by Paula Cisewski
Black Ocean 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
O, the Birds
The day you read the middle section of Paula Cisewski’s first book is, in all likelihood, a day you will spend considering birds a little more than usual.
When you’re two or three poems into that section—titled “How Birds Work”— you might be tempted to say enough with the birds. But the avian poems keep on a-comin’, and the more feathers that fly as repeated birds thwack into your temple, the less you mind; what started as sweet becomes a sort of punchy, obsessive mania surrounding those cuddliest living dinosaurs. I don’t care if you’ve had enough birds, you can almost hear the poet saying, have a few more:
Teach them a word. Hello. Home.
How dainty they seem and their beaks pull meat.
Of the sky again or singing and hidden.
This obsession serves as a microcosm of Cisewski’s finest trait; she is best in Upon Arrival when she gives in to her most manic impulses. The least interesting poems in the book render an image of a poet sitting at her desk trying to write the best poems she can. The Simic-like posturing that opens “Tyros’ World Tour,” for example, is overstated:
Each of us captaining
a solitary lifeboat.
As if we are lost
at sea. We’ve never
been to sea…
But mimicking the control of Simic’s mania is needless for a poet with other promising impulses, and it’s when she apparently loses preconceptions that she’s most in control. Take this rather random slip into exclamation and rhetoric in the book’s penultimate poem, “Opening Remarks”:
That’s the song I love!
Who titled me Distributor of Dirges?
Did I consent?
To some end, then, she is the Distributor of Dirges, whatever that means; and the mania she’s really indulging in, we come to realize, is an obsession with the notion of multifarious selves. Every person is burdened with an infinite number of conflicting impulses and emotions—indeed, of ways to finally envision oneself. Where these conflicting selves might be a source of conflict for some people, Cisewski’s best poems find an almost eerie comfort in them:
The emperor in me places himself in charge
of the olive branch in me. The waitress in me
sneezes in his glass of hundred year old port.
And later, she elegizes a friend, “Michael”: “The small selves we then were are / not here for questioning.” Her history as “waitress” reveals yet another self, and leads to the inevitable kitchen-as-heaven, god-as-chef metaphor:
…The kitchen loves the kitchen
and through its rapture of self-love trickles
bounty down upon us.
On occasion, Cisewski writes her way out of poems. In “Opening Remarks,” for example, the under-earned repetition in the last line serves as a bit of a spoiler: “into the drama the drama the drama of the human spirit.” But there’s a deep intelligence underlying each of these poems that help them escape the first-book “poems about paperweights” trap. Readers will find at least a small moment of ineffable satisfaction in most poems (you might have fun unfolding “Our Possible Brother”). She asks all the right questions, and the book’s final poem points beautifully elsewhere rather than wrapping us in tight.
In the end, she’s interested in that which is scattered, the way each person’s collection of selves might seem a sky-full of sparrows. The “selves” she offers here aren’t as sharp as Plath’s “old whore petticoats,” but if Cisewski takes the time to find ways to explore the unrestricted mania she’s hinted her selves possess, there’s no reason why she can’t develop them into a commanding presence.
*
Tags: 5 stars, Black Ocean, John Deming, Paula Cisewski
Posted in reviews
On a rainy Wednesday evening way back in May, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church showcased the work of poets Paula Cisewski and Ronaldo V. Wilson. Cisewksi’s Ghost Fargo was chosen by Franz Wright for the 2008 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem) won Publishing Triangle’s 2010 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the 13th Annual Asian American Literary Award for Poetry (he also was brought up in our 2008 Year in Review. Both poets offered up poems from their collections as well as new works in progress. Check out our video coverage of the event below.