Microreviews
Black Milk
Tory Dent
Sheep Meadow, $15.95 (cloth)
Victorine Dent, known as Tory, was diagnosed with AIDS at age 30. Five years later, her first collection, What Silence Equals (1993), appeared, followed in 1999 by HIV, Mon Amour and in 2005, the year she died, by Black Milk. The three books, all of them at once diaristic and baroque, now form a kind of triptych of her illness and death, and, simultaneously, of her development as a poet. They are very beautiful: from first to last, Dent favored a Rilke-like diction and loose elegy form, and watching her discover her capacities within this style is one of the great pleasures of reading her. Of the three books, HIV, Mon Amour is the most complete statement as a book and is the place to start with her work, not least because Black Milk, which takes its title from Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue,” requires a familiarity with its predecessor. Black Milk’s major piece, the title poem, is a serial work in 35 one-poem-per-page parts. Here is the second stanza of the second poem within it: “The regret burns like its converse property, / the hope I had (so fucking much of it) now retarded in me, / a tumor, inoperable, contained by chemo, a perverse kind of cancer / where the desire to live only prolongs the suffering—.” This stanza does not contain everything of Dent’s voice, which can be as allusive as it is direct, and as gorgeously subtle as it is pointedly abrasive, but it does encapsulate this book’s requiem for desire, for life, and for the discovery of life—her “surveillant privilege.” It is impossible to read the book, and Dent’s work generally, without being affected by its brutal intelligence and helpless passion.
—Michael ScharfPuppet Wardrobe
Daniel Tiffany
Parlor Press, $12 (paper)
The “doll is a writing machine,” Daniel Tiffany insists in his dynamic first collection of poems, Puppet Wardrobe. Nearly 40 years after Roland Barthes declared the author dead, Tiffany identifies dolls, gadgets, games, and other purportedly inanimate objects as the real laborers behind works of literature. This might announce yet another poetry book willed into existence by a fleeting encounter with critical theory, but fortunately for Tiffany’s readers, every word, line, and stanza here is animated by a relentless instinct for play. Of course, play, as any truly naughty child knows, is as much creative as reactive, and these poems contain small rebellions of sense, dialogues between phrases that resemble eye-rolling asides or menacing second guesses. In “Hadn’t a Had My Pistol,” Tiffany shifts between humor and canker, flaunting his many voices and tones, so that the doleful “Even my itches have itches” is met with the next line’s tart comeback: “Boo hoo.” Lines like these point toward a self-generating mechanism that makes the poems seem at once improvised and intricately wrought. Thus, scenes and characters appear with sudden and surprising clarity: “The sky leads to an untouched forest / untouched by humans anyway / a deer pops out / the hunter fires. / Out of bullets.” Here, as elsewhere, language flirts with violence and the unknown, troubling our safety only to lead us to an uneasy comfort. Whoever or whatever writes these poems—the poet, the writing machine, “my second thoughts,” or the culture that constitutes every self—ultimately matters far less than the “infamous promiscuity of things.” “Things” no doubt include words, which, like Tiffany’s doll, perform active duty as the embodied (“at the neck of the word”), the clumsy (“word slips”), and the ominous (“his words a hissing tide”). They are also one of the principal pleasures Puppet Wardrobe offers: “I caught myself in the glass / and fought off a dream: two dragonflies / skating the lip of a pond, so close / they could be light threshed from the eaves.”
—Jennifer ChangMagnetic North
Linda Gregerson
Houghton Mifflin, $22 (cloth)
Linda Gregerson’s recent departure from the tercet has done nothing to ease her characteristic rigor. Rather, the new poems of Magnetic North are experiments in formal restraint, and they mark an effort to achieve an even greater intellectual and spiritual depth, to refresh us to the poet’s vision of a difficult world, “forever en- // grafting the strictures of hunger (bright shoots) / to the strictures (bright / shadow) of praise.” She sees that natural and human life is full of anomalies and absurdities: a spring snow, a cleft palate, the feel of a raw egg in the hand. And her premise here is that these things too often leave us “dumbfounded, still / bereft of likely narratives.” The failure of our stories—the disjuncture between what we wish to be and what we are—compels Gregerson to seek out better, truer knowledge. And she looks everywhere, out into the yard and back into history, to the lost art of falconry, to the forgotten mysteries of magnetism. She studies the wisdom of other visionaries, including filmmakers, sculptors, religious figures, and her own children. Her range of subject matches her range of form, though neither makes for easy reading. Gregerson’s meticulous attention to syntax and rhythm and shape expose her anxieties and attend to them, straining the lines to chart the way she has been listening, watching, pondering: “A river / of intelligence runs through us, could / the part we do on purpose do // less harm.” This isn’t to say that Gregerson doesn’t sometimes find resolution. In the collection’s closing poem, “Elegant,” a physiologist explains to the poet the discovery of programmed cell death in the roundworm. The poem skirts and snakes across the page, illustrating the way scientific evidence is gathered and stitched together, and slowly our labors are rewarded: “the microscope / makes shadow and / our question gains some traction and the world, // though not / just yet and not / so seamlessly, makes sense.”
—Kathryn CrimCivilization
Elizabeth Arnold
Flood Editions, $12.95 (paper)
With conjunctions, articles, and pronouns dropped and the syntax spun toward brevity, Elizabeth Arnold’s clipped lines can read like journal entries sent by telegraph. The emphasis on private occasions adds to the diaristic feel of Civilization, as do a number of hermetic poems that seem like jottings or aides-mÌ(c)moires. Despite the personal subject matter, however, the tone of the book—Arnold’s second—is relentlessly impersonal. Even poems about a father with Alzheimer’s are deliberately flat: “My Father’s Face” ends “Why not grimace? // He never liked to travel. / But his likings and dislikings going, // he could care less that he’d ever cared—” The poet’s eye wanders, and abrupt shifts in subject, parenthetical remarks, and fragments shorn of context sometimes defuse the work and sometimes open it up, leaving one with the sense that Arnold is revealing less than she feels. Civilization conceals not only emotion but also understanding. In “Barc,” things happen “As if the body weren’t entire. As if / the mind weren’t.” And the entirety of “Solstice” runs: “We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December / to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun!” Given that Arnold’s pedal note is common speech, the oracular moments sometimes perch uneasily. (It’s a problem for Ezra Pound—one of Arnold’s touchstones—as well.) But the strongest feature of this collection is—and this is no small praise—its evenness. Arnold’s work is of a whole, a book-length investigation of a particular mode of seeing, clipped, worked, and driven by the intellect. The poet’s adherence to this particular style means that moments of divergence feel deeply original, as the ending of “Genealogy” both recognizes and enacts: “How different from ideas out of a culture / into actions, us?”
—Simon DeDeoNecessary Stranger
Graham Foust
Flood Editions, $12.95 (paper)
The poems in Graham Foust’s third collection walk in and around the difficulties of our modernity, our quests, and our raw occurrences, with the poet’s signature wit and verbal compression. “We imagine / wanting,” he writes in “Los Angeles,” “And here our wanting / is at its most tangible. The movie turns // into itself. What not for?” Foust’s condensations always seem needful as well as watchful, even as they attempt to take in the full impact of things not yet experienced or known. As he writes in “After Aretha Franklin,” “We are two / breathing people in / a room. // The rest, the rest // is as emphatic, / scratched out.” The poems in this volume constantly consider the eventfulness of “the rest,” things happening elsewhere, instances and abstractions that are arbitrary or eruptive yet that somehow engage our will and attention. He concludes the same poem in laconic devastation: “The meaning of a cruelty / is its hurry, / its use.” Paired lightly with “ its use,” “cruelty” suddenly throbs with renewed peril. The effects of Foust’s method echo Virginia Woolf’s assertion about modern poets, that they “express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the same moment .åÊ.åÊ. one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew.” Though Foust’s poems are fragmentary, hushed, and stripped down, they radiate lushness. In image and form, these short, bitten-off lyrics register a vibrant physical and emotional immensity: “I move around / my many-cornered / heart some. // There are acres ever through me / flags refuse.” The poems in this collection seem less prayer-like than the ones in Foust’s first volume, As In Every Deafness, but they also appear more authoritative. Here we sometimes find rage in his austerity, but also an amazing grace in moments of uneasiness or genuine disquiet: “And doubt lit up / Like some sudden and / unnecessary good.”
—Sandra Lim
