Posts Tagged ‘9 stars’

Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

by Daisy Fried
University of Pittsburgh Press 2013
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

“whacking the ground, like a wife / pounding her pillow, alone all night.”

Daisy Fried’s new book, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, begins with a long poem titled “Torment.” The title suggests distress and provocation, and the poem delivers. Its first stanza is a tight fourteen lines and introduces one of several college seniors at the cusp of the “real” world. Panicked, presumably about his future, the student declares, “ ‘I fucked up bad.’” These are the poem’s opening words. The student, named Justin, is returning from a job interview in the financial district of Manhattan. The poem’s speaker, who turns out to be a professor of Justin’s, observes his behavior on the commuter train like a farmhand might watch a foal take its first wobbly steps before it falls, nose first, into piles of shit. The speaker knows Justin is doomed, as we all are, to torment. Like most of the poems in this collection, “Torment” does not avoid reality, and Fried’s language offers a precise and sobering look at the modern world.

The poem’s second and third stanzas reveal that the speaker is pregnant, and she too finds herself interviewing for jobs, adjunct teaching jobs:

The woman interviewer looked at my belly.
“As a new mother would you have time to be
literary mama to your students?” So I could sue
when they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want.

Despite the interviewer’s prejudiced and ignorant questioning, there is no anger evident in the speaker’s voice. Instead, there is an honesty that recognizes the world as flawed and material, a matter-of-fact recognition of how we live steeped in nonsense and bullshit that is often directed, with particular acuteness, at women. Although the poem’s tone might propose enervation, the speaker resists surrender and denial, the easiest of human responses in the face of difficulty. Instead, she insists that despite the midwife’s warnings, her “ankles / are slim.”

These poems are “Women’s Poetry” in that they are poems presenting the reality of a pregnant woman in a treacherous economic and political climate, a woman forced to engage in meditation on responsibility as her unborn child will inherit these problems of the modern world. The poems offer advice in a “fuck it” sort of way, suggesting that we are perhaps all guilty, all in some way responsible for that which plagues us. Take for instance a bit of advice from the book’s final section in which Fried’s speaker runs an advice column titled “Ask the Poetess.” She refers to all poets, both male and female, as poetesses, perhaps a nod to Gloria Steinem’s insistence on the definition of feminist as “anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.” Why shouldn’t we all be called the same thing? We are all poetesses, just as we are all poets. Someone writes in to complain of a professor who lectures with his eyes shut. The poetess responds with a necessarily blunt reality check:

Is your teacher an adjunct with a double-full-time teaching load at $2,500 per class, without health insurance, job security or other benefits? Overworked teachers generally have a talent for teaching while sleeping. I’m surprised you noticed. In my day students universally practiced their own version: listening while sleeping.—LOVE THE POETESS

The reply illustrates a poet in touch with the consciousness of her era, an era in which educators are overworked and underpaid, and artists of most kinds rarely matter in the mainstream. Although there is a sense of disillusionment in the poetess’s advice, she does not sink into bitterness. Instead, she remains a voice for realism, for recognizing the realities of a situation and, rather than ignoring them or attempting to wish them away, meeting them head on.

Fried’s connection to her generation extends beyond the problems of a society that does not seem to value education or cerebral muscle. In another response from the poetess, one geared toward an advice-seeker who wishes to know why “mothers think they’re so special?” since “Anybody can pop a child out” and “Writing a book of poems is much harder,” the poetess recommends treating “the poem as the child and the child as the poem.” To those pitifully reductive comments regarding motherhood, Fried’s poetess gives little regard. Instead, she reminds her readers, “you can’t finish a child or book without making lots of mistakes.” We are all fuck-ups, actually. And there is no universal “harder” or “more worthwhile” when it comes to any act of creation. VIDA’s Dear Fury attests that she “sure as shit knows it’s possible to be a writer and a mother.” The poetess’s sentiment feels consistent. It’s the individual that makes that decision.

Fried explores one of the many “mistakes” a mother might make in her poem “Midnight Feeding,” in which a woman in her underpants with a flashlight in her mouth heads out to her shed to feed a litter of feral kittens. She can’t let them starve or end as a larger animal’s prey. She must protect them, but while she feeds them, the baby monitor she wears sounds with the cries of the speaker’s three month old daughter. “She’ll wait,” the speaker proclaims. Her proclamation is decisive, and yet just a few lines later, she exclaims, “What a bad mom!” It is never clear, however, whether the speaker refers to herself or to “wild La Mamma” cat that “ran off a few weeks ago,” abandoning her babies. The poem expresses the anxieties of motherhood, always trying to provide care and protection and never quite knowing if one is doing the right thing. These anxieties are also present in “A Snow Woman,” in which the speaker “decide[s] again not to get pregnant,” her decision perhaps partially based on the signs of difficulty and trouble that parenthood can bring. Through the window she sees:

The neighbor child’s sandbox still out there,
lid on underneath snow: White barrow
burial for troubled life’s
embraces.

The lines hint at abandonment, as there is something doleful about a child’s sandbox buried in snow. Fried’s use of the word “still” adds to the downcast effect, yet the poem develops into an imagined “romance,” as the speaker envisions building a snow woman with her neighbors and their child. The child punches the snow woman, and the speaker echoes Wallace Stevens: “One must have a womb of snow, an eye of cold.”

In these poems, Daisy Fried displays an intense and refined attention to the troubles of the present moment. Effectively blending the personal with the more universal, she delves into issues surrounding womanhood, but also she looks at the troubles of humanhood. Often these poems are overtly political. Take “Lyric,” for instance, where Fried’s speaker deals with the very specific problems of the modern moment: “Gas price up again, stink of gouging.” And sporting goods stores that, according to Fried, are really “modernist gun megachurch[es].” Other poems, like “Liberalism,” “Metaphor for Something, or Solving the Credit Crunch” and Attenti Agli Zingari, the long poem that makes up section three of the book, all attend to the political unrest of the age.  

The poems in Women’s Poetry take place in a modern wasteland. “Elegy” even alludes to Eliot’s The Waste Land. British literary critic F.R. Leavis insists on a poetry in touch with its time. Leavis believes a poet must be aware of, even one with, his time. The poet’s personal consciousness and the collective consciousness of his/her age must be inseparable, at least in the poetry. Daisy Fried has mastered this, as her poems successfully reflect the contemporary climate. Leavis wrote that T.S. Eliot’s poems “express a modern sensibility, the ways of feeling, the modes of experience, of one fully alive in his own age.” The same can be said of Fried.

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Just Saying

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

by Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press 2013
Reviewed by John Deming

“a metaphor / for sensation” 

When Roger Ebert died three weeks ago, I felt compelled to go back and read some of his old reviews of some of my favorite movies. In his review of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, Ebert has an insight about the Allen character, Mickey: “his constant complaint is that it’s all very well for these people to engage in their lives and plans and adulteries, because they do not share his problem, which is that he sees through everything, and what he sees on the other side of everything is certain death and disappointment.”

Part of the appeal of Rae Armantrout’s poetry is the extent to which the poet, while not fixated solely on “certain death and disappointment,” also seems to see through it all. Like Mickey, she is led only to further mystery as a result. But she is so dialed into that mystery, so ready to impart its means and ways without imposing her findings on reality, that she has developed into one of the most clear-eyed American poets since William Carlos Williams.

This is not a new development. Armantrout has been publishing poetry books for 35 years, including three new books in just the last five years. 2009’s Versed earned her a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and nomination for the National Book Award. Versed may long be considered the poet’s towering achievement. But 2011’s Money Shot is just as viable, and so is her new book, Just Saying.

The poet’s approach in all three books is more or less the same; the differences between them are subtle and have to do with whatever aspects of experience are her greatest preoccupation. She assembles images, thoughts and sensations–things seen, heard, overhead–and finds inconspicuous patterns in them, never losing the abiding sense that saying anything might mean pretending to know too much. Yet many poems lead to overpowering revelations that will be lost on those only committing to a cursory read.

Much of Versed was suggestive of the poet’s battle with what was considered a terminal case of adrenal cortical cancer—a somewhat personal turn for the ostensibly cerebral poet. Armantrout, also an exceptional prose writer, chronicled her battle with cancer in a three-part essay for lybba.org. In part two, she writes:

I was sent to the ICU and I took a notebook with me. Writers write, I told myself. It was a core part of my identity. Of course, I was on heavy pain killers and somehow, too, I had a build up of fluid around my lungs which made it difficult to breathe, but I did take notes. In fact, I started a poem called “Own” there which ended up in my book Versed. There was plenty of material at hand.

The first section of the poem quotes something I heard. It goes, “Woman in a room near mine moans, “I’m dying. I want/to be fine! It’s my body/Don’t let me! Don’t touch me!” Maybe doctors and nurses hear things like this all the time, but, in my condition, the woman’s irrational desperation resonated through me. I thought that might be me in six months or a year. Of course, I don’t know if she was actually dying or if she was just hysterical. The nurses seemed to find her irritating.

This indicates something important about the poet: her ability to key in to her surroundings, and to draw something meaningful from them without being didactic. One thing that makes Versed so powerful and enduring is the way that the poet didn’t necessarily treat her experience with cancer as anything more than another thing that had infiltrated her environment; the poet’s mortality becomes more palpable–and chilling–because of the extent to which she doesn’t deign to change her style, but instead, to allow it to absorb this new experience.

Armantrout survived (I say again, read the piece at lybba.org), and she published the follow-up , Money Shot, in 2011. If Money Shot seemed more squarely aimed at the broader culture–media, money, politics–Just Saying reminds us of Armantrout as a seminal language poet whose subject is always the words she is using as much as whatever she is using them to describe. She sees through things, remember, to the extent that one can, and the language we use is just another forum for this. Here is the entirety of her poem “Spent”:

Suffer as in allow.

List as in want.

Listless as in transcending
desire, or not rising
to greet it.

To list
is to lean,
dangerously,
to one side.

Have you forgotten?

Spent as in exhausted.

The language is the subject itself; it is suspicious of itself, always indicating its own slipperiness. Yet the poem ends lyrically (“Have you forgotten? // Spent as in exhausted”), more Dickinson than Williams, with a great exhale and what can almost be perceived as a moment of empathy: everyone gets exhausted. She also indicates a notion that underlies much of her work; by stating “To list / is to lean, / dangerously / to one side,” she suggests a suspicion that all real knowledge involves negotiating opposing “certainties,” that with new perspectives, fixed points always come unfixed.

The concept surfaces in this lyrical passage from “Scale”:

“An electron
is an excitation

in an electron field,”

a permanent tizzy
in the presence of

what?

Like thought
it creates the ground
it covers,

like thought,
it can’t stop.

And again in “Midst”:

Singing that bar
about the flock
taking off

“as if”
it were one body—

as if this was one body—

and who could be listening?

The second that things become “one body” is the second we ask what exists beyond that body. It’s a question that constantly regenerates itself, like turtles all the way down. This kind of mystery is important in Armantrout’s poems; there is ceaseless wonder and engagement, but without the expectation of absolute truth. An Armantrout poem can supply catharsis simply by crystallizing the question.

To do this, sometimes providing a clear image is enough:

On the wall in a coffee bar,
a model’s arms
and stern, pretty face
frame a window

(where her chest should be)

and a clear sky beyond

[from "Ghosted"]

This kind of image is not easy to render. The poet is able to do so economically, and she does so without leading us towards some overt social commentary about body image or objectification. We see it as clearly as she does, and we are permitted to draw our own conclusions, if indeed there are any to draw beyond some identification of the strangeness of humans or the beauty of a clear sky. If I press the issue, I might regard that when we think we are looking for one thing, we very often find something else, something even broader, filled to the brim with the new and unanswered. Nothing provides fewer answers than a clear sky. But the poem is somehow resolute, even final, in its openness.

Her skill at rendering the individual image is matched by great depth of insight into what it means to be a human animal. She constructs her fragments by absorbing the world around her. In some cases, that means identifying and exploring triggers within her own body or mind:

If you became pain, perhaps,
then you could rest.

But it is not possible
to merge with pain.

[from "Suggestion"]

Seeing through everything means seeing through language, too, as the poet admonishes: “Language exists / to pull things / close.” Language is an mechanism for organizing; it allows one to impose order on thoughts, feelings, and experience. Armantrout reminds us that this, too, is a kind of illusion.

I am taking the Hannah and Her Sisters metaphor too far, because Armantrout is obviously a very different kind of artist. But something that happens towards the end of the movie seems relevant. The arc of Allen’s Mickey is that he is terrified he has a brain tumor, and when he is cleared, finds only fleeting satisfaction. He soon realizes that he has only delayed the inevitable and becomes deeply depressed until finally, watching the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, he arrives at a revelation: “What if the worst is true? What if there’s no God, and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience?”

Few modern writers see as well, or hear as well, as Armantrout; few are as deeply a “part of the experience.” She ruthlessly challenges common perception and brings back from her psychic frontiers revelations that are earnestly conclusive for the very fact that they are inconclusive and are suggestive of what Wallace Stevens called a new knowledge of reality:

If we think dying
is like falling

asleep,
then we believe

wrongly, rightly
that it’s a way

of sinking into
what happens,

joining the program
in progress

[from "Progress"]

Rae Armantrout’s full bibliography is important and possibly essential. But it seems to matter that we don’t ignore the incredibly high level at which she is currently writing. If there are few variations in style, one might remember that her poems are new like every day is new: as long as the world is changing, there is fodder. If not order, ideas of order. Stevens closes his book Ideas of Order with an image of “The spruces’ outstretched hands; / The twilight overfull / of wormy metaphors.” Armantrout, like Stevens, embraces universal metaphor. She concludes Just Saying:

Stop,
I know this one.

It goes
everything’s

a metaphor
for sensation.

[from "Stop and Go"]

*

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Engine Empire

Wednesday, September 19th, 2012

by Cathy Park Hong
W.W. Norton 2012
Reviewed by John Deming

9

“We have shattered new frontiers with our 14 golf courses”

The ultimate futility of human endeavor is a pleasure in Engine Empire, a new triptych of poems by Cathy Park Hong. She begins in the boomtowns of the old west, pinballs over to what she has called a “fantastical reimagining of present day industrial China,” and finishes in a human future that is lived almost entirely digitally—the kind of thing Google is slouching towards here. The three sections of the book are like points on a triangle, each pointing in its own direction, but relying on the other two for structural integrity. They are set in ostensibly dissimilar times, but each correspondingly betrays an era of human “progress” as a giant lateral step—boom and bust, boom and bust—where metaphysical longing remains a constant.

The poet, though, is not stern or humorless. She glories in the exotic human animal while exhibiting its flaws and contradictions (“Recall the frontier inside us when the business / of memory booms”). Human hubris manifests itself in an addiction to expansion and ever-promising frontiers. It is our perpetual distraction, the coping mechanism of animals who know for certain they will die one day and don’t know what else to do. The settings of her poems are as central as the characters, and they serve as stages from which to build playful, durable poems. She jumps around formally and stylistically, including ballad sequences, prose poems, free verse, an abecedarian, a sonnet, an aubade, and some lipograms. This technically sophisticated approach renders each poem a performance that slyly contextualizes the book’s rather serious subject matter.

Her starting point is the American Civil War, evidence as good as any of the oppressive weight of expansion. She follows a group of gritty, ambitious prospectors who want “no part” in the north-south “duel” and advance west in hope of striking it rich. The 19th-century west is vividly detailed:

All around us forts lie built and unbuilt, half-
walled towns as men yoke themselves to state,
but we brothers are heading through fields of blue rye and plains
scullground to silt sand,

afar, the boomtowns of precious ore.

The landscape is ripe for plunder. The men are reckless and violent in their ambition, killing and raping to no real ends. Hong treats her subject matter with bluntness, but also with a clear eye for its absurdity. In the closing section of “Fort Ballads,” one group of frontier travelers passes another, and the character “Jim” dehumanizes and murders the “other” group, possibly competitors (but probably not), with ease:

It is here we call Our Jim to drain
them of the last dregs of consciousness
he shoots them easy as horses and
we move on, passing

a legendary mining town drained of its ore
yet still, still the isolated men settle to dig
and dig, furrowing wilder
into the earth.
We see the empire rising.

They kill and move on with their conquest with a senselessness of rhythm echoed by the poet’s optional punctuation. The diggers they pass are like worker ants in service to industry; they may dream of riches, but this is little more than a requirement that inspires their continued role playing in the expansion of this empire. Their success is very important to them. To what end? Most see each other fail, and continue failing themselves.

The act itself, however hopeful or greedy, is the true ambition, whether they know it or not. It gives the individual a reason to keep on, and allows the poet to hint at the sweeping desperation of it all. If the worker pauses long enough to notice this desperation, more work, another lottery ticket, is the way to block it out quickly—an idea elaborated on in the second section, “Shangdu, Our Artful Boomtown,” where the boom is not a gold rush, but a rush for industrial prosperity. The elusive goal—wealth—yields for the wealthy the same hollow ends that define the quest for prosperity:

We have shattered new frontiers with our 14 golf courses.
A dexterous harmony of manmade and natural hazards,
fairway glades surrounded by leafwhelmed mountains
of tinted tallow trees and pars graced with stately flame
throated birds-of-paradise.

(“A Little Tete-a-Tete”)

The wry tone, the alliteration, the use of words like “leafwhelmed” demonstrate the absurdity of the scene without detracting from its natural beauty. Reality beyond human design—the mountains—is worthy of attention and adoration, while the human imposition upon it—the golf courses, which may be beautiful too—carries for the humans the same depth of accomplishment that pillow humping provides for a dog. It is a skillful balance rendered by the poet, who in her critique of human activity never purports to know too much. Instead, she performs for us, laying out incredibly agile poems like her “Aubade,” which contains a shade or two of Wallace Stevens in his more percussive moments:

I am ready in my plaidwhelmed
puffpuff golf hat. Ready to be
whelmed by a petstore cacophony
of crickets shirruping in their cage balls,
juddering slam of hammering jack,
humming sussurations of catamarans,
aerosol striations of welder’s firecrack,
then a caracas of fist cracks
after workers slurp off their goggled specs
to a bassooning fog horn hooning
so spooning lovers know when to return
to their dawn shift, tuning cymbals
for toy baboons who clap clap,
Hail the Industrial Age, hail!

The prosperity that permits the golf courses depends upon the hard work of those worker baboons who wake early, who leave their beds and loved ones in service of empire. And the final purpose of empire, apparently, is the opportunity to feel “whelmed” from time to time by manmade and natural beauty.

Hong defies her own objective stance here and there by providing small glimpses of the suffering that is endured in the service of providing these “whelming” moments for a select few. For example, the “spooning lovers” listed above or the “old travelers forever dying” that Jim kills. But she saves her most robust insights for the book’s perfect final section, “The World Cloud.” Here, the “boom” is life in the world of technology and its ever more promising distractions. The physical aspects of this frontier—“now every industry / has dumped whole cubicles, desktops, / fax machines into developing / worlds where they stack / them as walls against / what disputed territory”—are immaterial next the “shared dream” of virtual existence, where people exist seamlessly alongside their internet selves, going on and offline with the blink of an eye:

You wake up from a nap.
Your mouth feels like a cheap acrylic sweater.
You blink online and 3-D images hopscotch around you.
A telenovela actress hides under your lampshade.
You switch to voice activation.
Good afternoon! Sings the voice of Gregory Peck.
You look out your window, across the street.
Faded mattresses sag against a chain-link fence.

As with the gold digging and golf courses, there is a pronounced meaninglessness even in a mighty technological achievement like the Internet. In Hong’s near-future,  “minds flood into minds,” and pop-up ads blow by like leaves, leaving the average citizen “half transparent / with depression.” People can even visually “enhance” something they are viewing in real time. One could say this generates a reality that is supported only by artifice, like living in a video game. Conversely, one could argue that our potential to develop these technologies is as real as anything else, and if we can slightly enhance the extent to which we are “whelmed,” then why not? It could even be perceived as an artistic act, depending on how much choice is involved. But none of these viewpoints address a more central problem: any moment of peace or beauty will pass, and no amount of industriousness or money grubbing can reverse basic facts about time, decay, separation, and death.

To that end, “Who’s Who,” while not one of the most formally ambitious poems in the book, is one of the best. Hong’s central character is incredibly memorable: a woman whose husband still lives with her physically, but who has abandoned her in a more modern sense—he has chosen to live “on roam,” and has only sent her one message since doing so: “I am by a pond and a coyote is eating a frog. It’s amazing.” She takes care of him in the physical world, clipping his fingernails to “keep up appearances,” perhaps only because the only alternative would leave her even lonelier.

Moments like this are earned in Engine Empire—they creep into poems that pretend style is their central appeal. When they land, they are a reminder that we can’t invent our way out of certain problems, even if we find a way to live forever. The husband’s virtual delusions are similar to the money-chasing ambitions in this book: both mean chasing shadows. This virtual delusion—think permanent Facebook—earns its counterbalance in the poem “Get Away from It All,” where a speaker is able to escape the dehumanizing delusions it seems exhausting to keep supporting. She walks out into an expired world, she quotes Whitman, she finds a Whitman-prophet on the beach, and in this moment, a wisp of salvation:

are they UN forces no
they are nudist bathers.
They have beached.
Dashed with amorous wet,

they  call out like walruses,
these loafing rebels against
the enhanced,
I see too much

yet go, go into the unknown,
smell the salt, rancid
scent of water, seagull,
blades of grass and listen,

the one with the sodden beard says
undrape yourself,
you are not guilty to me.

She holds herself back from these kinds of moments, which makes them all the more affecting when they come about—you are busy being entertained, and suddenly, you are “whelmed” with insight and an abiding need for empathy. No amount of financial security can teach us how to die, nor can inventing our way into distraction. Hong’s book is not about exorcising personal demons or telling her own sad stories. It is about the world, and is a chance to listen to its music. It is also a chance to find the world hysterical, but from a position of empathy that does not undermine the suffering we experience—suffering that, like beauty, is sometimes human-generated, and sometimes just simply a mark of our reality.

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‘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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