Posts Tagged ‘9 stars’

‘Touch’ and ‘Pierce the Skin’

Monday, September 12th, 2011

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011/2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“…to the whiteness of death”

Henri Cole’s new book of poetry, Touch, follows Pierce the Skin, which selected poems from his six collections published between 1987 and 2007. In the context of his work-to-date, Touch only gains in significance.

Although Cole’s The Visible Man was perhaps his most notable encounter with autobiography and gay identity when it came out in 1998, many of his abiding concerns and conceits have been present from the beginning. Despite the ongoing evolution of style and substance in his work, Cole has consistently written contemporary lyrics. Sometimes commemorative, as in “To the Forty-third President” in Blackbird and Wolf, sometimes occasional, as in “The Annulment” in The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, Cole’s verse finds meaning in the luminous skin of the world.

Cole’s lightness and delicacy, his reserve and restraint, also unify his work. Situated on the branch of modernism that extends from Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Stafford, Henri Cole operates a poem through the senses, figures out the world through imagery. His lines are “tempered and formalized,” like the “Poppies” of Blackbird. His elegy for his father in Middle Earth, “Radiant Ivory,” shows humble objects doing heavy lifting in service of the poem:

After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery.

Underneath the hood of these pristine poems roars a combustion engine, “memory, the motor of everything,” as Cole describes it in “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” in Blackbird. In “Chiffon Morning” from The Visible Man, he could be describing the sustaining act of writing when he says, “the mind replays what nurtures it.”  Blackbird’s “American Kestrel” offers an ars poetica:

…This is my home:
Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

Beauty is always tempered by brutality in Cole’s work. And a dynamic tension runs throughout, like a dangerous undertow. The comprehensiveness of his view is reflected in his unselfconscious melding of East and West, of Japanese and Chinese culture and classical Greek and Roman mythology. Childhood and adulthood alternate within one poem, as “the essence of self emerges / shuttling between parents” (“Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono,” Middle Earth), and “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s” (“Apollo,” The Visible Man). With each new book, the poet reveals more of the violence of his childhood. But these seeds were planted in the beginning, including “The family squabble, the bruised cranium” of “Ascension on Fire Island” in Zoo Wheel.

In his newest book, Henri Cole stretches the limits of his minimalist style, delves deeper into family memory, and widens the scope of the tensions he explores. Touch is divided into three sections, moving from the poet’s mother’s death to a troubled relationship with a younger man addicted to drugs. The volume begins with “Asleep in Jesus at Rest,” a poem of long lines laid out in overlapping caesuras, a looser and more expansive form than what we’ve come to expect from Cole. He repeats this form later in “Legend,” a bit further into the volume. And he includes “Grebe,” a poem that he translated from the French with the author, Claire Malroux. Although he continues his familiar syllabics, Cole includes more experimental pieces in Touch, such as the free verse collage of “By the Name of God, The Most Merciful and Gracious,” which gives voice to a victim of torture. If Blackbird’s “For the Forty-third President” signaled a more engagé stance, Touch does not disappoint, with additional anti-war poems such as “Quai Aux Fleurs” and “Sleeping Soldiers.”

Like his seniors—Glück, Gilbert, and others—and like his contemporaries—Frost, Powell, and others—Cole explores aging, loss, maturity, and mortality. If self, identity, and body have been enduring concerns throughout his work, then in “Myself Departing,” he treats the issue of age humorously:

My hair went away in the night while I was sleeping.
It sauntered along the avenue asking, “Why
should I commit myself to him? I have a personality
of my own.” Then my good stiff prick went, too.
It opened the window and climbed down the escape,
complaining, “I want to be with someone younger.”

This is in stark contrast to the stunning pathos of the first section of Touch, which is devoted to the poet’s mother’s illness and death and his affectionate care (as well as guilt and melancholy). Read Touch if only to appreciate the powerful poem “Shrike” in its full context. Cole begins by watching a bird capture a cricket, and then through association makes a poetic leap worthy of a trapeze artist. The cricket

. . . holds up
pretty good in a state of oneiric pain.
Once, long ago, when they were quarrelling about money,
Father put Mother’s head in the oven.
“Who are you?” It pleaded from the hell mouth.

In our inured age, we have ready clichés to describe abuse in families. Repetition has numbed their impact. Through understated elegance and direct simplicity, Cole makes this image indelible. In this section, Cole accurately captures the complexities of grieving, elaborating on the simple human truth he had first presented in “Paper Dolls” from The Look of Things: “goodbye / in a scene / at first holy, / then lurid.”

As a minimalist, Cole comes by ingenuousness naturally. An unlikely subject, such as a “Taxidermied Fawn,” leads to the discovery of a resonant truth:

A minor smear on the white spots is the only
evidence of a violent passage from bridal innocence
to the whiteness of death, which is the absence
of everything, and, in the end, all there really is.

After a career of deftly conjuring evocative imagery, Cole has earned the right to utter plain speech, as in the poem “Ulro”: “Cigarettes, love, work, liquor, brooding, despair— / one thing not controlled can destroy a life.”

More of the poet’s dexterity is on display in “Mechanical Soft,” which doubles and triples imagery, twisting the strand, while describing a son feeding his mother in hospice:

I am not
a typical son, I suppose, valuing happiness,
even while spooning mechanically soft pears—
like light vanishing—into the body whose tissue
once dissolved to create breast milk for me.

Cole’s Touch justifies the poetic obsession with childhood. As we age, circumstances call forward past experiences. We are never done remembering, or for that matter, discovering, as in “Dolphins”: “Recently, among Mother’s things, I found this: / ‘I am afraid of him. He need psychiatric care. He lead me / to believe strange things. He ignores me, threats me.’”

The dynamic tension of opposite forces evident in Cole’s previous books acquires deeper significance in Touch. The image of his mother’s hands in “Broom”—“hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair”—underscores how we know tenderness through cruelty. Other poems help extrapolate: we know peace through war, age through youth, closeness through isolation. But these are not simple binaries, as Cole explains in “Hens”:

There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Through the accumulation of images of “the push-pull thing, the polarity stuff” (“Ulro”), we perceive the balancing act of walking a web of connections, the risks and rewards, pains and pleasures, and every subtle variation in between, tied to each step. Cole’s menagerie of poems grows with several more additions besides “Hens,” including “Pig,” “Hairy Spider,” Bats,” and more, in Touch. Animals tend to be more humane than humans and humans more bestial than beasts in Cole’s cosmology.

The tradition of story and storytelling encourages us to assume that those who suffer in youth find happiness—or at least escape—in age, like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk. The poems in the last third of Touch help subvert those expectations. In “Passion,” Cole begins with the ending: “Our love has ended. / We only have a little time, darling. Let’s read / swim, and sleep in one another’s arms.” Ending and beginning run simultaneously, as do pleasure and pain. If “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s,” then here we see a mature son engaged in a troubled relationship: “I watch you emerge from the bathroom, / having breathed your fix” (“Laughing Monster”). Cole may be the first poet to incorporate a partner’s texts: “‘Loser old man u r a cheap cunt,’ he wrote, ‘I need coke. Unless ur buying, answer is no’” (“Resistance”).

Cole’s elaboration of two additional themes from his previous work—gender identity and language—helps broaden the focus of Touch. The last poem in the book, “Swimming Hole, Buck Creek, Springfield, Ohio,” takes forward the questioning of masculinity and femininity that Cole started in such early poems as “The Marble Queen” and “My Father’s Jewelry Box.” Or the exploration of language and writing in “Apollo” from The Visible Man resurfaces in Touch, with the poet’s reassurance that “writing this now, / sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought, / I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.” No mere ephemeral beauties, Cole’s spare, masterfully controlled poems are a sustaining activity, a necessary function to help keep the poet, and the reader, safely positioned in the world.

*

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I ♥ Your Fate

Monday, August 15th, 2011

by Anthony McCann
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Matt Hart

9

“And stood there all naked and human and shaking”

I.

I ♥ Your Fate is as electrified as it is buttery, as glue-faced as it is full of angles and soul—constant surprises, the turnings of corners, trap doors, blinding sunrises, Samuel Taylor Coleridge!—why can I not just type out all of the poems here and call it a day?—alibis forever, the visitor’s locker room, which turns out to be a vagina—an interview with Kobe Bryant—O beautiful for “EAGLES/big as nouns,” “…something as thoughtful as chairs in the snow…”  I could go on forever.  It goes on forever.  Figuring and reconfiguring—and then it ends, leaving me to retrace my steps, with hope, looking forward to the next tracks. The thing is, I almost don’t believe these poems exist. This isn’t a review.  It’s an appreciation, a lecture on debacle, both fuck-up and flood, a dry-dive into whatever comes next—this is our fate.  I’m spoiling too much. I ♥ Your Fate is one of those books I’d like to take to class and just read out loud with/to my students–no discussion! Why talk when one can listen?

The grass thinking snow thinking snow thinking snow
And under the grass the system of roots
The systemless system of dark wiggle roots
And the master who lurks in the rooms after dark
In his motionless hand the luminous milk

(from “Putin with Lynch”)

Why be analytical when it feels so incredibly strange and on fire to be baffled, face to face and attentive to the deepest parts we know, and yet obviously still have a lot of trouble articulating?

The purpose of behavior is disputed.
Though it serves
a hopped display

hammered in distinctness

How wonderful to be “hammered in distinctness”—that is, with clarity and detail—and also to BE hammered “indistinctness” (i.e. the opposite—unclear, ambiguous, vague, connotative) at the very same time.  There’s something nearly primordial about these poems.  We read them as they come to be, reaching prophetically, apocalyptically, lovingly, and elliptically toward their own ends, which are our ends—our FATE—as we read them:

I say the names of my hands
First left and then right and then right
Strange to have hands and a name
I look down to my hands when I speak

I don’t say my name to my hands
(I’ll save the dark magic for last!)
This event will go unrecorded
Weird, fake birds overhead

(from “Letter Never Sent”)

I like that things end—that they end and just end, making me long for new beginnings, for more Anthony McCann poems, for my fate to collide with his and theirs. I also like being blind-sided/surprised, as in these lines from (McCann’s poem) “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”:

and through my brassy spyglass
I will watch the city advance
the contracts, the workers, contractors
the plywood, and dust buttered trucks

I will dream of rivers of glue…

The adjective phrase “dust buttered” to describe the trucks is so beautifully/perfectly wrong, especially as it leads to the speaker (essentially, oh so romantically) looking away from the scene into the “dream of rivers of glue.” The image is so HIGH…and of course, so was STC a lot of his life.  Great. Welcome to life—which is everybody’s fate, one way or another.  But what’s really important here is the infusion that these poems insist upon—through their descriptive idylls, constant meander/ discovery, and one surprise party after another—into and with our lives.  As McCann puts it at the end of “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”:

tall swaying tawny thin grass
rhyming my steps with my words
the sea will appear, pocked with sails
Then I’ll enter your life

What could be more gorgeous or more intrusive or welcome?

II.

Maybe I should mention that I ♥ Your Fate consists of three titled, numbered sections—1. The Event, 2. I ♥ Your Fate, and 3. New Dreams of Mammal Island.  Sections one and three are bookends for section two—which itself consists of a single, long title poem in fourteen unnumbered sections (more on that below). A lot of books contain section breaks that seem totally unnecessary; in McCann’s book, one leads into the next, prepares the way.  There’s a real sense that one is being taken somewhere, fatefully—perhaps fatally—and yet the guide knows just about as much as we do. The difference between him and us—if there is a difference—lies only in the degree to which we’re prepared for the surprise…

Like a ghost
     showing its
first
tender
ghosthood

to another
       quieter
                more
bashful
                ghost

(from “Mammal Island”)

And this is strangely—at least to me—of some comfort.  If I’m heading into the darkness, I’d rather go along with someone who’s thrilled by it, than with someone who’s terrified.   Should we embrace our fate or work against it?  Does life actually have something in store, or is the store the thing we build over the course of our lives?

Can you believe now once how my body talked
With all these words in the hands of the dead
Every day I disown myself twice wake again
Go back to sleep with my brains in my hands

III.

Section 1, The Event, begins with the poem “Post-Futurism” in a nearly narrative voice:

When I was young, life
was instrumental and
through experience (in life)
through which I poured myself
I passed through various
Containers of
pre-dawn excellence

and then finishes up with the section’s title poem “The Event,” which itself ends:

I knew you’d come
to describe the animal
and I never drank again

I love the track this creates from the beginning to the end of the section, the speaker “pouring” himself through “various/ Containers of pre-dawn excellence” only to arrive eventually at a point where “you’d come/to describe the animal/ and I never drank again.”  There’s something wildly triumphant about tracking the section this way.  In it I find a spirit reminiscent of Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” and his line about seeing “what men have thought they saw.”  What gets me here is how the section enacts from beginning to end, with all its machinations in between, a big event—The Event—life-altering and pivotal.  Yet, what’s really funny is that it isn’t the declaration that “I never drank again” that’s epiphanous/momentous, it’s that “you’d come”—ENTER: you—“to describe the animal”—interpret the animal a thousand different ways.  And this leads us directly into section:

2. I ♥ Your Fate, which (as mentioned above) consists of 14 unnumbered sections (a sort of stretched to the gills, pushed to the limits sonnet-sonnet), and each of these sections in turn is composed of five quatrains, with mostly four beat lines.  In other words, McCann becomes both a balladeer and a sonnet sequence writer simultaneously, the I/you relationship taking center stage in the poem right from the start:

I came out of the past, with fingers all stained
Behind my face my brain glows like carp
It’s like this, you’ll see, even in pictures
Leave it to someone to figure that out

What follows goes wild in the streets and in the margins, the regularity of the stanzas contrasting with the contents which are as surreal as they are romantic, as violent as they are analytical, as distorted and particular as they are lyrical and volcanic.  For example, take these stanzas from 3 different sections of 2. I ♥ Your Fate:

Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
Can’t live a day in a world without birds!
I drag myself toward you using only my face
To see each little flower, forever at once

*

“What have you done?” our someone exclaimed
You shrieked as though you’d stabbed me yourself
It was weird: being there, with the rocks and the trees
I leapt from the platform into your arms

*

The miracle gland gives my body no rest
To be emptied again by the meaningless roar
Let’s go die, and then die, and then die and then die
Roll on, little toes, to the top of the earth!

As I hope these stanzas (which I sort of picked at random) demonstrate, the book’s second section is maddeningly beautiful in its wiry shiftiness.  The lack of end-stops, (except for occasional exclamation points—which serve more than anything to barrel us—with alacrity—into the next stanza) makes the sections and the individual stanzas seem less than nailed to the page.  And this, in turn, makes me want to jump around in my reading, to try new configurations of the poem’s lines/stanzas/sections.  It’s like being given a forest made out of Legos.  The first thing I want to do is map out the forest, then I want to play hide-n-seek in it, and after that I want to take it apart and build a monkey or a fighter jet.

This isn’t to suggest, however, that the poem as McCann has written it is “undone”—he’s made real choices; he’s given the poem a real trajectory and shape.  But at the same time, he’s crafted the poem (and each line) with such detailed musical consistency—and with such unnerving jump-cuts and leaps—that it almost begs to be read around in with both pleasure and re/constructive imagination.  It’s a poem to read and to play with—a toy box of Anthony McCann samples that points toward endless, marvelous (and kind of frightening) remixes.  To illustrate what I mean, take a look at these stanzas that I made from the three I quoted above:

I drag myself toward you using only my face
The miracle gland gives my body no rest
It was weird: being there, with the rocks and the trees
Can’t live a day in a world without birds!

Roll on, little toes, to the top of the earth!
Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
To be emptied again by the meaningless roar
I leapt from the platform into your arms

To see each little flower, forever at once
Let’s go die, and then die, and then die and then die
You shrieked as though you’d stabbed me yourself
“What have you done?” our someone exclaimed

The point here is that the poem is so rich, so musically intertwined in itself, and so out-of-control-in-control in terms of its content, that reading it as McCann has written it suggests—almost insists on—a reader’s rearranging it endlessly in order to read the massive plethora of its surfaces and depths.  It’s a poem that rewards reading, re-reading and re-inventive-reading, allowing us to get lost and find both each other and ourselves, over and over again:

No object here aches to be seen (except me)
Once again I’d arrived at the limit of friends
It might just be me and it might not be me
But it’s nice to be held while watching the waves

3. New Dreams of Mammal Island:

But one day they changed the color of everything
It was kind of like tasting all the world’s locks
And then a girder the size and shape of a fork
Fell to the floor and presented this room
And a bus barreled down and the whole building quaked
And the trees opened their shirts stepped out of their shirts
Out of their pants stepped out of their pants
And the trees started to weep I mean rain it was raining
And stood there all naked and human and shaking
And your face was an image of waiting in that rain

(from “Your Voice”)

I ♥ Your Fate’s final section seems to take off where section two leaves off, each poem a new wave pounding against us, flooding the stage with the strangest clarity ever, removing our clothes:

When I opened the fridge:
Leprosy tanks!
I’m up on the ladder
when the leaves start to shake
I am holding my hair
holding my teeth
I am resembling knees
when the birds start to twitch
In the meantime:
Miracle cops!
Filled with small traits
I was combing my head
When you touched my wrist
I was leaning

(from “Alibi”)

Everything in this book is leaning—on a slant, a little bent, off-kilter, a little bit waiting in waiting, hoping for the future, headlong into the future.  It makes me want to reflect on and connect to the world, to other people and to words, differently, physically, with abandon, apocalyptically.

It strikes me after all of this that more than most books I ♥ Your Fate is a book of intersections, of fates and lines and stanzas—of words—mingled and commingled and deliberately intertwined to create one of the strangest, most human, and most out of this world (yet) worldly places I’ve ever been. It takes me places I could’ve never predicted or expected and which feel nevertheless exactly like home. More importantly, the book points over and over to that one crucial intersection that exists in almost any reading experience, the collision of reader and writer at the book. I ♥ Your Fate is a sort of love letter to our fates intertwined—mine and yours with Anthony McCann’s and poetry.  The book’s title implies I heart your fate, because I heart our (don’t forget the “our” in “your”) fate in these poems.  To read these poems is to keep fate in mind—to reflect on where one has been, who one is (the relationships that define us) and what it all points to—with openness to the possibilities of significant dis/connection.

*

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Destroyer and Preserver

Monday, March 14th, 2011

by Matthew Rohrer
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Nate Pritts

9

“and then they do / and I don’t know”

Poetry that rejects the delicacies & eloquences of the human spirit as it interacts with our human world crushes in all around us.  Some of these poems work by way of a distorting & discomforting syntax, presenting readers with speakers who barrel their way from one strobe-like & startling & empty pronouncement to the next without notating any kind of ideological or emotional sphere or allowing any linguistic system for discursive, narrative or associative logic to take hold.  Still others of these rushed & slight poems work by way of creating a hermetic & closed subject composed of disconnected caricatures or random images where the initial surprise of the material is supposed to stand in for staggering insight & carry the vapid poem all the way to its empty transcendence.  While neither of these strategies is inherently flawed, much contemporary practice employing loose prosody or a subject that has been thoroughly wrung through the tenets of yellow journalism relegates Poetry to the role of minor diversion.

Still, there is Poetry that articulates & deepens our conception of what it means to be alive–a flawed human fumbling glimpsed however imperfectly through a busted lens.  Matthew Rohrer’s Destroyer and Preserver struggles heroically with the need for concentration & revelation against a field of distraction & shattered perceptions.  Rohrer has written with such tender affection–for people, for places, for the very ability to feel & think–that each poem feels weighted with equal parts nostalgia & hope.

The first poem in the book, “From Mars,” demonstrates the kind of motions these poems make, quietly & insistently, while also announcing its broader underpinnings: “the imagination thinks / in phrases but the universe / is a long sentence [.]”  By colliding the terms “imagination” & “thinks,” Rohrer settles the reader into a logical & emotional universe, the Romantic worldview that Shelley or Keats espoused.  Remarkably (& effortlessly), the poem parses itself cleanly despite the fact that there is no punctuation at all.  Clearly, the reader is still being led down a path marked by the considered syntax of thought, even without the placeholders.  This sense of a simultaneity of thought & impression, coupled with the feeling of a sturdily woven Romantic unity, helps deliver the poem’s resounding close:

but we have sad
news this morning
the dream has no
location or direction
and friends separated
by thousands of miles
are thinking of each
other simultaneously
but they have no idea
and we have no way
to reach them    

The line breaks create the subtle & controlled reverie of this section.  However, Rohrer is directing the reader’s concentration not on some enflamed or exaggerated image, but to a painful & human truth–a feeling already residing in our souls & not something we need to scramble to invent.  The wonder of the pathos generated is that it stirs us to reside more fully in our selves.

In many of these poems, the speaker is presented in everyday situations or scenarios; “Poem for Starlings” describes a visit to the bank, though the speaker is obviously out of synch with his surroundings–both humorously in terms of action, as in “When you try to make a joke / in a bank / it falls flat,” & also emotionally in terms of attention, as in

my step as high
as the starlings
bickering in the sky
the birdsong
of the city
and the paper lifting off
the sidewalks
goodbye, I wish
the world were different  

This wish fuels much of the Poetry in this collection, made up of a desire to see the world more precisely as it is, to open the self more fully to the range of human experience, to make some kind of lasting change.

Ultimately, the title of Rohrer’s collection signals the crucial dichotomy of the speaker’s ability.  Human shadows are capable of destroying so much of the real charged living that gets presented to us while we struggle to preserve what’s worth preserving.  But creation is outside the province of the speaker–it’s enough to notice, to defend, to assert belief, as in the luminous & fragmentary poem “Believe.”  In repeated quatrain bursts, the speaker notates his surroundings through both objective & subjective renderings:

black unmarked vehicles appeared
in front of the
bagel place a part
of me wants oblivion  

…

my face started to
twitch I pushed my
daughter through a city
I still believed in   

These build to create a system because of the weight given to seemingly disconnected impressions & experiences–seeing the bagel place, wanting oblivion–& the insistence on meaning & human perception as great unifiers.

In “Red Flowers,” Rohrer’s speaker begins by pledging fidelity to watchfulness & observation

I don’t know what
kind of flowers they’ll be
until they open
and then they do
and I don’t know

while thwarting the reader’s expectation of knowledge.  Sometimes paying attention & focusing your concentration like a laser through the hard steel of preoccupation & distraction is its own reward.  The poem ends with what seems to be a quiet surrender

I see you, I see you
I whispered to her
but I would never see her like
this again 

but is instead a reaffirmation of the powers of Poetry to be destroyer & preserver, & finally, human.

*

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Thin Kimono

Monday, December 20th, 2010

by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books 2010
Reviewed by David Sewell

9

“I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.”

I have never read The Da Vinci Code, which I don’t mean to present to you here as an advertisement of my suitability for mating. Or perhaps I do, though I don’t want to give the impression that that’s the only reason I’m mentioning it. But, anyway, having lived in Paris for almost two years now and having seen groups of tourists lugging that estimable work all across this fair city, it occurs to me that the twain must have some connection. It’s possible I could validate this hunch with a few clicks on the computer machine and some time surfing the world wide web, but my ironic coolness depends on my not really knowing, and my ironic coolness is very important, not only to me, but to forces far greater in scope, coherence, and personal hygiene—forces, for all of our sakes, I dare not mention here. So let’s just assume the tourists are not misguided, other than in a sartorial sense, and keep this journey of discovery steaming along.

Slowly, and then somewhat more quickly, then, strangely, slowly again, it occurred to me that my being in Paris, the book-toting tourists’ being here, the deictic opus’s being set here (as far as I know), and my being asked to write a review of a new poetry collection…it was all starting to add up to something. I needed to focus my eyes, or perhaps let them go out of focus completely, or perhaps I just needed a stiff drink, and then what exactly had been carefully hidden out of my view for so long, the big secret that would make all of this make sense would be revealed, like Lindsay Lohan’s underpants as she emerges from the backseat of a chauffeured sedan.

I discovered the path through this forest of intrigue around 1 a.m. one night, walking home through the darkest evening of the year, rain filling up the streets, somewhere near the Louvre, after staying out past the Metro shutting down and having no cab fare after spending all my money on research materials. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so might as well exercise the old cerebrum along with the legs. If you have read TDC, as the cool kids call it, it might be useful at this point for you to think of whichever character is the sandalwood-smelling, furiously handsome one, and imagine me as him. Or him as me—it is really the same thing. I am your hero. Please keep that in mind as we move forward. The fate of all humanity now and in the future could very well depend on it.

~

Anyway, speaking of reading effluvia, if you’ve ever passed your eyes over any of the handful of reviews I’ve written for this site, I’m frankly surprised that you’re still reading this now. You see, the me that writes poetry reviews is a bit of a dandy, a fancy-pants who pretends to write reviews nominally about the book in consideration but mainly spends an unwarranted amount of time trying to show off some notion of je ne sais quoi, or mateability, that, in the end, really should have been kept concealed beneath the proverbial trench coat. (If, on the other hand, you find yourself captivated by my tarty insouciance and florid scratching style, please do yourself a favor and check out my multivolume doctoral dissertation on the role of trouser pleats in nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, available at some of the finer university libraries in Bhutan and Turkmenistan.)

You might notice, for instance, that we are more than six hundred words into this very review and I’ve yet to say anything even remotely substantive about the book, such as its title or the author’s name. You don’t need me to tell you that life is like that sometimes—not so much a box of chocolates as a long walk home at 1 a.m., with the recurring urge to knock a fellow night denizen off his velocipede as he cycles by, then pedal quickly away, whisking yourself safely home, where there is never a shortage of research materials or anyone telling you you’ve had enough research for one night and will be given no more, or if there is, you are certainly more powerful than her and her puny girl arms. But that is tea for another time, as the man says.

~

It is at this point that you are probably thinking that the review of the book will begin, but I’m sorry to inform you, dear reader, that is not quite the case. I haven’t even laid out the bare facts of the Da Vinci Code–like case we have on our hands here, the revelation of which I’m sure will shock and excite you in, hopefully, unequal measures. Here it goes: Michael Earl Craig, the putative author of Thin Kimono, goes authorially by three first names, any of which may or may not be his own. Such a situation is unusual in today’s go-go times of acronyms, initializations, and abbreviations, especially as his friends seem to refer to him as Earl (full disclosure: I would like to be his friend). There are any number of reasons why this might be the case, the most prominent of which is that his nom de plume (and, perhaps, de vie) is a sly, tripartite homage to (1) Philip Michael Thomas (also three first names), noted thespian best known for his smoldering turn as Ricardo Tubbs in the ’80s romantic comedy Miami Vice; (2) the Earl of Sandwich or the Second Earl Grey, or possibly both (thus totaling three Earls); and (3) Craig T.(heodore) Nelson (three first names again), noted coach. I once had a Miami Vice Trapper Keeper, every day I eat exactly one sandwich and drink exactly one pot of Earl Grey tea, and one time I saw Mr. Nelson at the airport… This is starting to get spooky.

There is yet another layer at work here, revealed to me late one night after doing extensive research in my kitchen by the light of the moon. You see, no sane individual would ever believe that anyone would say or write a name as long as Michael Earl Craig’s these days. As a thoroughly mateable and ironically cool person, I’m privy to the knowledge that the cool kids nowadays write and say, in their sexting sessions and such, “MEC,” when referring to our mysterious author. Fine, you might be saying to your wife or prostitute or butler, so what? Well, did you know, smart guy, that mec is a word in French, which by some strange coincidence is the official language of the country I currently live in? Weird, I know. And it’s not just any word, either. In French, mec is roughly equivalent to dude in English. (Need I remind you of the original definition of dude—“a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S.”—and that Michael Earl Craig was born in the thriving metropolis of Dayton, Ohio, and now summers and winters, as well as springs and falls, in the wild west?)

~

Cleverly, our thrice-forenamed author has revealed to us his true identity: the dude. A crucial document in the corpus of mysterious symbology behooving us to consider it is the 1998 historical documentary The Big Lebowski, which followed the comings and goings of a Renaissance man and bowling enthusiast who also went by the name of The Dude. Here is some introductory prose from that film, which sums up that dude’s presence rather succinctly:

“…He called himself The Dude. Now, Dude, that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But, then, there was a lot about The Dude that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But, then again, maybe that’s why I found the place so durned innarestin’…. I only mention it ’cause, sometimes there’s a man—I won’t say a hee-ro, ’cause what’s a hee-ro? But sometimes there’s a man…. And I’m talkin’ about The Dude here—sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for his time ’n’ place, he fits right in there—and that’s The Dude…. Sometimes there’s a man…. Sometimes there’s a man. Ah, I lost my train of thought here. But… Aw, hell. I done introduced him enough.”

Indeed. Sometimes there’s a man… Sometimes there’s a man in Montana who shoes horses and writes unadorned poems about extraordinary ordinary things, and all the time this is a good thing for the rest of us. The poems in Thin Kimono (as in his previous two books), for the most part, eschew the sudden jumps or shifts in tone, style, placement, or focus that so many poets today hop around on like a crippled albino being chased by a tiger, perhaps also albino. (The second section, of three, is one long, sectioned poem mostly comprising unconnected images and thoughts presented in somewhat non-sequitur fashion. But there’s plenty of emotional/tonal glue here, and it works.) Most of the poems’ images, lines, and thoughts follow what came before in a natural yet not-obvious way. Nearly everything is connected in a logical and emotional sense. This is sometimes called accessibility. Indeed, even the detours are easy to manage—they feel like normal cognitive diversions, following the mind as it follows a tangent to a related place, then returns to the original train of thought like a cross-country traveler who just needed to stretch his legs on the platform for a second.

On the stylistic level, the poems are most often composed of simple declarative sentences, short in length, without many subordinate clauses or complex constructions. There’s not much enjambment of lines, not many metaphors or much figurative language. Most of the lines end with a period or a comma. There’s nothing really experimental, nothing neo-this or post-that at work here. And yet the poems consistently pop with brightness and originality against a humorous and clever backdrop.

Take, for instance, the poem about the man hanging out at the bottom of the swimming pool to check out (and not in a weird way) two dozen synchronized swimmers as they practice. Or the three poems about being at an acupuncturist’s. Or the two about lying on a hotel bed. The poems here are about small things: talking to his grandmother on the phone, visiting New York City, riding on an airplane, shoeing a horse. The poem “Windsor” begins, “I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.” Then, for the rest of the poem, he talks plainly about a one-eyed horse. That is more or less how these poems work. One does not have to consult the etchings on Bruncvik’s Sword or stare intently at a pair of Leonardo’s used underpants during a penumbral lunar eclipse to unlock the secrets here, or to fully enjoy these poems for all that they are and aren’t. “Trying again I wrote / in capital letters THE READER / CAN ALMOST BE DUMB REALLY / AND STILL GET MY POEMS,” he writes in “Bluebirds.” Empirically, I can attest to that statement’s truth.

The source material Craig draws from is the same available to anyone else, but the results transcend the standard product. He talks often about things he sees in the newspaper, on TV, while driving his automobile. It’s through the peculiar alchemy that occurs in the writer’s/speaker’s head that these everyday scenes and situations become something of a more precious nature—to quote “After a Terrifying Nap”: “Not golden like a bar of gold / (an ingot) / or golden like honey / or paint on a football helmet. / It was another kind of gold.” That poem is about a golden grasshopper that falls into a car and comes to rest, next to a potato chip, on the floor in the backseat, below a soundly napping infant. That’s all that happens, really, yet the poet somehow arrives at, “The grasshopper sent forth a golden light. / The infant awoke in his car seat, / looked at the grasshopper / and wiggled his feet, his white socks.”

~

It’s worthwhile mentioning the sort-of shorthand poetics found in “Poem (The nitwit danced…)”: “To those people who are always talking about ‘surrealism’ / can I suggest you open your fucking eyes? / If you do this, you will see mothballs. And a green nightgown.” I think the point here is less whether these poems do or do not trade in surrealism than that such discussions are inherently less interesting than what one can see by simply opening one’s eyes and looking around. Ultimately, it’s what Craig sees, and how he sees it, that makes these poems work so well. “Clear writing is clear thinking,” he writes in “Humans.” The obvious danger in such perspicuity is that stripping away all the stylistic and poetic drapery is a bit like being naked in front of a crowded room of insurance salesmen: there’s nothing to conceal one’s human frailties from their prying, insatiable eyes. That Michael Earl Craig’s poems are continually as lean, well-proportioned, and finely chiseled as that other Renaissance giant, Michelangelo’s David (no relation), proves he has nothing at all to hide.

*

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Chronic

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

by D.A. Powell
Graywolf Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

 
9

“I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until –”

powell cover

Chronic speaks to the obsessions of the imagination, the intellect, and the heart, as well as to the modern “deranging” of the landscape and the body. Eschewing the conventional prologue poem, Powell structures the book in two sections, the title poem framed in the center, followed by a coda of two linked poems. With medical valences apparent (underscored by a torso X-ray in place of a traditional author photo on the jacket flap), he names the first section “Initial C,” referencing the first letter of Chronic, and the last section “Terminal C,” the word’s last letter. Together they form a twisted set of parentheses, framing the idea of the self in the eternal present, but revealing that despite the power and immediacy of the here and now, it is simply a piece of something larger, a fragment or intrusion into a longer sentence or composition. Faced with the finite nature of life and the fickle nature of inspiration, given over to the needs and rewards of the body, where do we root our hopes for permanence? Powell considers mortality and eternity; he considers the limits of the individual and the ego alongside the limits of existence on a planet that humans are guilty of infecting:

and always, the sandbars eroding at the periphery
where freshwater meets saltwater, and sawgrass swamp
drains into estuaries and bay.       and always the balance

upset, as herbicides eradicate cat’s claw vine
which has choked out carrotwood, which has displaced cypress
and the sea absorbs the toxins and eliminated matter

what does it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speak
or who does not speak, whether the poems get written
whether the reader receives them whole, in part or not at all

(from “cancer inside a little sea”)

Breathtakingly frank and dark, lyrically beautiful and passionate, Chronic attains wisdom while resisting false consolation.

Powell follows through on the conceit of his title and structure by tweaking readers’ expectations in visual and concrete ways. In “early havoc,” a poem recalling youthful inclinations to the theater, opening quotation marks signal the beginning of speech – but no closing marks follow, and the sentence redirects due to faulty memory. Known for his expansive lines, Powell pushes the physical constraints of the book by including a foldout poem appropriately titled “centerfold.” Distracted by the innovation, a reader might be tempted to dismiss the content as secondary, but in fact the poem is an eerie reminiscence occasioned by a magazine photo of an AIDS protest. Conjuring the promiscuity of youth with vivid imagery, including “on the steps of city hall at the yearly die-in: he was a body . . . you heaved upon like amphibious d-day craft quitting the ocean,” Powell infuses his lines with genuine, understated regret. The flip side, “cinemascope,” contains brackets and cross-outs. Turning to the committed and somewhat stifling domesticity of age, the poem ends with an echo of the biography of Sylvia Plath. It is a powerful statement on the guilt of surviving: “nearly everyone else, pissed off passed away / past and past and past.” Far beyond gimmickry and cheekiness, these subversions of convention support the underlying curse/hope of this book: What if the unexpected happens? What if the world surprises our imaginations?

In part, this has already happened, as indicated by the beautiful love poem “continental divide.” At the middle of life, with youthful indiscretions a distant memory overlaid by years of loneliness, the poet offers a moving, measured praise of love. Several poems explore love as a resolution to the book’s thematic questions of temporality and eternity. In signaling a relationship in trouble with the opening poem, “no picnic,” Powell sounds the themes of artistic manipulation and the fallibility of memory. In “gospel on the dial, with intermittent static,” the lovers shelter from the rain in a cavity caused by lightning in a sequoia’s trunk, mirroring in miniature the emblem of the book’s title and structure: if it is temporary, there is still peace. In “coit tower & us,” Powell seems to say our memory of comfort is permanent, even if the experience of it is not. The demands of illness and the body, the essentially solipsistic nature of pain, may be what drive a relationship to its end, “that night in the foxhole with the pfc” suggests, a theme repeated in a later poem, “scenes from the trip we didn’t take to the antarctic”:

say it with me, sunshine: today, brainscan; today, x-ray
today, complete metabolic panel with platelet differential
today, urinalysis; today, liver biopsy; today, preparing the body

at the last station, the sepulcher was empty and you asked why
beyond this numbing terrain, frozen white cell: phantom laughter
didn’t you hear it all along?     or did you think it was just the wind

But “even the business of dying must be set aside occasionally,” Powell says in “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic,” reasserting memory’s dominance over pain in some stern self-talk: “go away, you bitter cuss.     it’s still 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery of the lyric hasn’t faded.     and love is in the chorus waiting to be born.”

Although now it may seem commonplace for poets to incorporate popular references from commercial culture into serious work, Powell helped to pioneer this approach, and remains its best practitioner. In “confessions of a teenage drama queen,” he seems to refute his critics who have called him confessional in a hilarious string of B-movie titles and clichés. With endless source material, the challenge of writing such a poem is to be selective, and Powell has the best ear in the business:

I was a male war bride.     I was a spy
so I married an axe murderer.     I married joan
I married a monster from outer space

I am guilty, I am the cheese, I am a fugitive from a chain gang
maybe I’ll come home in the spring.     I’ll cry tomorrow.
whose life is it anyway?     it’s a wonderful life.

[...]

I was a burlesque queen, I was a teenage zombie
I was an adventuress, I was a convict, I was a criminal
I did it, I killed that man, murder is my beat, I confess

The poem also serves as a warning, forbidding too much autobiographical interpretation of the work. In a poem published in a recent issue of Poetry, Powell offers lines that may shed light on his creative process, in the persona of a student addressing a master:

I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches
of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon
at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word.

In contrast to the experimental poems included in Chronic are poems written in traditional form, such as terza rima for “come live with me and be my love,” and a hybrid of the English and Italian sonnet with “coal of this unquickened world.” In fact, classical mythology informs the structure of Chronic, providing rich counterpoint to the poet’s innovation. If a thread running through this book is the relationship of an older and younger man, it draws meaning from the tale of Corydon and Alexis. Powell further bookends the work by beginning with an epigraph from Virgil, and ending with a coda of two poems titled after these figures.

In Virgil’s story, the unrequited desire Corydon feels for Alexis transports him from the literal world to a fantasy realm of the imagination, where he engages in a dialogue of his own making. Finding that he loves the figment of Alexis more than the real person, and struggling to fit his emotions into his pastoral setting, Corydon awakes from his dream and upbraids himself. Doubting that the music he has created is appreciated, he attempts to express his desire in sanctioned ways by using an image of Pan’s pipes as a metaphor for coupling. Powell playfully echoes this image in the racy poem, “lipsync [with a nod to lipps, inc.]”

However, all Corydon’s attempts to find other paradigms that will fit his desire into his surroundings achieve only ambiguous results, with the implication that the effort continues beyond the story. This myth is a powerful engine that fuels Powell’s thematic explorations of temporality, mortality, and eternity; desire, art, and impermanence; and artistic ego, self-doubt, and the creative process. In the book’s final line, he encapsulates the abiding questions that result: “as if banishing love is a fix.    as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes.”

If the pastoral world order did not allow Corydon’s desire to find justification, in Powell’s book the adversary is the suburbanization of the California landscape. In “republic,” he comments that the processed land of industry and agriculture removed some of the causes of catastrophic illnesses such as malaria and typhoid, and yet clearly the chronic illnesses we have inherited in their place are a result. Placing the relatively feeble yet enduring activity of creating art in stark contrast to the poisoning of our world and our bodies, Powell steers clear of conventional consolation:

you want me to tell you the marvels of invention? that we persevere
that the time of flourishing is at hand? I should like to think it

meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling

it began like:

            “the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . .”

Powell has said that the photo on the cover of Chronic shows river waste from a paper mill. At first glance it appears cellular, as if we are seeing a sample under a microscope. Upon closer inspection, we see the indicators of scale and human habitation, including a tiny building and power line in a lower corner. This seems a fitting emblem for the crux of human issues so masterfully covered in this book, the easy transport from macro to micro and back that Powell achieves.

*

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Sunny Wednesday

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books 2009
Reviewed by Matt Hart

9

“Good for us who walk among the ghosts.”

kocot cover

Today isn’t Wednesday.  It’s Sunday.  And it isn’t sunny.  It’s actually really cold and rainy out—a perfect day to stay inside and scribble out a few words on Noelle Kocot’s Sunny Wednesday, a book I’ve been carrying around with me since I got it last Spring.  Between then and now, I’ve read it many times.  It was one of only two books I took with me to Europe this past summer (the other being Renato Poggioli’s Theory of the Avant-Garde—another story entirely), and it’s been with me this Fall wherever I’ve gone—Houston, Louisville, New York.  A couple of times, I’ve thought to take it out of my bag and replace it with a different book, but something (not the thought of writing these remarks) has always stopped me.  What something?  I don’t know.  I’m not really sure I care.  Can I say the book is haunting, perplexing, electric?  I can.  I do.  Do I have some big thesis to make here?  I do not.  Or maybe.  Yes.

Sunny Wednesday is a book in the middle of something, halfway between the end of time (the end of a certain time—with double emphasis on “certain”) and the next thing, as yet in the shadows.  I think about this next thing (these next things) a lot (both in relation to the book and life), the past and the future as seen from that momentary and ever-shifty, yet perpetual middle ground of the present—that Wednesday between Sunday and Saturday, the midway between absolutes—the birth salute and the death salute.  And it’s sunny, too, this Wednesday, this green-y middle meadow, but don’t let that fool you.  Rather, think about it as ambiguously as possible, i.e. that “sunny” doesn’t necessarily mean things are (figuratively speaking) looking up—only that someone is (literally) looking up into the sky and noticing there a brightness, perhaps in marked contrast to the way the looker actually feels:

The study of heat blinks
In the midday sun.
Soon, a blaze of rhyme
Will cast an artificial glare
And sunset on the windowsill.
Good for us who die in flames.
Good for us who walk among the ghosts.

(“Nature Poem”)

And yet, with so much goodness at hand, the feeling remains complicated.  The world remains a haunted place: half-sensations, and echoes and traces.

So now, with all that in mind…

***

At the center of this collection of 59 poems is a massive absence, the loss of a beloved—a spouse—producing a gargantuan swell (or perhaps shock after shock) of mourning, longing and ekstasis.  To read these poems is to experience a terrible, though often beautifully wrecked and crushing, embodiedout of body strangeness, “I saw my love shoot up the intravenous moonlight, / Vanished in a Milky Way of negatives” Kocot writes at the beginning of “Neptune,” an image which is simultaneously fucked-up and lush, galactic and romantic, flooded with light and sucked into darkness. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, dispersion, fade-out and negation (both formally and subject-wise) are the prime movers of these poems, for example in these lines from “Rite”: “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you / And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.”  What’s weird about so much of this book is how the poems seem in a constant state of vanishing, and yet they never blink out entirely.  Their radiation imprints a spirit on the air itself:

I predict the end of my predictions
And the loss of the whole world
At your brilliant shadow
And I will continue to hum
Your buried music like a refrigerator
Deep into the night

( from “Tribute #2”)

What I love about these poems is that they’re brimming with personal metaphorical gestures, which, at their best, don’t come off as secret-code making—and even when they do I usually could care less, because the images themselves are so arresting, stirring, and/or devastating:

Too often, you are only a shadow cast

Across an endless sunny Wednesday:

Trapezoidal sleep, spell-check aflame with saints,

Roseate silo, the arrows are dark, the moment sharp.

(from ‘“You Will Always Be My Animal”’)

That said, I’m also intrigued by the fact that reading these poems I’m not able to set aside—the way as a “good” reader I’m supposed to be able to set aside—what I know and have read about Noelle Kocot, the person—that she was married to Damon Tomblin, a composer who died as the result of a heroin overdose—a loss which has had an understandably profound effect on Kocot and her work.  References to “Damon” and “shooting up” abound in this collection, along with constant reminders of a deep separation of souls.  It seems that autobiography is the scaffolding upon which Sunny Wednesday’s poems (not to mention those in Kocot’s previous book Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems) hang both their grief and amazement at the fact that anything exists at all.  And while it’s the personal that provides the poems’ stability, it’s the universality of the larger human issues here that give the work its visceral power.  These poems aren’t what one might typically think of as confessional lyrics.  For one thing, they don’t confess or divulge the personal beyond the scaffolding I’ve already mentioned. Rather, they take note in the midst of the scaffolding—as if, weirdly, to build it up imaginatively, so as to be both wholly inspired/mired in it and also transcend it entirely, often floating or collapsing—resolutely unresolved:

Now, as I wait, miles ahead of and miles behind

My time, a train that hovers here suspended

Over a warm pool of numbers, never adding up

Or subtracting delicately away.

(from “This Is What You Get”)

And whereas, the more I think about, for example, Robert Lowell’s poems, the more I’m drawn to think about Robert Lowell, in contrast, the more I think about Noelle Kocot’s poems the further away from her I get.  Rather than being therapeutic explorations of the facts, Kocot’s poems explore the possibilities—emotional, imaginative, and intellectual—of what the facts point to—something beyond, “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you/And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.”  In other words, these poems are, more than anything else, physically moving responses to the swirl of existence and its constant barrage of beginnings (surprise) and endings (loss).  As such, the poems in Sunny Wednesday are an assertion of BEING in the face of our having to live with and against its antithesis, GRAVITY/NOT-BEING.

Furthermore, whereas many poets use poetry as one of the ways to organize, make sense of, and explode the presences and experience of the overwhelming fullness of life, Kocot seems to be using it to make sense of this fullness in the face of the Void, an unshakeable and overwhelming emptiness/absence, one brimming simultaneously with meaning and meaninglessness, breath and breathlessness, ritual and randomness, aloneness and loneliness, music and silence, darkness and light.  Nowhere in the book is this more mind-blowingly and beautifully demonstrated than in “Once Upon a Time in America” where Kocot begins the poem addressing her deceased husband:

Here in this room I slept
As you lay dead and alone
After you died, while I, superstitious
Peasant slept, slept through
Phone call after phone call from
Detective after detective, finally
Waking to Daniel’s simple and beatific
Damon’s dead […]

From here, however, the poet, after making arrangements “like a cop/Or fireman” and saying “I love you to the morning sky” flies into the imaginative ether:

Never having been one of the fully
Living, I live, half of me in
a cornfield filled with skyscrapers,
Half of me in that place we are
Before we’re born and after we die.
Tonight, I was outside thinking
Of that holy drunken terror
Jackson Pollock. Fuck you moon,
He’d shout and cry. A big dog
Came running up to me and his owner
Shouted, Jackson, come back here.

It’s as if Kocot’s associations and imagination become REAL LIFE—from saying “I love you to the morning sky” to Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” to the rather mysterious/mystical appearance of Jackson, the dog—as if Kocot’s own associations have come instantly TO BE.  The poem ends with the poet once again addressing her husband:

You are a dead musician who died
Alone.  I wait to go to you,
Smoking and breaking curses under
The Jackson Pollock fuck you moon.

What’s so blindingly weird to me here is that the poem leaves off with everything blundered-up-the-same: the musician has died alone, the speaker waits alone, and Jackson Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” has been transformed/transferred to the moon itself, which presides over everything in anger, defiance and recognition/resignation.  It’s as if all the stuff of life is just one shifting mess of strangeness and witchcraft.

And yet, the book is not without its own antidote, as words themselves not only describe and articulate, but make, meaning—which is always a kind of connectedness, one thing to another to an other.  Or as Kocot puts it in “To You, the Only”
 

And when I am lost
Your scent wafts toward me
Like the notes of a vibraphone
And I shake off the muck of existence

[…]

To remind you that before all else we are animals full of music
Tethered to the contradictions of this world.

*

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A Village Life

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

by Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

9
“And the adults, they’re all dead now.”

gluck village life coverHow do you follow a book like Averno? Distilled, evocative and crystalline, Louise Glück’s previous title seemed to be the consummate modern re-imagining of the myth of Persephone. At first glance, the expansive lines and colloquial tone of A Village Life may appear very different from the austerely beautiful verse of Averno. As her new book proceeds, however, we see that these deceptively loose poems revolve around a talismanic set of images. Even the multiple personas who impart their various narratives use a shared lexicon: mountain, window, fountain, plaza, night, earth, sun, leaves, fire. What emerges is an incantation, a rosary, a mandala. Not unlike Averno, this meditation on aging and mortality uses narrative to speak archetypal truths.

A host of narrators populate this Village, and plot lines recur with circadian rhythm. Children swim in a quarry, leaves burn in a pile, and husbands resort to the bottle, among others. The opening poem, “Twilight,” deftly establishes tone and method, framing through the home window of a mill-worker “not the world but a squared-off landscape / representing the world.” If aging is a progression, then this speaker advances by embracing the subconscious: “I open my fingers— / I let everything go.” Seemingly everyone takes a turn at the microphone, including worms and bats, who happen to offer some of the most elevated metaphysical observations in the book. Locating her speakers in an unnamed village, with a fountain in a plaza at the center and a mountain on the edge, where figs and olives grow in the summer and snow flies in the winter, Glück establishes a hierarchy of story, with rank based on the speaker’s position in beginning, middle, or end. In “Tributaries,” personal trajectory is reflected in proximity to a fountain: children and mothers near the water, old couples at the tables at a safe distance away:

They’re alone at the fountain, in a dark well.
They’ve been exiled by the world of hope,
which is the world of action,
but the world of thought hasn’t as yet opened to them.
When it does, everything will change.

These poems phrase dynamic tension through approximate contrasts: work perverts the human character, leaves conceal the winter, the mountain cleaves from the village, the city overwrites nature, anticipation ends virginity, estrangement undermines marriage, lies pollute truth, and, if we are lucky, the spirit learns to manifest itself in the body. If an aggregate narrative emerges from the multiple perspectives, it is that of the prodigal daughter restored to her hometown, having made the journey through virginity and marriage and career, disillusioned and dispossessed, and able to glimpse, through a comparison of the human life span with the seasonal aspect of nature, what comes after mortality.

You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you
           can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.

(“Midsummer”)

Through the observation of rituals at the passing of seasons, the villagers aspire to a higher understanding of temporality. Put simply, time as a concept feels much different to the young than to the old. When we are young, we wait out life, and expect to forget mistakes.

It seems a strange position, being very young.
They have this thing everyone wants and they don’t want—
but they want to keep it anyway; it’s all they can trade on.

(“Noon”)

The girls who accompany the boys to the quarry’s swimming hole treasure the sexless democracy of adolescence, uneager to leave behind the broad suspension of inexperience. Limitless in potential, youthful imagination is better than reality, the way that the ephemeral reflections of the stars in the river are better than their real correspondents: “they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas, / not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike” (“At the River”).

But even this static expanse of time must end, and we find that our omissions or indiscretions survive to haunt us, “because whatever you did then you do forever” (“At the Dance”). In youth, the broad expanse of the present is interrupted by premonition; in age, by memory. Glück seems to say, a life’s expenditure of moments is simply incremental, not cumulative, leaving us no better off. To avoid decay, one would have to be like the shape-shifter, the incubus of “In the Café,” the serial boyfriend who takes on the likes and skills of his current paramour, then discards her. Instead, the enlightened seek erasure. In the second of two poems titled “Earthworm,” Glück subverts expectation by uniting earthiness with holiness, putting wisdom in the voice of the reincarnated:

It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric.

The unity of the spirit and the body takes a form beyond human ken, describable only as “wholly physical,” and visible only in a reverential study of the world.

Eroding the distinction between novel and verse, A Village Life bucks recent trends by embracing narrative, even if fragmented. Glück avoids the triteness of small town catalogues like Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Classically disciplined, her imagery arises directly out of the setting, evoking an austere, timeless, and archetypal community. Sometimes Glück astounds with loving descriptions of nature: “The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink / as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson” (“March.”) Her infrequent similes provide insight while staying close to home: a pile of burning leaves is “a small thing, controlled, like a family run by a dictator” (“Sunset”); the sun hangs steady “like an actor pleased with his welcome” (“A Warm Day”). Despite maintaining a measured, contemplative tone throughout, she is also able to capture personal inflection: the bartender runs the television with the sound off, and “we spend hours watching this junk” (“Via Delle Ombre”). I caught only one instance of melodrama, at the end of “Hunters”—“the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses”—although this is in persona for the poem. A Village Life is a wise statement about the body’s relation to the earth, and rewards with beautiful if, of necessity, fleeting glimpses of eternity, as in “Sunrise”:

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.
Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
But sooner or later the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.
And maybe the moon will send the seas there
and where we once lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills,
paying the sky the compliment of reflection—

Blue in summer. White when the snow falls.

*

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Winners Have Yet To Be Announced: A Song For Donny Hathaway

Monday, June 8th, 2009

by Ed Pavlic
University of Georgia Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

9

“…They don’t trust themselves alone in the dark.”

pavlic coverA singer uses vowels.

Poetry deals in freaks, whether the poets themselves or their pseudo-creations and characterizations.  A true weirdo would have to begin the rented space by falling in the window backwards, as in a reversal from the possibility of continually becoming gravity’s victim.  “Laughing and singing, “Only way to enter a room full of friends, fall in backward thru the window.””  

There never can be an honest account of the reasons an artist (human being, for that matter) would take his or her own life.  Do not wade into the murk of Camus’s or Pollock’s car wrecks.  And make sure not to high dive into the mind of Jimi Hendrix’s or Elliot Smith’s manic depression.  If so, wear a flotation device, night goggles, and a strong will to remain in sanity’s house of mirrors.

This must have been the task Ed Pavlic prepared for when writing his 2008 collection of poems, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: a Song for Donny Hathaway.  Perhaps Pavlic and many other poets feel a version of what Hathaway is put on display for, something like this:

And, I want to talk, man, bad.  Hand over all my records for one conversation.  Hand over all my—well, half my money . . . Serious.  Simple things.  Sit and talk and be there, man.  Hold hands and talk.  Talk, hear me, let the roof come in.  Hand over a shoulder.  Let the fucking doors freeze shut.  With anyone.

The poet here rises to a skyscraping task of recreating the ethereal and concrete landscape that an inventively driven genius-musician succumbs to when the old, reluctantly forgotten bright beacons come back to blind.  There is rarely a moment when Pavlic makes a hero out of Hathaway.  But, you will never forget the multiplicity of voices flying all around your reader head like a Charles Dickens metropolis.  A reader might drift over the canyons of the difficulties of genius, of artistry, of depression, et cetera.  Pavlic leads in this direction, however:

Fewer, however, have come to account for how very difficult it is to be, you know, a person.

Check Woolf, Camus, Nietzsche and many U.S. troops (oh, and that one math dude that Russell Crowe played) in the coat room because you have heard of them.  And because they are white.  It is the rarest of occasions to have to lift your own (white) veil of invisibility and understand that depression can come from various acute and obtuse angles.  The acute, in the case of the observing poet as well as the musician (Pavlic/Hathaway) is the madness, the misunderstandings, the little addings-up which rarely fade.  The obtuse—American Racism.  Pavlic never comes out and says it in its black/white form because his subtlety hides in the various file cabinets of paintings and songs being discussed.  But the big cotton and tobacco plantation demon is there.  Look at this line from a prose block where Hathaway is telling a lost man from the East St. Louis projects how audiences can be:

They don’t even give you a chance.  They don’t trust themselves alone in the dark.

All the poems swim in their own prose block; there is the rare occasion of the usual, left-margin, line-break poem.  They seem and look, at their shell, as normal as Robert Bly or Richard Hugo; but, in fact, they are as experimental, Freudian, and even Deleuzeian as a poem can get.  There truly is not a better poetic medium for these slightly-real documentarian, authenticating statements that Pavlic allows a breath more like a quiet, influenza cough.  His poems don’t dance; they stomp out a blues diction and exist on the very border he creates; which, is also the border where all things real occur—the backslash between happy/sad.  Think of Golden Gates and Brooklyn Bridges.

The book is brilliant, not hipster or on the cusp like flarf but it possesses a conceptualism of process, of tiny details and necessary magnifying glasses.

Readers go backward (like the man falling in the window) through time and then forward again.  Hathaway’s timeline is incredibly interesting, as it is.  He put out his first solo recordings in early  1970, gained fame from his proximal amity with Roberta Flack (the woman who first sang that one song that Lauryn Hill got limelight for), wrote three film scores (one with Quincy Jones) and checked himself in and out of madhouses a few more times.  He studied classical music on his own, scored off-the-chains on two different IQ tests, and held a couple summer-long Brooklyn arts camps for underprivileged children.  Ruben Studdard can’t touch him; Justin Timberlake claims he is his own biggest influence; Common says he’d be on a lost path without the earthly/wraithlike presence of Hathaway.  And innumerable electronic/hip-hop producers sample his sound.  Pavlic/the poet’s best summation of all this legend-quintessence happens here:

They’ll say they come to hear you sing to forget their troubles. And then there’ll be you, in a room that moves when you move, with a voice that’s a search from the next open opening inside of all the will and won’t and will and won’t want and won’t and won’t will and need and don’t want and need and can’t have. And need and can’t have. And need and can’t have [. . .] Need.  Should have to have a permit just to use that word.

If we are to believe anything in Pavlic’s Real World-esque recreations, Hathaway (like many poets, musicians and artists) despised and loved his audience while simultaneously using that phenomenon to understand his-self and his World.  This is non-fiction poetry couched in a metaphysical dream coated in a tincture of madness.  A reader cannot make it thru the tunnel of Winners Have Yet to Be Announced without losing sight of light at the end while also becoming a little mad his- or herself.  When Pavlic writes:  “All the time his eyes on you like they’re staring through barbed wire,” he is not playing.  Readers will be schooled on the nuances between quietude, silence, noise, and schizoid-paranoia—“A sound like a conversation between face-down cards” or “Like in the silent way your body learns a song.” One can only imagine the kind of mad-trip Pavlic must have taken his own self on in order to write this thing. 

Flaubert said that the life of a poet is a dog’s life.  Pavlic (in this book, at least) then becomes a Siberian husky, multi-hued eyes and all.  Hathaway, no doubt, heard voices; Pavlic channels them through crystal or a ham radio—something that he must have thought all of humanity (at least those who read in English) could relate to in a personal space.  And if James Dickey was right when he said, “Poets are not trying to tell the truth, are they?  They are trying to show God a few things he maybe didn’t think of,” then Pavlic hoists Hathaway on his shoulders and casts off any misgivings that the true human being, the true freak and weirdo camp out on the state line between mortal and immortal.  Let Pavlic’s statement display that very notion:  “You wake me up in the midnight hour and I’ll tell you how I feel.”

*

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The Book of Props

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

by Wayne Miller
Milkweed Editions 2009
Reviewed by John Deming

9

What Will Suffice

miller props cover1.

It is impossible to imagine an empty room. Your bedroom is strange when there’s nobody home. All the stranger at the end of the day when you open the door and walk inside.

Beyond strange are guest rooms in the houses of friends and relatives. A first-person narrator in Wayne Miller’s poem “Sleep Suite,” the first poem in his second collection, The Book of Props, makes acquaintance with such a room while preparing to sleep inside it. He describes the view from his borrowed bed:

…A streetlamp

pressed the shadow of a tree
to the window screen, the same shadow

also on the bedside wall.
They rocked with the wind in tandem,

myself wedged between them
in that spare room I returned to

and then returned in the morning.

An empty room is pressed with stillness. There is motion here—the movement of shadows—but it has nothing to do with human cognition, and is likely there on nights when the room is absent a living person.

The speaker here is calm and intellectual, but doesn’t lack the terror of a child kept awake in the night by shadows. Maybe a child is right to be afraid when “wedged” into such overwhelming nothingness. Yet the speaker is careful to note that the room is his to “return” in the morning—for if he sleeps in the room, he becomes unconscious, and ceases to impose his own thoughts or imagination on it; he becomes as much a part of its landscape as the bed, the screen, the shadows.

2.

Humans can’t comprehend stillness. If we flatline, we’re dead. In a living heart, mind, or set of eyes, lives a constant repumping and resetting. Sleep is similar to stillness—it fuses the sleeper with a room’s own blankness, and “gives the body back its mouth”—but really stillness, nothingness, can only be achieved in death.

So there is terror in Miller. But also logic: whatever stillness is, it is as likely to be nightmarish as it is to be calming, or as it is to be completely neutral, rounded in all aspects. The only real tension that exists is the tension between the way things are now and the way they will be moments from now: the problem of constant change.

This is exemplified in one the book’s best poems, “Nude Asleep in the Tub.” The title smacks of stillness, sounds in fact like the title of a painting (though a few moments’ turned up nothing definite). At the start of the poem, we find a nude woman, asleep in a tub:

As if she were something opened—
like a pocket watch—her body

slipped beneath a surface
peeled back to reveal its surface—

drops of air clinging to her thighs
like roe. Outside, the snow…

There is a peculiar mathematics to this image: she is covered by water, but also opened by it: clarified, defined. The image is static and silent, an antidote to the problem of time, until shockingly, she wakes and walks out:

—as if

the room’s edges radiated
from her, as if I were inside

her thought. But then,
before any of this could register,

the clothesline creaked
and the wind picked up,

and she stirred, so the water
broke from her into water.

She ought to have stayed in there forever. But the still life had to end. The moment is extreme, like a “touch” in Whitman. The human urge to freeze time, or to preserve certain satisfactions, can be in found in all artistic mediums. The passage of time is an abstraction, maybe gravity’s work against the stasis of spacetime. One feels time passing—now—but the sum of all time passed and to pass is impossibly constant. And governed by light.

3.

There is in people the urge to “pin it down”—to find satisfaction, to arrive. But time keeps passing, and nothing can hold. If the passage of time is our abstraction and our problem, it is useful to consider the things that people do to get by, or the things we use to prop ourselves up: to use a Stevens phrase, to find “what will suffice.” As Stevens explained, and as Miller demonstrates, our general response is to impose imagination on the world:

…The glasses
left out on the brownstone

stoop caught light
as we passed by, and so

we gave them great
significance…

If the glasses are indeed watching the poet and his companion, then Miller is in part surrealist; yet always the logician, he is sure to point out that this is the imposition of human imagination. The glasses possess a reasoned otherness; their strangeness is isolated and real. To consider them at all is to imagine them, to divine a prop. To view a pair of glasses is to project an image of them in your brain. To imagine them. The flare of light, light a speed but a mysterious constant, enhances the sensation.

Yet eating means more eating. Needs mean more of themselves. For every satisfaction, there is greater need, until death. In “Still Lifes and ______scapes”, a man who has loved Rembrandt’s Danaё his whole life sees the painting in person for the first time and “doesn’t see much // more than he did on the page”, yet he “fears losing it // the moment he turns away.” And at the close of the title poem, a couple in the back of a cab is breathless in its attempt to be satisfied:

—Those poor lovers
drifting sexward in a river

of lights: now even
their kiss has become

another object pressed
between them.

The urge to blend makes sense when recalling the “Sleep Suite” narrator, the man who sleeps in the spare room. In sleep, this person became a part of something that had seemed alien, or separate, only moments before. So perhaps the human problem isn’t simply a problem of time or of change, but of a separation from things and from one another. It is the fact that once people are finally able to blend, they aren’t there to experience it, because they’re either dead or sleeping. Our minds are what make us want to blend, and our minds are the very thing that prevent us from doing so. To bother another phrase from Stevens: “It is the human that is the alien.”

4.

Miller has his own props in this book, the most obvious of which are Justine, Andy and Clarence, the characters from peculiar Section III, titled “What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse).” The section would be ill-fitting if the rest of The Book of Props failed blend so seamlessly in tone and delivery. Yet it is inarguably different from Sections I, II and IV, employing a cast of characters in place of a first person narrator, and envisioning itself with an omniscent moviemaker’s eye: “We’ll hold // on these flakes of light”.

In any story, we come to value characters based on decisions that they make. The strange thing about Section III is that there is no real plot to the “film in verse,” or no crucial decisions being made. It is in most places a catalogue of each character’s abstract observations during moments of pause and reflection. In the fifth poem in the section, “Justine’s Childhood (Abroad),” we see Justine on a sailboat, watching the shadow of the sail on the water:

…The rippling chop

enhances the shadow’s
illusion of fluttering. Though,

It’s only the sail that flutters,
Justine says to herself—

the shadow’s untouched
by the wind that propels it.

The shadow is propelled by wind it never touches. It’s an interesting idea and savory image, but why it has to be attributed to some abstract “Justine” rather than the first person narrator we’ve come to know in Sections I and II is unclear, beyond the fact that his poem is in the “film in verse” section. In “The Tightrope Walker,” Clarence, ostensibly Justine’s “lover,” talks to her on the phone about a tightrope walker’s chances of falling:

…Perhaps two lovers

—like us—talking across the country, will hear
a trembling in their voices,
as the quivering wire upsets the birds—

It’s hard to hear Clarence refer to his lover as his “lover,” the word even more dramatic here than it was with the lovers in the cab. Again, the conversation arrives without context; we are only just meeting “Clarence,” so it’s hard to find justification for this melodrama, even given that this is a “film.”

But proceeding through their world, it is easy to become absorbed; the characters are anybody’s characters. They provide pattern and multiplicity to what might have been a limited perspective. The details of their stories are scattered, but each is humanized by an ability to perceive. Consider the thoughts of Andy, a drawbridge operator, watching a game at a bar during “Andy’s Monologue”:

…What we’ve done
becomes us—I know this—: exercise
becomes muscles, and, bless it,
touching a woman sometimes becomes
feelings. [He points to an instant

replay above him on the screen.]
See how he holds onto it?—that’s
perfection. And I say thank God for it—
for those men who stay in motion above us
each Sunday, while we get good

and drunk.

These kinds of details, then, become most important. Where some stories are built to show a character persevering, or experiencing or achieving something unusual or extraordinary, this series of poems is important because it takes us inside the mind. We see moments of reflection that are often unheralded and that vanish a moment after they take place. We watch people with props, people finding what will suffice while they can. Perhaps, ultimately, that will be our story.

5.

It is impossible to imagine an empty room because once the room has been imagined, it has been fused with something. Miller’s world involves the stillness of empty rooms, involves generally the struggle of cognition against the absence of cognition. Humans are a part of things, but also are dramatically removed. In “Landing,” part of the “film in verse,” Justine and Clarence see the city from above:

This city
like a nickel of light
dropped in a field

It brings to mind Stevens and “Anecdote of the Jar.” The field imposes itself on the city as much as the city takes dominion over the field. Miller is calm in between, and provides greater illumination the more that you read him. He has the stuff of an outstanding poet. He has a mind bred from Stevens and an eye bred from Williams, synthesizing them with a flare for passionate romance that, in its most effective applications, allows for humans as a part of the world—in part for our ability to control light as survival against darkness. At the close of the book, we are back in a dark room:

…that spring-pale

leaf remains pressed
to the window, all day lit up

with sunlight, then at night,
lit by whoever

inhabits the room—

There is stillness but constant motion, the most important of which might belong to light, measured in some platforms as a constant. Amid constant motion, there are hints at stillness, and stillness implies eternity. We are still, but constantly moving—not back to front like in a movie, but with lateral shifts, like the surface of water.

*

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The Shadow of Sirius

Monday, January 5th, 2009

by W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

9

Speak, Memory

merwin cover

W.S. Merwin has written, translated and studied a lot of poetry during his lifetime, and his newest collection, The Shadow of Sirius, undoubtedly demonstrates the payoff of that work. While deceptively simple, the poems effortlessly pursue themes lying at the core of human experience: childhood, impermanence, mortality and memory. They’re beyond poignant and possibly even beyond his best work. They’re essential.

Sirius is divided into three sections loosely separated but also linked thematically – the first a recollection of youth, the second a series of ruminations on death, and the third a less definable hodgepodge of observation. The focus of sections one and two allow them to resonate a little more powerfully than three as actual “sections,” but all remain effortlessly lyrical and all convey a general message that when one sits and reflects upon everything in old age, these are the most important things in a lifetime. Simultaneously, age seems to have transcended time for Merwin. In “Still Morning,” he writes:

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words

What proceeds in section one is quite a phenomenal display of memory and poetic expertise combining to result in simple, profound moments. In “The Pinnacle,” Merwin writes of a friendship he had with a teacher he once admired, and of the impermanence of that relationship:

she was beautiful
in her camel hair coat
that seemed like the autumn leaves
our walk was her idea
we liked listening to each other
her voice was soft and sure
and we went our favorite way
the first time just in case
it was the only time
even though it might be too far
we went all the way
up the Palisades to the place
we called the pinnacle
with its park at the cliff’s edge
overlooking the river
it was already a secret
the pinnacle
as we were walking back
when the time was later
than we had realized
and in fact no one
seemed to know where we had been
even when she told them
no one had heard of the pinnacle

and then where did she go

I could quote most of section one here and it would be equally as powerful, but I’ll refrain. The poet captures the general essence in “A Likeness,” in which he writes “I have only what I remember.” Moments from childhood, things we remember of people we’ve known, these are what ultimately resonate as important in our lives, and these things are typically remarkably simple, enhanced by a sight, smell or sound.

The book turns more specifically to ideas of impermanence and mortality in the more compact section two. “By Dark” works as a metaphor for the act of dying itself:

When it is time I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day

I can see nothing there but the black dog
the dog I know going ahead of me

In “Dream of Koa Returning,” a consideration of the loss of an animal results in the consideration of impermanence:

I looked out to the river
flowing beyond the big trees
and all at once you
were just behind me
lying watching me
as you did years ago
and not stirring at all
when I reached back slowly
hoping to touch
your long amber fur
and there we stayed without moving
listening to the river
and I wondered whether
it might be a dream
whether you might be a dream
whether we both were a dream
in which neither of us moved

I don’t really know what I can say about that passage other than the fact that it deserves ten billion enthusiastic thumbs up. It’s quite a revelatory moment in a brief period of text – the speaker sitting, thinking of his dead pet, then regarding both his own and his pet’s impermanence – and isn’t this what poetry is supposed to be about?

As I mentioned, section three seems more a mixture of daily meditations. It’s not quite as focused as the first two, but reverberates quite well. In one of the most powerful pieces in the section, “Shadow Hand,” the speaker thinks of a roof repairman he once knew:

yesterday after all these years
I learned he had suddenly
gone blind while still in his sixties
and died soon after that while I
was away and I never knew
and it seemed as though it had just
happened and it had not been long
since we stood in the road talking
about owls nesting in chimneys
in the dark in empty houses

Again, a revelation found in a brief moment, another revelation leading to a reflection on the impermanence of all things. Ultimately, “Worn Words” summarizes the essence of this book the best:

The late poems are the ones
I turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight

it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there

As such, The Shadow of Sirius acts in itself as a collection of late poems. They are made of words that have come the whole way, that have been there. In a world of so many poetry projects with so many complicated agendas, this collection both reemphasizes and illuminates the importance and relevance of good poetry.

*  

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