by Linda Gregg
Graywolf Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Fragment Rock
Do poets still employ whatever fearless political wit they can summon and work towards earning Right of First Refusal from The New Yorker? Either way the fact that nine of the poems from In the Middle Distance appeared in the magazine say something of the unique category Linda Gregg is in. Not that New Yorker ink = good poem, but it does imply a certain degree of a certain brand of smarts and political dalliance. And whatever Gregg’s done, she’s done with smarts; accordingly, In the Middle Distance is one of the most self-contained, coherent things I’ve read all year.
The 58 poems comprising the book are not separated by section numbers or titles. Though most poems function on their own, they also emerge as a larger, abstracted series of romantic meditations: imagine emptying out a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece fits into every other piece. Every poem or numbered section of a poem is only one little brick of a stanza, and poems seldom stretch onto a second page. Nevertheless, each piece implies the poem that follows it, and implies the book as an autonomous unit.
The meditations are often emotive, sometimes too much so, which accounts for the book’s only consistent flaw. In “Arriving Again and Again without Noticing,” Gregg’s speaker reminisces about “all different kinds of years” before closing with the suggestion she’s self-actualized: “It’s strange that my heart is as full / now as my desire was then.” Yucky-sweet as that is, she makes up for it; like any good series, Gregg’s poems contradict each other from time to time, and the excellent last poem, “Highway 90,” shows that continued confusion and indecision are seamless with life at any age, regardless of one’s level of “desire” or fullness of “heart.” Here it is in its entirety:
An owl lands on the side
of the road. Turns its head
to look at me going fast,
window open to the night
on the desert. Clean air,
and the great stars.
I’m trying to decide
if this is what I want.
Her romantic assertions—many of which involve the word “heart”—don’t resonate because they detract from a dazzling thread of chance and indecision. In most cases Gregg allows the fragmented pieces to dictate and reveal themselves to her, each poem title becoming more or less the “topic” of the poem. The best poems begin with abstract ideas and fuse them with imagery, the handsomest arrow in her quiver. These poems are also chiseled, often employing sentence fragments for rhythmic punch, as in the opening to “The Problem of Sentences”: “A sentence is an idea. An idea with urgency. / A feeling for the sun before it rises.” Another fine idea/image fusion occurs in “Beauty”:
When my father heard his beloved dog
had chased and killed the rancher’s sheep,
he went right out and shot it. Because,
he said, once they ran with the pack
and tasted blood, it would never stop.
Perhaps the most telling lines in the whole book occur in “Parian Marble”: “I would like to hold / something up against ruin.” The word “something” implies she doesn’t know what, and improvised-yet-focused lyrics of In the Middle Distance are a stab at that something. The book, which Gregg explains in the notes took her five years to write, is an inquisitive quarrel with the divine; she allows herself to build fragments with the confidence that fragments—questions—can cohere. Here, they do. So it’s easy to get sucked out of her world when lines like “It fills me with tenderness” and “To make the day rise / out of the heart’s darkness” (both from the same poem) hand you a lollipop and beg you to confirm that God is Good. There are maybe one too many of such “sweet” moments to make the whole thing a slam dunk, but it’s awfully close. The great poems are many (“Surviving Love” and “Quietly” to name a pair), and when Gregg is good, she works like a punch in the gut you probably deserved.
Finally I’ll add this. We know Linda Gregg is smart. Academic even. But nothing new can be said about Orpheus. Especially in poems. Please stop; this goes for everybody. When Gregg brings in Orpheus in “I Do Not Need the Gods to Return,” it’s fitting cause to simply turn the page, because face it, who among us can stand another poem about Orpheus. I guess everyone wants to write the “ultimate” Orpheus poem. Sweet. Here’s what I recommend: write a book called Orpheus Poems in which Orpheus does everything from buy his Mom a birthday cake to throw Eurydice over his shoulder and, sword in hand, battle his way out of hell; Make him jump beside a trampoline and sleep with a transvestite hooker. Then we can finally put the Orpheus thing to rest—“No Orpheus to sing again” indeed.
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