More Poetry Microreviews

Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse
Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad
Turtle Point Press, $21.95 (paper)

This 600-plus-page labor of love springboards from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s much-celebrated 1950 film All About Eve. From the opening credits (“Alfred’s music grand & cloying . . . / while the credits appear on what: a scrap of gray burlap?”) to the famous closing shot of yet another aspiring ingénue (Phoebe) infinitely copied in the dressing mirror (“Such a girl has / looked in a mirror too many times to experience experience as experience”), Conway, Crosbie, and Trinidad retell the movie scene by scene, assessing, digressing, celebrating, mocking, and confessing along the way. Every line and image sets off a campanile of resonances: one expository section on the scene late in the movie between the backstabbing Eve and the critic Addison De Witt is interrupted by the following associations: Carrie, The Star (a later Bette Davis flick), Mommie Dearest, May Swenson, a spurious note from Crosbie’s Eve-like assistant, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joan Crawford, Stevie Nicks, and meditations on celebrity and diva-hood. The authors dare plenty: to narrate, to signify, and to feel. They treat the reader to insights about the collaborative process, about the poets’ friendship (one of the most exuberant and moving committed to paper), and, in one irresistible section, about Eve-style climbing and leeching in the poetry biz. The authors also revel in poetry’s bag of tricks: Phoebe 2002 is almost an encyclopedia of rhetorical strategy and poetic form, from the sonnet and the Keatsian ode to concrete poetry and acrostics. Phoebe’s sheer capaciousness—its multiplicities of subject, theme, mode, viewpoint, and form—may be the best way to capture unruly reality between the covers of a book. Perhaps the most miraculous thing about Phoebe is that it manages to be acutely instructive on the subjects of ambition, selfhood, artistry, and many others, while never ceasing to entertain with great panache. Pointedly, the book vilifies the usurper Eve but saves its most caustic bitchiness for the bland dilettante-housewife Karen. In the world of Phoebe, striving unbacked by integrity may be blameworthy, but dullness is unforgivable.

—Kathleen Ossip

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Murder (a violet)
Raymond McDaniel
Coffee House Press, $14 (paper)

In the poem “the translation of trees into guitars,” Ray McDaniel describes flora: “the meat of trees grows ever-outward and hides their hearts // which, if drunken from, will make the world seem as slow / as sunlight sinking down to the heart’s meat.” Later, in “tongue, fur & feather,” he turns his attention to fauna: “[dogs’] coats glisten like the sheen of falcons / to whom we gave sleep.” Amidst these images a murderer lurks, a “tall woman striding through the wave,” apparently attempting to come to terms with her identity. If you’re already lost and would rather not be, read no further. McDaniel’s book-length mystery about a female assassin on the lam is full of passages like these, cast into lyrico-narrative fragments intended to function interdependently. McDaniel wants readers to “sort through the mosaic in whatever ways they find evocative” (there are no page numbers here), but the bulk of these tesserae provoke nothing so much as a longing for the very condition they eschew in the first place—narrative cohesion. At first this longing for order might seem like an analog for suspense, but when we remember that no one sequence or set of interrelations is privileged over any another, our desire becomes indifference. The parts themselves—airy, elusive, and largely unpunctuated—would have to be considerably more captivating than they are in order to maintain interest. Adding to the trouble is the story’s ersatz medieval setting, which affects not only the lexicon (“cloister,” “janissaries,” “cloak,” “cathedral,” “quest”) but the syntax as well: “pitch black / its succor and temptation its tourney // I cannot recall if sanction is curse or benediction.” Murder (a violet)’s experiment in structure may be predicated on the belief that conventional narrative techniques rely upon and encourage misconceptions about the true nature of experience, but ultimately it provides new evidence that these conventions speak to a basic human need, and one that we can never hope to master by disregarding altogether.

—Aaron Belz

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The Rest of Love
Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20 (cloth)

Ezra Pound defined an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” And while Carl Phillips is no mere imagist, in his seventh book, The Rest of Love—a book which, like the previous six, exhibits an impressive mastery of dialectical tensions—his use of the image stands out as especially expressive. Phillips’s keen balance between image and abstraction—his anchoring of the ephemeral to the worldly—enables him to represent the contrary pulls between seeming opposites: release versus restraint, sensation versus thought, perception versus concept, all of which articulate in some way that age-old conflict between the life of the body and the life of the mind. Indeed, his images are precisely what allow Phillips to span the gap between the ideas on the page and their arrival in the reader’s mind, for in a sense they embody the mind, fleshing out the mental intricacies and passions he abstractly invokes. In “White Dog,” for instance, he writes, “First snow—I release her into it— / I know, released, she won’t come back. / This is different from letting what, //already, we count as lost go. It is nothing / like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what / losing a thing we love feels like.” Here the figure of the dog captures the tension between holding on and letting go, particularizing the struggle to comprehend what love isn’t and is. Not all the poems in this superb collection employ so overtly an objective correlative, but each provides a mooring that keeps it and us from drifting from the matter of this world, reminding us that those things which seem most opposite—body and mind—are inevitably intertwined. Distinguished, too, by Phillips’s characteristic phrasal complexity, intricate lyricism, and sinuous syntax, these poems have—like the work of the Greek and Roman poets he spent much of his early academic career studying—a monumental quality, a sense of the magnetically mysterious which draws the reader back, as to the classics, again and again.

—Kathleen Rooney

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A Green Light
Matthew Rohrer
Verse Press, $12 (paper)

“I try to view nearly every situation as humorous and detached,” Matthew Rohrer admits early on in A Green Light, his third collection. The death of God, the nightmare of history, the fleetingness of life: Rohrer chooses to face these enormities from a distance, through a lens of irony. Even if we try to apprehend them directly, language (our means of making sense) is likely to fall short—or fool us into thinking it hasn’t. A practiced ironist, Rohrer almost always underscores his deadpan comedy with an unmistakable melancholy, pathos, and a touching sense of bemusement; he takes pains to remind us of what irony guards against in the first place: “we take up defensive positions / against the machinations of the universe.” At once hyperbolic and matter-of-fact, Rohrer captures the tenor of the contemporary psyche; his voice is fey but determined, and it speaks for a generation raised on too much TV and a vague sense of impending doom. Pervaded by an awareness of recent history and seemingly surreal but familiar images (“Huge American planes lay fallen / into the very buildings / they had been attacking”), A Green Light is in fact Rohrer’s timeliest book to date, and it reminds us that a measure of irony can keep us from being duped by those in power, from falling prey to rhetoric: “The book that says the President is a friend of trees is a book of lies! . . . It is a book about how to have a big piece missing from your head and live.” Occasionally Rohrer hits too easy or too fashionable a note of irony, even if the point behind his playfulness can still be discerned (“if the question is: / what has replaced God / in my life, the answer is drinking / and being exceptionally social and not working”), but often he confronts the intractability of our predicament and the limits of human endeavor with exemplary humor and ease: “you can’t / teach the wild turkeys your name.”

—Craig Morgan Teicher

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In a Landscape of Having to Repeat
Martha Ronk
Omindawn, $14.95 (paper)

In unadorned language at once impressionistic and precise, Martha Ronk records the highly conditional appearances of things as if she were a naturalist on a field trip through the Twilight Zone. Of course, her Zone is ours, too, with its malls, freeways and all-pervasive junk culture (“In Florida the TV is always on a game show”), but she is sharply conscious of what might be called the intertextuality of the moment, the way each individual’s perception of or orientation to the external world represents a mediated, framed confluence of stimuli emanating from multiple, often unstable, sources. Her poems are microclimates of uncertainty and transience (”The relative motion of two objects moved”) in which the sense of a center dissolves and “proximity is neither like nor not like.” The operative metaphors in Ronk’s anxious yet lyrical pieces—rain, fog, reflective glass, television and movie screens—suggest distance, obfuscation, the erosion of one thing (or one moment) into another so thoroughly that its predecessor can no longer be recalled. The best we can do is reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of our own reasoning: “Trying to find out what one thinks is approximate / at best, trying on one thing and then another.” A section of prose poems collectively titled “In the Vicinity” makes several attempts to define ”home” as a state untethered from physical space: “Home it turns out is more often elsewhere than not.” Eventually Ronk’s sense of displacement, or perhaps her sense of the simultaneity of place, leads her to conclude that “it is no longer necessary to go anywhere which is no longer different from anywhere else.” Despite the poems’ unconditional indeterminacy and economy of expression, Ronk’s sincere desire to comprehend a reality that refuses to hold still for analysis generates an unexpected and uniquely human warmth.

—Fred Muratori

Originally published on the Web in April 2005. Read more poetry microreviews in the April/May 2005 issue of Boston Review