by Michael Schmidt
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
A Pointed Purging
Michael Schmidt lusts after the divine, but he caps that lust with humility; if the narrator in The Resurrection of the Body were more impulsive, were less intelligent, he might strip naked, run through high grass, drop to his knees and proclaim at the top of his lungs the divinity of Christ and the loving, complicated fusion of all things living and dead.
But no one wants that stuff rammed down their throats, and Schmidt—a profoundly academic and high-modern poet able to make the printed date “1 August, 2006” look a thousand years past—isn’t out to convert anybody to anything. His is a stern, lyrical, meditative exploration of spirituality. He is mysterious, humble, devotional, dead serious about the grunting heft of a real human body and the abstract spiritual body/bodies it implies. Call it Christ or what you will (any human might be “Christ himself,” as per the wisdom of Salinger): obsessive devotion is obsessive devotion and can be made metaphor for whatever one chooses, be it a romantic obsession, the ghastly indifference of the universe, or the teachings of Christ. That’s to say, you don’t have to be Christian to like this book.
So The Resurrection of the Body, you’ll find, can be filed under both Christianity and modernism—a fusion not without great precedent, and which in this attempt feels at turns dense and compelling, at turns beleaguered or contrived. Our speaker has a sizzling intellect and has probably read more books than there are dead seals in the sea, but some of the offerings here feel inevitably like poems for the sake of Poetry.
Resurrection opens with its enticing title poem. The first six lines, mysterious, set the scene:
The cellar floor is swept. Women are weeping
Like shadows in torchlight, around the straw pallet they hover,
The soon-to-be mourners, a dozen, discarding their shawls,
Unpinning their hair. It’s so hot in the cellar of death.
Professional, they know what’s to come:
She will shrug, shiver, jaw drop open, let go.
“Weeping” and “cellar of death” set of any number of drama alarms, but the austere, lapidary poesy is so willful and consistent in Resurrection that you begin to forgive. A poet taking his subject matter seriously in the age of incessant sarcastic skeptic-to-cynic blather is, ironically, a touch refreshing.
Before long we’re in familiar country, witnessing the awesome power of Christ as healer (the title poem is a lyrical rendering of the Gospel passage in which Christ raises Jairus’s daughter). Even for the couldn’t-be-further-from-Christian, it’s not as hard to stomach as you might imagine, because Schmidt isn’t pushy or one-dimensional. The poems are dense and open-ended; the best provide a rewarding re-readability. “Wanting to Think” might be the most darkly obsessive, best poem in the book:
Why, when I want to think of you, do I think of him?
He may be dead, and yet he still lies with you
Warming his calloused hand between your thighs.
He may still be alive, and his lips for ever
Puckered on your nipple, above your heart.
Who’s the “him”?—his wife’s ex-lover? Ex-husband? His wife’s forgiven infidelity? Could be Christ, for that matter, could be the abstract notion of Christ as the “other man.” No doubt Schmidt has something specific in mind. Nevertheless it’s mysterious, corrupt, devotional, and in the end, rather pleasant. “Third Persons” also abuts infidelity, real or imagined, through the narrative of a would-be cuckold—“He gave her the benefit / of every single doubt”—and underscores the truly heartbreaking, vital thing present in Schmidt’s poetry, and present in Christ’s teachings: the tangibility of a quiet urge towards something empathetic, forgiving, honest—something impenetrable in its humility, even in its defeat.
Schmidt’s seriousness makes for some unfortunate slips into maudlin posturing. If your Christ-alarm starts to go off—I know mine is still buzzing—it might mean things are getting a little too religious for you. Conversely if Christianity is your bag, maybe there won’t be enough of it. Either way, you’ll be delighted to find he doesn’t ignore the butchery and horror present in the histories of assorted faiths, and swamps his poetry with enough deep-seeded intellectualism to maintain a dignified balance to any open-minded soul.
Still, I should mention again that the book is unfortunately peppered with unjustifiable poem-poems. A series of Ghazals is simply poetic—“If so, am I Persephone?”—and doesn’t move things forward. “Not Yet,” a rather nice vision of a father unsure how best to protect his family, feels a little too Gladiator at the end: “not yet, not yet.” Schmidt can also spoil a poem by over-stating things: “Out for the thrill of it, to learn the elements and be / Not like men but men indeed.”
Nevertheless I’m pulled to the core of this book—to the impenetrability of forgiveness and humility, and how it can give way to a fitting nobility and austerity. The voice in these poems seems to genuinely care about human bodies in all their sweaty, physical, organic repugnance, in their emotional landscapes, in their propensity, however slight, for salvation—“that grace which is rooted in muscle” and its omnipresence in the population. “A Meditation on Necessity” beautifully captures the voice of a seemingly random old woman who is moving into a new (her last?) home: “Will someone visit? Will I change? The cities I lived in / Fade in this sunlight” and “The houses I lived in in those fading cities / Have all been blighted.” Time equalizes people, levels us and gives us something in common, and you might suspect when reading Resurrection that it’s worth it, after all—the would-be childish notion that we should try and feel empathy for everyone experiencing everything.
“The Golden Dome” presents the need to build a place of worship: “Man honoured God by making / A second home for him.” There is equally the abstract notion of a house of words, of ideas, and at the risk of speaking for Christ, I’ll say this book is not Schmidt’s best, but that its insistence on forgiveness, humility and the divinity of human bodies provides a suitable habitat for the subject/s of his adoration.
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