by David Gruber
Astrophil Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo
The World Outside
No matter how deliberately we arrange language, certain states of mind defy our attempts to freeze them into poems. David Gruber’s Sleepers’ Republic is a book of tightly composed, rhythmic dreams, and like all dreams, they are undermined by their translation into English. They shift through geography and time as dreams do. They turn suddenly forbidding where they were once joyous. They slip into and out of coherence. But necessarily, the words his speakers choose are the words used to describe a dream, not the dream itself, and the best poems in Sleepers’ Republic faintly acknowledge that even a dream world is limited by language. In the first stanza of “Approved Methods,” Gruber reveals one of the ways he will attempt to recreate the experience of dreaming:
Strange wedding music, savage
echo against the brass door
a coughing
an interruption
that slid through the water
where we hung.
Here, Gruber presents a set of disconnected images that seem uniquely compatible with one another. It is hard to place why “wedding music” and “brass door” make such an appropriate pair, but together they become a foundation for the tiny universe of the poem. The poems are held together with a recognizable Lynchian logic, though even in his most acclaimed and recognizable dream sequences, David Lynch can only capture the spirit of dreaming. While Gruber’s poems are less superficially provocative than Lynch’s sequences, like Lynch, Gruber is restricted to conjuring the spirit of dreaming. Interestingly though, he discloses the impossibility of such perfection. Sometimes this acknowledgement is explicit, as in “No vocabulary is enough / to catalogue your geography,” and sometimes it is subtle. The first several stanzas of “Prelude in a Time of War” dither over where to begin:
In the queen’s closet, with no mirror:
lavender soap, open window, the scent
of oranges and sky beginning to blue.Or: a broken pane of glass
held together with masking tape.
Bacon frying down below.
Photographs pinned to the wall.Or: the worm tunnels through our guts,
the moth settles in our nostrils.
Gruber’s speaker cannot decide which image is best, and when he makes broad, cinematic cuts from image to image to image, he admits the failure of all three. None is a perfect beginning, and the failure of language begets the failure of dreaming.
Though his poems arise out of a sleepers’ republic, they are a way for Gruber to reckon with the real world’s troubles. His speakers’ inability to effectively construct their dream-like existence becomes their failure to effectively contend with real sociological, political, emotional and intellectual concerns. In one moment of such concern, Gruber imagines a glossing-over of agriculture, a deeply necessary pursuit, with media-induced artificiality:
There are field and dreams about wild herd. Once the clover is gathered the hay is baled and rolled. There are cartoons of these things: the soiled colors that overtake knowledge and replace the organs under flesh with a composite of image and speculation. Every eye an iris, all the leaves dampened by snow dissolve in their cinema.
In moments like this, it becomes clear that Gruber’s speakers are not hiding behind dream logic, but that they have been forced behind it. The “cartooning” of the landscape is the speaker’s way of reaching out from behind the veil of the dreaming and into a world where “cartoons” have specific implications. Of course all language has specific implications, and the world of the dream, rooted in the subconscious of real people, is a negative image of the world outside the dream. Through a process of reverse-engineering (i.e. reading), the stilted goings-on of the poems’ dreams appear increasingly representative of the real world, and the speaker’s prohibition from proactively responding to a very real, very important reality depict a common, contemporary feeling of individual helplessness.
If dreaming is an apt half-metaphor for contemporary life, any confrontation of the world’s violence (as made unconfrontable by distance or time) is restricted to waking and describing the dream. If the dream is indescribable, the world eludes consequential influence from the individual. In “Lisbon,” Gruber writes, “Once the softest word made the world tremble / […] but it came that we wrote loud / large on land and sky.” The speaker here is privy to the ineffectuality of language because, unlike in the past, language has little manifest effect on the world outside the poem. The speaker is caged by the way the world demands certain things from language. One poem, “Film: Butterfly Oeuvre,” is stuck pretending to be a film. Another, “Instructions for Antigone,” is stuck pretending to be stage directions. Even the emotional realities of many of Gruber’s poems cannot avoid infiltration by the bits of premade language that float overbearingly around in contemporary speech. In “Ingathering of the Exiles,” Gruber writes “Satellite passes you to me again, a plea from / outside my service area.” That the emotional reality of the poem is supported by the phrase “service area” makes great sense, as if amid many attempts to cut through language toward truth, Gruber takes language back and stabs deeply and momentarily at those things that keep us contained in our dreams. Even where no art is perfectly accurate, we still continue to try, and when the world becomes “like a magazine forgotten / on a chair, then reupholstered,” it is not only forgotten, but also noticed again.
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