died. Something hard still grips our narrator, though she wavers between elements of hope about the world around her (“The dull glass absenting from my eyes, // The oil veil lifting from the world.”) to moments of despair. She is still deeply haunted by her mother; the specter of their apparent partnership during the mother’s death is still very much with the poet, who begins to contemplate her own death:

And finally, I promise to remain,
To hide and cackle in the great dark,
Fiercely inextricable.

Again, death is little more than rebirth into another strata; here the poet pledges to be “fiercely inextricable,” to “hide and cackle.” Or, her mother cackles from beyond the grave. What the poet experiences with her mother in Inflorescence is incredibly profound, as is the poet’s grasp on the complexities and contradictions implicit in the concepts of living and dying.

A friend said to me a few months back it would be impossible to review Sarah Hannah’s new book without mentioning her tragic suicide in May 2007; to an extent I think that has to be true (the book was scheduled to come out in November 2007, but the publishers bumped it up to September after Hannah’s death). Nevertheless it would be careless to prowl this book in an attempt to find some sense of reason relative to that tragedy. This book is as much about rebirth and the blazing immediacy of life as it is about death: again, that birth and death are not opposites, but a form of coalescence; after all, anything that lives will eventually die; the fact of death is required for the fact of life, and vice versa; if one is to impose the book on a poet’s personal life, it could as easily be seen as a personal rebirth after a family tragedy, especially considering the book’s conclusion.

The final poem in Inflorescence is titled “The Hutch,” and illustrates this principle perfectly. A wooden hutch that has been “slumbering for decades / in a moldy basement” wakes suddenly “to a new house”; we can probably imagine that this hutch belonged to the poet’s mother, though this isn’t stated explicitly in the poem. An empty panel in the back is opened for the first time in decades:

Deep: the scent of the wood itself—
Walnut, lost thirty, forty years,
Returned, a certain desperate stir,
Unquiet thoughts,
Felling, the outraged exodus of birds.

These, the final lines of the book, are doubly complex. We’re taken all the way back to the felling of the tree from which the hutch was made. Any birds that were then impelled to explode from the tree were “outraged” but were moving on. You could stack the metaphors here, but birds flying simultaneously from a tree as a mark of “outraged exodus” provides a gorgeous lyric moment, a moment of flight that one can reform how s/he sees fit. All of this flux of life and death can of course be perceived as an empowered attempt on the part of the poet to rationalize the grisly nature of her mother’s demise. But however you mean to square it, it can never be said that this poet possessed a shred of indifference. These poems are calculated with precision, with elegiac grace, and with a probe into the deepest questions of living life as a human being who lives and cares for other human beings; in short, this an immensely important book.

Tags: 8.5 stars, John Deming, Sarah Hannah
Posted in reviews

Elegy

Monday, January 21st, 2008

by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

“Goodnight. I will see you // Tomorrow. I know I will.”

bang cover Sometimes an elegy arrives with such force, it starts to feel like an individual poet can only have one tremendous elegy in them. Or one great person they’re capable of elegizing properly, a person capable of making the poet wrench in silence that there is no proper way to live in a world where this person has died. That’s not to imply that the poet doesn’t care as deeply about someone else: only that the transformation it causes and knowledge it yields means the elegy can probably only be written once.

Maybe. If so, Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy for her son Michael Donner Van Hook accomplishes this. Bang avoids the trap of simply narrating her own grief, and instead lays a crying, nightmarish, high-minded and elastic tribute beside the deceased. The poem “You Were You Are Elegy” makes her son her best and most important elegy. The world doesn’t exist without him:

I’ve been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I’m crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are

The narrator in Elegy is plenty grief-stricken, and even blames herself. Yet she confronts her son’s death with fierce and immutable intelligence; ultimately, this means a reminder that “The Role of Elegy” is not to expunge a poet’s grief, but can instead be a tribute to a life, or a person who was and is very real:

Come on stage and be yourself,
The elegist says to the dead. Show them
Now—after the fact—
What you were meant to be:

The performer of a live song.
A shoe. Now bow.
What is left but this:
The compulsion to tell.

These lines regard the difficulty one can have with the urge to “explain” oneself to other humans. We are authorities on our own lives, yet none of can properly know the totality of his or her own life; it is impossible to see its completion. It becomes the role of the elegist to tell the tale: not always of the person’s specific actions and deeds, but of that person at his or her greatest moments of inspiration: what s/he was “meant to be.”

The poet never states explicitly how her son died, though she gives his age (37) and hints that his death had to do with drug addiction: “this last act where you disappear / Behind the curtain of addiction catastrophe.” Her son died a full-grown adult, not a child, but it seems a mother never outgrows the feeling she should be the protector, a sensation fully realized in this recollection from “Worse”:

…Death is
A jerky reversal of forward momentum.
Back into memory. Into a cereal bowl
On a table decades ago, the color of an orange
Aspirin for a fever at age four
That produced a heat-filled forehead hallucination.
Think of a hive made of glass, all the bees,
Theoretically at least, describable but not all at once.
That’s my mind and you
Are doing all the things you ever did at once.

In the end, I think the poet’s great elegy recognizes the constancy suggested in that final line: her son is gone, and all the moments he ever lived outlie conventional, or at least present, “time.” “All the things” he ever did have little to do with seconds passing; they are one buzzing thing.

A great elegy, then, is the result of a death so immediate and painful that there is an inevitable, if to some extent imagined, realization that death is not what you thought it was. Time passes and people watch it, record it; beyond earthly life could be space-time and stasis. Nothing, even, equally something. After Michael’s death, the poet finds “He continued to live in the space that it took / To conjure him up.” I’ll repeat something I wrote in my review of Sarah Hannah’s final book: that along these lines, time on earth is just an abstraction, and it is possible to discover that to have lived at all is to live eternally.

Time can seem even less than an abstraction following such an important death; time is dumb, silly, cruel, and of little need—“The dull mind is a different kind / Of world. Earth was frozen.” The poet is left amazed, equally strengthened and dulled, by the fact that a whole year can pass after a tragedy. If the world is a new thing following this kind of death, one might live it out in tribute to the deceased. Then things will be as they were: rather than being two different kinds of abstractions, our tandem can inhabit the same vacancy.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Graywolf Press, John Deming, Mary Jo Bang
Posted in reviews

Protected: White Egrets

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Tags: 8.5 stars, Derek Walcott, FSG, Stephen de Jesus Frías
Posted in reviews