Up to Speed
Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press, $13.95 (paper)

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“Very brief musical passages quoted out of context often seem banal,” wrote Theodor Adorno. “The most stringent test is to see whether . . . smallest components make sense, and whether they can be quoted.” In Up to Speed, her eighth book of poetry, Rae Armantrout snips “smallest components” from the music of ordinary lives not so much to determine whether the original, the world, makes sense, but to test how the foreign matter of everyday America reacts when placed in the context of poetry, a medium often thought to be autonomous (or at least resistant to intrusion). Reunited with an old friend “after months apart,” Armantrout tries to reconnect by quoting (or misquoting): “I agree by mangling quotes.” Quotes have a ready-made quality, a locked-down givenness like the past itself, and in this sense Armantrout’s quoting and sampling isn’t merely an act of archivism but of endearing nostalgia, the banality of which may be—in Armantrout’s dialectical fundamentalism—the measure of our fallenness. A familiar soundtrack rendered uncanny (“Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ / . . . batted back / and forth / between speakers”) intercuts the book, interrupted by surprises: unforgettably, a “woman dressed as ‘Frank N Furter’ / from The Rocky Horror Picture Show” appears “alone on the sidewalk, 9:30 a.m., / August 24, 2002.” More somnambulist than surrealist, Armantrout’s poetry drifts half-awake (“When a dreamer sees she’s dreaming, / it causes figments to disperse”) through the automatic writing of a world dopey with the bad dream of history, where the only alternative to the oneiric is to be totally unconscious. Armantrout gives back to experience its innate incoherence. Anything but obscurity is pure wish fulfillment: “How often in dreams / I’m making my point / clear.” More than ever before, Up to Speed makes clear that Armantrout’s importance crosses over from the ghetto of poetry and into the arena of serious thinkers, serious comediennes.

—Jeffrey Jullich

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Hank Lazer stands out among experimental poets for his refusal to cross the line where innovation becomes orthodoxy; he puts the tendency toward “the kind / of ironizing that makes your alienation / feel worth it all” into question without succumbing to “plainspoken poetic speech / & its weary manipulations.” Wry, lyrical, and anxious by turns, Elegies & Vacations contains some of Lazer’s most frankly moving work, centering on the diaristic long poem, “Deathwatch for My Father.” The chronicle of a death foretold, suspended for a brief, blessed period of weeks, and then concluded with swift finality, “Deathwatch” uses mostly short lines and a minimum of punctuation to track the banal and brutal phenomena of dying as well as the survivor’s struggle in the face of disrupted relation: “you will die / & i / will cease to be / a son.” But the undiscovered country of the dead does not put an end to poetry’s possibilities for dialogue: “trust / above all others / the dead their / conversation / in which you / take part.” Lazer seeks, after Charles Olson and George Oppen, to be an ethicist of morning—to find a poetic that carries forward the luminous language of “this first hour / of the day / before the others / wake into our conversing” into our daily conduct and beyond our “flawed rhetoric.” That paradisal dawn winks slyly like a beacon almost overwhelmed by the glare of the commodified tourist heavens where Lazer’s poem-vacations take place. In each we find the poet articulating his fierce desire that poetry should not be a monument but a means for attending to the present tense of our lives. Instead of trying to produce a “cockroach capable / of surviving an atomic blast” Lazer is a self-healing metaphysician of presence whose utterance stems from his own particular and unpermanent flesh: “say the name of all / say it as a breath.”

—Joshua Corey

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Light Disguise
David Sofield
Copper Beech Press, $14

This first collection’s verbal, formal, and imagistic disguises conceal—lightly—a dark streak worthy of Larkin. Light Disguise opens with an inscription from a Venetian sundial (“Only the serene hours I number”) and closes with another from Heidegger (“The moribundus gives the sum its sense”), and the relationship between these two inscriptions—the first promising eternal serenity, the last assuring us that we are dead before we even start to exist—is the subject of the book. In other words, the book’s subject is art, or the passing of time and how art might be enlisted to delay it, unsteady it, keep it an open question. Artfulness here seems like an unspoken prerequisite for being a person at all, and people in Light Disguise often seem truest to themselves when beheld performing. In “That Moment Long,” a mother plays Debussy on the piano every night while her husband is away at war; when he returns, he forces the family into a comic-horrific dawn exercise regimen to keep them “Fiji fit.” These two strategies for inhabiting time (the mother’s lending comfort, the father’s provoking distress) suggest that happiness is largely a question of what instrument one plays to accompany one’s life—and how well one holds the tune. While this notion squares with the sundial’s motto, more often it is Heidegger whose words preside over Sofield’s. A professor at Amherst in his 60s, Sofield has accumulated these poems over the last several decades, and as may be fitting for a book written slowly over time, Light Disguise is full of unusual and inventive elegies. These are remarkable in part for their ability to keep the book’s larger philosophical questions in play, but also for their unlikely wit, as in “Death’s Duell,” which is both a dreamlike tribute to the poet’s mother-in-law (a noted soprano, she hums a phrase from Die Zauberfölte on her deathbed) and a profound exploration of the membrane, always porous, between “art” and “life.”

—Dan Chiasson

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The Cuckoo
Peter Streckfus
Yale University Press, $13 (paper)

Because an admirable first book is often over-praised, let me begin by saying that Peter Streckfus’s The Cuckoo is not a perfect book. Several of the poems, including the long closing sequence assembled from the writing of Francis Parkman, feel arbitrary in their formal strategies and willful in their opacities: less mysterious than muddled, they frustrate more than delight. Other poems are slight; others rest too easy in vague allusive cleverness. All of which is to say that Streckfus is not above the bad habits of his contemporaries; but what is striking about this book is not how often one sees in it familiar techniques, but how often those techniques are transfigured in poems as rending as they are strange. At his best, Streckfus abdicates common, worldly logic (“I’ll speak nonsense,” he writes in “After Words.” “You speak truth. We’ll see what comes of it.”) not for a capricious freedom, but rather to bind himself to a different but still severe government of meaning: the logic of dreams and visions, in which his weird metamorphoses, his narrative leaps and gaps seem compelled, like Dickinson’s, by an urge to disclosure matched perfectly with reticence. Thus, in “The Bird,” in which the speaker finds a bird which becomes his human lover only to abandon it and take himself the shape of a bird (“And this is how you’ve found me,” he concludes), one feels some essential, secret experience of love has been revealed through a poem graced with all the resonance and mystery of a medieval dream vision. That this resonance and mystery can stand alongside poems about Ronald Reagan and Hsüan-tsang, poems in the voices of trees and dung, poems in colloquial tones, and poems of exquisite music and image, points to the greatest strength of a book which stands among the most authoritative and promising debuts in recent years: its capaciousness, its endless variety and range, the uncommon, thrilling impression it gives of a made and inhabitable world.

—Garth Greenwell

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Figment
Rebecca Wolff
W.W. Norton & Company, $23.95 (cloth)

The poems in Rebecca Wolff’s second collection, Figment, are witty and sleek; it’s hard to doubt their authority. At the same time, it’s just as difficult to warm up to them, or to find their speakers all that . . . well, likeable. “When you know the right people,” Wolff writes, “they send you over onto the next / in line. They return your calls.” The brash, unshakeable confidence of these poems, which chiefly take the self as their subject, is attention-grabbing—some might say to a fault: “ ‘To what do you attribute / your success?’ Talent and genius.” To her credit, Wolff is not afraid of challenging lyric propriety or of risking the censure of her less intrepid readers. She leaves it to us to discover that the source of this blasé, self-obsessed irony isn’t unchecked arrogance but a gimlet-eyed despair—what lies at the heart of Figment is a dejected (and satire-laced) postmodern critique. A poem titled “Sunday Morning; or, Instead of Services,” for example, declares that our poetic forebears thought “practically the same idea” that we do, but “none of us can believe / the same simple truths, / the gems.” Wolff’s work is packed with the trademark signifiers of our age: allusions to pop culture (“I grow power hungry / as Demi Moore does in Disclosure”), crafty wordplay (“It all happens so fast— / ovulation, creation, cremation.”), and amusing moments of pointed self-consciousness (“The stink of the mid-eighties / is on you and there is nothing you can do”). But even as these poems fulfill the expectations of the postmodern masterfully, they reveal its fundamental limitations. The Adrienne Rich–inflected final poem, titled “An Arch Dolefulness Has Taken Me This Far,” renders this most acutely, declaring that we are “stuck out here in the devastation of the forest / in the middle of fucking nowhere.” But Wolff has not quite given up yet: we grow “more songlike,” she tells us—and that’s mostly a good thing—“the further we row / from our figmented shore.”

—Amy Newlove Schroeder

Originally published in the April/May 2005 issue of Boston Review