| Poetry Microreviews
Not Even Then
Brian Blanchfield
University
of California Press, $16.95 (paper)
“Good
morning fungibility,” Blanchfield writes in
his first collection, a book-length elegy to the
lost-and-forever-gone intellectual capacity to make distinctions.
Everything is equivalent: Louis Althusser, Scooby-Doo, Hart Crane,
and Newfoundland. Despite his often loopy humor (“All God’s
squirrels get / darker as you go north”), there is real distress in
these poems, albeit spackled over with a shiny layer of hard-won
irony. What gets lost when there are no distinctions is, of course,
identity, and the poems in Not Even Then proceed like a cortege to
the funeral of good old-fashioned subjectivity and selfhood.
“Empathy subsists on estimation,” Blanchfield writes, and “In
bed the Never architects / pull blueprints up to their chins.”
We’re living in a sorry world, says this poet, making his point
with dizzying shifts in image and shattered syntax; the poems shudder
as vertiginously as disco lights. Thankfully, the helter-skelter
congeries of observation and allusion is held together by a
controlled, consistent subtlety of tone recalling early Ashbery. But
Blanchfield is more exhausted and more importunate than Ashbery ever
was: “When I was fifteen in the public library I’d find in
greater / metropolitan phonebooks other Brians’ addresses / and
write away to them for help, Brian, dear on principle.” What
survives here is a wistful faith in romantic love, and
Blanchfield’s love poems provide a reprieve from the book’s
general aridity. In one poem, Blanchfield imagines two lovers
lingering through the morning in bed, drinking glasses of ice water:
“The water is perfect in its own way, and your pillow is my
pillow.” Blanchfield’s book can be a difficult, sometimes
frustrating read, but the baffling, kaleidoscopic quality of the work
is an aspect of its meaning. There is very little here that is
conventionally beautiful or accessible. But one senses what
Blanchfield’s response would be to that complaint: in these very
late days, conventional beauty just won’t do. —Amy
Schroeder
As in Every Deafness
Graham Foust
Flood Editions, $13 (paper)
It may be that the
most difficult poetic
form isn’t the sestina or the rondeau redoublé but a modernist,
free-verse form commonly known as the “skinny” poem: three-,
two-, and often one-word lines expose the poet’s every gesture.
With the 50 poems in his debut collection, Graham Foust swiftly takes
a seat alongside a handful of others (including William Carlos
Williams, the form’s originator; Robert Creeley; and the late Larry
Eigner) as a master of that most minimalist, no-place-to-hide form.
Here, in its entirety, is Foust’s “Night Train”: “creased,
the darkness seems / exactly // the same— // someone / in one of
those houses // is you.” Yet for all their economy, the largesse of
these frequently rhyming, expertly paced poems accommodates the great
themes of the human condition, from love (“One day love / is mere /
manipulation. / . . . On another day love / is purely possession”)
to death (“Bury me / up to my kite”; “You look / as if I
haven’t seen a ghost”) and the complexities of time (“Tomorrow
is the newer / of two ruins”; “give this scream / time”).
Allusions to addiction and addicts throughout lend the collection
grit and gravitas, but their autobiographical relevance is somewhat
beside the fact—what do any of our desperately craved, quick-fix
commodities deliver in the end if not a kind of narcosis?
(“Welcome, autumn / to my room / of empty things.”) Foust’s
brutally elegant condensation distills a sore, sensitive intensity
rather than a Reader’s Digest–style abridgment.
Our age of the
sound bite has its own logic, its own snap judgments and damnations,
and with As in Every Deafness, Foust emerges as the dangerous,
tight-lipped Milton of that world-weary downfall: “Knives / from a
child // are not as beautiful / to pull.” He goes straight to the
point. —Jeffrey Jullich
Eyeshot
Heather McHugh
Wesleyan
University Press, $20 (cloth)
The
dexterous,
anagrammatic intelligence of Eyeshot, Heather McHugh’s seventh
collection, nearly overwhelms. Pleasures abound; lines tumble over
themselves, each finding its logic buried in the music of its
predecessor: “this cursive, this subversive currency!” When
McHugh pushes this logophilic thinking into the visual, as in
“Significant Suspicions” (“or old ardented ear-rings . . .
Oddly one / lives on, continually”), where ears are “ardented”
by the rings that frame them (“or,” “old,”
“oddly,”
“one”), she writes with a facility unmatched since James Merrill.
But this relentless virtousity grows (at times) oppressive. In
“Goner’s Boner,” it is difficult not to regret her morbid,
pun-rabid fascination with a hanged man’s posthumous erection:
“there he hangs / but it does not.” And when in “Songs for
Scientists” she asks, “Do you / prod for God’s address? grope
to learn / if love survives?,” it is difficult to ignore the strong
epistemological differences between the “probing” scientific
labor she evokes and the synthetic nature of her own work, whose
ethos is predicated on the notion that “coincidence / is not an
accident. It surfaces in order for the eye / (and its possessive
mind) to love.” But McHugh’s poems do not grope, and we’re
forced to ask what to make of a lyric form whose reach is exactly its
grasp. The poems find their pleasure in constant performance, their
meaning in points that connect and then divide: the sky “falls into
rubrics”; “my one” becomes “money”; Being
“yearns to
multiply.” These points of connection are a kind of grace, and it
is the poet’s wonderful intelligence that makes them possible.
Rarely, though—and perhaps this is a petty complaint in a book so
full of pleasures—do they show the urgency implicit in Sylvia
Plath’s defense of virtuosic performance: “Five bright brass
balls! / To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.” The
difference between “falling” and “falling into rubrics” is
the difference between catastrophe and
categorization. —Spencer
Short
Goldbeater’s Skin
G.C. Waldrep
Center
for Literary Publishing, $16.95 (paper)
Liturgical, intimate, and
intelligent, G.C. Waldrep’s first collection,
Goldbeater’s Skin,
restores poetry to the natural and to its natural status as a
creature bred of pathos and inquiry. At first Waldrep’s palpable
ambition as a poet and his fierce breadth of knowledge may seem to
conflict with his faith—he is one of a handful of converts to the
Amish church, which views education beyond the eighth grade, among
other things, as prideful. But readers will soon realize that Waldrep
is drawn to that space where the exception meets the rule: “The
difference between D-sharp and E-flat lies in the composition of the
chord: in this case trees, light, water,” he writes. Nature defines
by likeness and distance; it weaves and untangles the coterminus. And
it is by this same rigorous process enacted in the poems, a science
of subjectivity, that Waldrep attains a new semantics—of religious
experience, of origin, of empathy. He writes, “Try imagining the
theoretical as a succession of indigenous archetypes: /
predestination, evolution, relativity :: ram, salamander,
jackal.” Titles such as “Apocatastasis” and
“Synderesis”
may, on first blush, strike some readers as intimidating or
pretentious, strapped as they are with metaphysical and moral cargo,
but the poems themselves dispel potential self-seriousness with
tender admissions (“I raise one hand in darkness and see all five
of my motives”) and literary sleight-of-hand (“Perhaps this cold
will pass. Perhaps / that bridge was not a harp at all”). Elsewhere
he indulges in good humor and reverence for the vernacular as means
of sublimating, or at least complicating, the poems’ religious
implications: “I misread GUITAR LESBIANS for GUITAR LESSONS on a
streetside sign. / They’re out there, strumming away.” And when
faced with the diluted, subway-preacher idioms of contemporary
Christianity, Waldrep’s argument is neither defensive nor
condescending, but plain, self-evident, and above all, memorable:
“The good news / when the sun rises in the morning / is that the
sun rises in the morning.”
—Debbie Kuan
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review |
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