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
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