Posts Tagged ‘FSG’
District & Circle
Friday, September 15th, 2006
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy
Work Defines
Though Seamus Heaney wrestles on occasion with the American and global political climate in his new book District and Circle, it is apparent to the reader, or any reader of his older work for that matter, that Heaney comes from a very far off place with little identity in the 2006 United States. There is common ground to be found, however, from individual to individual, especially in relation to timeless human experiences like longing and manual labor. From this come the strengths and weaknesses of this set of poems.
The book opens with Heaney’s acknowledgment of his lost world of labor and personal industry. In ‘The Turnip Snedder,’ the world of “bare hands / and cast iron” is mutilated gorgeously into shining pulp. The ensuing poems read like lamentations that are nearly impossible to relate to unless you’re an elderly Irishman; however, the reader is unwittingly transitioned into recognition of the current condition of war and the sad similarities that mark every era. “The Aerodrome” reflects back on a bygone airstrip where once a son and mother waited for a father to come back from war. The poem concludes:
If self is a location, so is love
Bearing taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.
These lines emphasize the role of the individual and individual pressures in the midst of global chaos. Certain human experiences, it seems, are timeless. “Anything Can Happen” takes this from more of a current-events standpoint, referring to 9/11 while comparing such shocking acts to the unexpected wrath of Jupiter, the Atlantic to the River Styx, and the United States to the ruling classes of 2000 years ago.
As the book progresses there is a feeling of being mired in a past that is beautiful, but is certainly being viewed rather than felt. Unfortunately the poem “District and Circle” gives nothing much better than a great book title. Having ridden on District and Circle, I can report that the Underground experience Heaney describes is accurate. The most attractive poems are about working and labor; although the tools and the means have changed, anyone with the stresses and satisfactions of hard labor in their bones will at least be able to sympathize with them. “Sugan,” for example, isn’t quite Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” but validates in the same way:
The fluster of that soft supply and feed -
Hay being coaxed in handfuls from a ruck,
Paid out to be taken in furl and swivel,
Turned and tightened, rickety-rope, to rope -
District and Circle remains knee-deep in reminiscence until the final 20 pages, which start with “The Tollund Man in Springtime.” This poem is the book’s redemption point. Without explanation, it justifies each poem in the book no matter how distant or obscure. It begins:
Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost
The narrator views himself as a man alive in the wrong time, something he describes with both real humor and feelings of tragedy. He associates himself more with the earth than with modern day society and lets the reader know that if he or she can’t get that, they can piss off.
After continued human/nature metaphor and confusion, District and Circle revisits the favored theme of manual labor and the joys and sorrows of lives constricted and defined by work. Finally, it seems that the poet does want to give some credit to the transcendent experience of art and the depth of human life in “The Birch Grove,” “Cavafy,” and the wonderful closer, “The Blackbird of Glanmore.” If the reader is not already familiar with Heaney’s past work, this book will take some effort to love. However, a few close readings and special attention to its half-dozen gems will show the reader a tight, purposeful book of poetry that is as deep as it is sweet.
*
Capacity
Friday, June 9th, 2006
by James McMichael
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
How Much a Potato Holds, How Much It Can Do
The Irish potato famine is something all but ignored in modern verse. In his sixth book, Capacity, James McMichael uses the poem “The Begotten” to remind us of its ugliness:
The hardier were entwined for
weeks sometimes
in the limbs of their expired kin.
“The Begotten” is one of seven long poems comprising McMichael’s new volume, and its vision of death on an island that can no longer provide for its population serves as an example of the book’s central metaphor—surprise, surprise—capacity.
In “Above the Red Deep-Water Clays,” McMichael defines capacity as both how “much a thing holds and how/much it can do.” McMichael’s best work in this book forces the reader to look at the human race in this capacity. Born with what we’d like to imagine is limitless promise, we’re each really born within the confines of society, of social status, of anything we’ve the individual capacity to do or to hold:
Impertinent, the thorough
talking-to that one’s conditions gave one
right from the start.
The book’s biggest question, of course, becomes free will: does it exist inside an individual’s capacity, or are we merely playing out, step by step, the only things we’re capable of? Mankind’s will to endure despite its capacious limits becomes enough. And even if we’re given a talking-to by our conditions right from the start, it might also be important to acknowledge that, if we’re constantly pushing forward, there is no such thing as origin at all “until given out later as what has been/risen from.”
McMichael traditionally works in book-length poems, and this collection is essentially that; its seven poems are alike in form and content, and the voice itself is stable and strong, while not particularly surprising. His often formulaic language recalls Ammons, though his deductions seldom thunder like Ammons’s do. He presents a complex problem in this book, and he responds to the problem with verve; toward the end, though, he mentions a room or a “nothing-there” that becomes so stretched it is “his to break through.” Whether or not McMichael would claim he’s actually striving to break through his timeless predicament, between the lines, there’s the irresistible impulse to do so; naturally no one, including McMichael, has the capacity to “break through.” It might be more satisfying if there were a nod that the question itself is impossible for us; nevertheless, his will is admirable.
*
Averno
Sunday, June 4th, 2006
by Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
“Persephone is having sex in hell”
The “modern retelling” of a Greek myths is a typical, played out, and more often than not, boring endeavor. But Louise Glück’s reworking of the Persephone myth in the icy and dramatic Averno works, in part, because Persephone isn’t exactly the core of the book; rather, she serves as a means of informing its bigger, colder, more apocalyptic corners. Even before Persephone enters the book by name, there is the sense that any human being’s development of experience and awareness can lead to grief — the more one knows about the violence and horror that are seamless with reality, the more one is altered. So Persephone — dragged to hell and raped by Hades, released but forced to return for three months every year — is as changed as anyone that’s had an earth-shattering experience. In this passage from “October,” the unnamed narrator could easily be Persephone, her mother Demeter, or anyone else, for that matter:
Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.
When Glück brings in Persephone by name, she takes things a step further, suggesting that Persephone went to hell with Hades of her own volition. It becomes possible that Persephone is finding experience the old fashioned way—chasing the bad boy—and the real debate is between Hades and Demeter, the disapproving mother. Demeter’s a goddess, we’re reminded, so she could procreate again if she wanted to; instead, she allows winter to come year after year while Persephone’s away. This hostility suggests the possibility that sometimes even earth itself “has no wish / to continue as a source of life.” The story of Persephone, Glück explains, should be read “as an argument between the mother and the lover— / the daughter is just meat.”
Though the book benefits from its mythological thread, Glück’s greatest triumph lies elsewhere. The poem “Landscape” is an amazing accomplishment; as in “October,” the speaker might be, but doesn’t have to be, someone from the myth of Persephone. The second section of the five-part poem, which appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 under the full poem’s title, is one of the strongest. She describes the look of a barren and frozen planet that’s “bleached, like a negative”:
…the light passed
directly through it. Then
the image faded.
Above the world
there was only blue, blue everywhere.
Glück deals best in extremes. The book is full of buzz words like “love,” “soul,” and “death,” and I can see where this would be a turn-off for some people; one could equally claim that a blanket of snow representing memory loss is overdone. But Glück is too precise to let it become a problem. If snow and ice show how one forgets one’s past “lives,” we understand, they also mean a fresh start. “Is she / at home anywhere?” Glück asks, and we’re reminded that each of us is constantly dying and being remade. Averno, a crater lake in southern Italy, was considered by ancient Romans an entrance to the underworld; the balance between the fire of the underworld and the ice of the surface world is constantly in flux. And ultimately, it’s Demeter whose grief takes center stage.
According to the myth, Demeter is responsible for creating winter, because she is in angry despair during each three-month period that Persephone spends in the underworld. Glück, however, suggests that when Persephone went down there for the first time, she was gone for good—and only Demeter’s re-imagining of her begets spring. “Now over and over / her mother hauls her out again,” Glück writes; then Persephone re-enters from the first-person and wonders how to proceed after the horror she’s experienced: “I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, / how can I endure the earth?” The answer, it seems, is to forget everything and live the same life, as Glück hopefully concludes in the final section of “Landscape”:
And I thought: if I am asked
to return here, I would like to come back
as a human being, and my horse
to remain himself. Otherwise
I would not know how to begin again.
*
about - news - reviews - this morning - features - POP
designed by Magnetic State
powered by Wordpress
© Coldfront Magazine 2012
