Poetry Microreviews

Little Savage
Emily Fragos
Grove Press, $13 (paper)

According tothe International Labor Organization, in 1999 the United Statessurpassed Japan as the industrial nation with the longest workinghours—1,978 per year. Small wonder, then, that time is thecommodity that most of us feel we have entirely too little of. Yettime is exactly what Emily Fragos has taken with her stunninglygraceful first book of poems, Little Savage. A 1996 graduate ofColumbia University’s MFA program, Fragos (who is in her 50s) haswaited until this year to make her book-length debut, and from theunrhymed sonnet “Apollo’s Kiss” on the first page to thehaunting “The Other Place” on the last, this scrupulously craftedcollection proves well worth the wait. Permeated with sympathy forboth humankind and nature and peopled with outcasts, artists,misfits, and musicians, Fragos’s confidently voiced poems exhibit adelicate, mature mastery of language. An amateur cellist and pianist,she uses her finely attuned ear to work subtle internal rhymethroughout virtually every piece; her sense of rhythm and pacing areimpeccable, and she moves through time with poise and assurance, fromthe distant past of “Pompeii, A.D. 79” (“You will imagine ourface as the fire overtook us”) to the quotidian but no less uncannypresent of “Antarctic Night” (“I’ve found a job writingletters, / long and puzzling, on pale / pink stationery, for thewoman / with glass eyes”). Whether she takes as her subject suchfamous figures as Glenn Gould or Maria Callas or else such ordinaryindividuals as the girl who “said the landlady was deranged, / hadslapped her, set her German shepherd upon her / for no reason on thestreet,” Fragos takes pains to treat each of her fragile subjectswith dignity, compassion, and a grave attentiveness. The poems inLittle Savage are so smooth and radiant with thought that one getsthe sense that they were tumbled around in the mind of the poet untilcompletely polished, and we would do well to take the time to readthem with equal care.

—Kathleen Rooney

Of Thee I Sing
Timothy Liu
University of Georgia Press, $16.95 (paper)

The title of Timothy Liu’s fifth collection maysuggest poems of a political cast, but this book is no more or lesstopical than 2001’s Hard Evidence, and the title’s addressembraces any number of abstractions: nation, God, beloved, body. Liuis not an untalented writer, and he is capable of moments of graceand craft; two poems here, “Getting There” and “Bisexuality,”suggest a poet of sly, sometimes lovely erotic subtlety, at his bestalmost resembling a latter-day, lesser Catullus. But Liu seemsincapable of self-assessment; this at least is the best explanationfor a poem in which a line of potential emotional force and imagisticvibrancy, “Let world be more than teeth flashing in the dark,”can be followed by the nonsensical and awful “Let me be yourrotisserie Christ.” Liu’s better instincts are everywherehijacked by the indulgence of a strange voyeurism, a desire toimagine degradations cartoonish in their extremity: “threads ofspider / eggs parachuting onto the lips of / dying whores,”“festering / sores on a stranger’s cock.” Scenes of abjectviolence and need are glutted with debasement, turning what mighthave been an exercise in moral imagination, or at least beneficentsocial awareness, into an often repulsive aesthetic ofgutter-baroque: “needle stuck in the neck / of a woman giving headas a child // clings to her back, still sucking / on a pacifier.”The problem with such lines is not their explicitness but rather thetenor of their explicitness: they lack any sense of compassion, ofethical content or commitment, of what Martha Nussbaum has called“reverence before the soul.” These poems’ pageants of suffering(“a fag bashing / a lover’s brains with hammer blows / followedby twenty-two sleeping pills”) are finally anesthetic: they are notefforts at therapy, social or psychic, or invitations to empathy oreven indignation; they are mere rhetorical flourishes, attemptstoward the decorative, bankrupt grandeur of a negative sublime.

—Garth Greenwell

Fleet River
James Longenbach
University of Chicago Press, $14 (paper)

In thissecond collection of poems by noted critic James Longenbach, twotravelers embark on a journey both grounded in the literal and imbuedwith spiritual significance. In his acclaimed critical study ModernPoetry after Modernism, Longenbach has argued cogently for aconnection between high modernist and postmodernist poetics, and manyof the issues that preoccupy both movements haunt the poems of FleetRiver—questions of epistemology, teleology, free will anddeterminism, the power of language, the possibility fortranscendence. In several of the collection’s key poems, mostnotably the aptly titled “No Explanation,” the poet resolves to“respond” passively to the complexities of experience rather thantry to fix a determinate, delimiting meaning to them: “And if Isacrificed the possibility of being / Understood, I didn’t mind; // At night at times the hemlocks / Seemed otherworldly as thestars.” A somber note of fatalism darkens Fleet River, as in“Learning Window,” in which the speaker sees “no need / Toimagine a future because it was / Waiting beyond [his] control.”Despite this darkness, moments of wonder, ecstatic vision, andtranscendence abound in the collection, as in “The Two Together,”in which the protagonists imagine “A dream in which existing is towant / / And wanting to receive—the burden / Of not knowing theevent / Beyond .which nothing more will happen / / Foreverrelieved.” An almost Romantic sensitivity to the sublimity andseeming boundlessness of the natural world (“The landscapethreatened never to end”) as well as a habit of humanizing thatworld (“Clouds opening as if the sky, opaque / / Then clear,confused / What was about to happen with / A memory”) inform thewhole collection. If in his critical writing Longenbach has set out“to assert the historicity of poetry and the political power ofpoets,” he seeks in this elegant and thematically rich collectionto capture that fleeting moment of inspiration when “revelationdoesn’t wait / For us to choose a form.”

—Robert Schnall

Columbarium
Susan Stewart
University of Chicago Press, $22.50 (cloth)

Susan Stewart’s fourth bookof poetry, Columbarium, is her most fiercely intelligent andambitious to date: over a hundred pages long, its 35 “ShadowGeorgics” are framed by lengthy tributes to the four elements ofantiquity—air, fire, earth, and water—which set the boundaries ofStewart’s almost limitless concerns. Modeled on Virgil’sGeorgics, the poems at the heart of Columbiarium investigate not onlythe interactions of the human and the natural worlds, but alsoaddress literary tradition itself. “If I could come back from thedead,” Stewart writes, “I would come back / for an apple,” andthroughout the book she celebrates physical being and pleasure (theapple) while never losing sight of the intellect’s mediating force.Thus in a later poem, “Two Brief Views of Hell,” Stewart writes,“The mind wants an object and then recoils at what it has done.”Many of the poems touch upon the Fall and the notion offalling—what is the human’s relationship to the material world,and can we remain in it happily or must we fall from it? In“Pear,” for example, the speaker, “stalled” on a bridge,observes a girl almost magically “flying and falling, flying andfalling.” Lines later, we learn that the girl is merely jumping ona trampoline, but having witnessed this event urges in the speakerthe realization that “Everyone must leave . . . to burn, and burn /And burn back to the ground,” the trampolinist’s freedom havingcome to suggest a darker, but perhaps still liberating, image ofdeath. Stewart is at her most urgent and evocative when, as in“Pear,” she assumes the first person; otherwise the work’sessayistic quality obtrudes upon the immediacy and music of thepoetry. Alternately, when she aims to be more aggressively musical,as in “Night Songs,” the poems can sound awkwardly singsong andforced. That said, readers of Columbiarium will be rewardedthroughout by the poet’s remarkable acumen and edifying sense ofpurpose.

—Nadia Herman Colburn

Originally published in the October/November 2004 issue of Boston Review.