by Sandy Florian
Action Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough
Only Coming Through in Waves
Over the past few years, several small books in quasi-encyclopedic and dictionary-like formats, many written by women, including Haryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Jen Benka’s A Box of Longing with 50 Drawers and Marisol Martinez’s After You, Dearest Language, have helped prompt a rethinking of how books of poems are structured. Historically, encyclopedias and dictionaries have not been known to be the refuge of feminists. It’s perhaps too much to call this trend a movement, but these books give those musty formats a much-needed kick in the butt.
Sandy Florian’s first book, Telescope, is a collection of prose poems describing a carefully chosen set of objects and concepts in a near-alphabetical order that preserves both the arc from Abacus to Zero and the backwards stroke of the oars propelling us forward. A neat choice, it’s key to the flow of a collection that’s more interested in the dynamic of definition rather than the objects she describes.
Each three-or four-paragraph prose-poem presents first a dictionary-ish definition, a more encyclopedic definition and a poetic riff, using sentence fragments set off by periods and connectives such as a, but, and for, also set off by periods. These relentless ostinati can get annoying. The constant stops combined with the wall-like arrangement of the pieces make it hard for the lyric impulse to shine through. It’s as if song were forced to grow like moss between the bricks. Here’s one of my favorite moments from “umbrella”: “I am arching my back again. A shade before your bolded body. Or. A shell. Limpet-like, and marked by concentric lines. And. A furled fan.”
This kind of beauty seems to be extruded under intense pressure. In fact, the speaker seems generally oppressed by the power of definition. “Fact” is neutral until we get to “At length you commit a fact that accomplishes my annihilation.” The “you” could be culture, an abusive lover breaking her will, or worse. This piece starts with oppression, and ends with liberation:
For. You are the attorney of truth. The fact is. You stand on Buckingham. You walk across London Bridge. I, on the other hand, live in the world of windmills. And. I ask you to stop disproving my fictions. See. While you commit yourself to the harder science, I am truth-terrified. I skill myself instead the art of unmaking. For. To undo the deeds that have undone these dreams. Is the noblest of all metaphors.
Towards the beginning of Telescope, the “you” is a dominant force for precision, and the “I” is a force fighting for imprecision. Often, the precise “you” is depicted in a higher position looking down at the “I.” This tends to encourage a culturally gendered reading, yet there may not be sufficient artistic and political leverage to break through the wall. Looking back to the end of “fact”, the speaker seems less to escape an oppressive self-definition than to accede to a weary détente. In “bridge” the oppression is more religious in nature:
None but the Lord can bridge my days. And. I am trying hard to bridge the distance between us. Gestures bridge my way to spoken language. But I am as beside the bridge. Off track. I’ve gone astray. An attractive way of escape. These are the Gates of Hell. For. You have laid the bridge of silver for me, your flying enemy.
What started as an optimistic piece ends with the I/You pair as enemies. Another clue that the format doesn’t give the author quite enough room to breathe is found in “Factory”. At first bouncy, the tone is forced to modulate without any corresponding change in diction:
My unbeing. Factory of river. Factory of rain. Link in the Alps’ globe-girding chain.
A prison. A police station. A whorehouse. As. The lass I adore, the lass for me, is the lass in a female factory. But. The factory of manifold machines is a perpetuum mobile. These machines could produce forever. And. If the machines are in the production of your sense of forever, the magnitude of this great profit whets your appetite for more time. You endeavor to thoroughly exploit the sunny times of your first love by prolonging the unfixed day. The child, now five, works hours fifteen. While I. Under the burden of this rock, suffer its forever falling backwards. I am rheumatic. Paralytic. I am become stillborn.
A graveyard. A cemetery. A nuclear reactor. A concentration camp where prisoners are systematically murdered.
Some of that is amazingly awkward. The bounciness of “the Alps’ globe girding chain” could have turned into an ironic reference to The Sound of Music, but didn’t. In this example, the reader is not given enough cultural specificity to go there. This chain of meaning isn’t fertilized by the usual feverish and often self-undermining cross-references of an encyclopedia or dictionary entry. This could be attributed to the fact that the entry is about a factory, but the general effect is similar over diverse subjects. Florian’s speaker seems as oppressed by her self-chosen form as she might be by a culturally imposed form. Self-imposed walls can be the hardest to break; though as the book progresses, the poems speak to each other more easily.
Halfway through, the sense of an antagonistic, gendered reading modulates to a point where the “you” can be more easily read as God. It’s still an up/down relation, but the stage is set for a few poems where “I” comes out on top. The I/ you dynamic becomes less oppressive by the end— though “zero” predictably ends with the word “infinity.” This poetry struggles with culture, identity and belief. Brief moments of lyric beauty often seep through like moisture weeping through a wall.
Speaking of walls, a few lines directly refer to Roger Waters lyrics: “My hands feel just like two balloons” “To go to the show,” and “This is Radio Chaos.” Sometimes her use of shards of biblical language reminds me of the parody of the 23rd psalm in Animals. Surprisingly, the parallels go deeper, given Florian’s concern about nuclear war and American militarism. This extends even to prosody: those unfunky, hammering semi-classical ostinati, and clunky lists that seem at times just to fill out Waters’ songs. I can almost hear Roger’s strained voice declaiming some of her lines, but Florian has none of his acid, humorless self-importance. She does display his touching, honest struggle for equality and peace in what seems to be a permanently Manichean, militaristic world. I don’t want to encumber Florian’s work with a strained analogy, but it’s the best explanation of both my affection for this book and the reason why I have to give it a five.
*
