Microreviews
Next Life
Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press, $22.95 (cloth)
Wading through the dichotomies that attend the self’s relationship with popular culture (revulsion and pull, ephemerality and endurance, etc.), Rae Armantrout’s ninth collection of poems, Next Life, is riddled with skepticism. Regarded with particular suspicion is the self’s capacity to actualize, through language, intellectual, emotional, and moral independence when material reality consistently undercuts individual hopes and desires: “As if someone might have tricked us / into believing / there was just one room // or that there were other times.” The objective here, as the book’s title implies, is to construct, by necessity, a future in which both the mistakes and the realizations of the past and present may provide a firmer position from which to confront the sordid miscellany of mediated culture, where we may “Be untraceable / but easy to replicate. // Be relative. // Be twice as far / and halfway back.” This is not to imply that Armantrout feigns any knowledge of an “answer,” or that there is anything anodyne to what her poems appear to assert; rather, it is the telling of a mind’s only recourse for solitary progress among debris. One immediately recognizes Armantrout’s formal strategies, her poetics of dilemma: the taut and chiseled, yet witty and graceful, verse paragraphs that exist in the narrow space between syntactical interiority and the openness of speech. “Long live illumined / oblongs // with this shuttling / cross-hatch” and “Everything / must go!” coexist here. The poems in Next Life are last resorts, not simply efforts to mitigate crass and stifling realities but utterances of, again, necessity, in which “the solitary one / interferes with itself” and the poet pushes, at times warily, at times confidently, toward understanding: “Come close. // The crowd is made of / little gods // and there is still / no heaven.”
—Thomas Hummel
The Marvelous Bones of Time
Brenda Coultas
Coffee House Press, $15.00 (paper)
“The spirit is a bone,” Hegel says of the inextricability of material and metaphysics: the spirit, whether of a person or of an era, is wound tightly around the hard stuff of the physical world. In this sense, the title of Brenda Coultas’s new collection is fitting. Each of the book’s two sections is preoccupied with ephemeral, numinous features of human experience and the concrete objects that bear their residues. At first glance, the opening section, “The Abolition Journal,” seems to make room for history as well, as Coultas interrogates her own geographical-genetic inheritance for traces of her individual identity. Raised in Indiana with strong ties in Kentucky and Illinois, the poet revisits the lore of those states and their surroundings, wondering, “are there any abolitionists hanging from my family tree?” Ultimately, this collision of histories feels a bit too subjective, the history of racial struggle laminated onto a history of Anglo-American roots in a way that leaves lingering questions about the justifiability (and maybe the propriety) of the endeavor. Coultas’s previous experiments in “public character,” in her first book Handmade Museum, raise similar questions, but they also answer them with an essayistic élan that this project doesn’t quite manage. By contrast, the second section of Marvelous Bones, “A Lonely Cemetery,” is utterly absorbing. What might have been a rather banal dabbling in paranormal spectacle ends up touching the quick of our human fascination with persistently inexplicable phenomena; “The Robert Investigations,” in particular, is truly chilling. The pairing of these two distinct projects becomes easier to understand as one proceeds through the book. Both are “Excavations and Explanations” (as the book’s subtitle has it) of versions of America’s haunted history, and there can be no question concerning the sincerity of the poet’s assays in either case. Nevertheless, the feeling of arrival in “A Lonely Cemetery” does overshadow the (ironically) more speculative “Abolition Journal.” While the spirit of the book is indeed marvelous throughout, it feels most bonelike in the second half.
—Aaron McCollough
Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated
Carson Cistulli
Casagrande Press, $10.95 (paper)
Immanuel Kant, not primarily remembered for his sense of humor, once explained laughter as “an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing.” If this were the case, Carson Cistulli’s debut collection would be a book of jokes, not poems. Cistulli is a master of deflations and diversions. Take these lines from the beginning of one of his prose poems: “I was alone but still surrounded by close friends. ‘Is this some sort of logic problem?’ asked one of my students as he drank himself to the point of needing another drink. ‘No,’ I replied, but of course I was lying.” Still, in Cistulli’s poetry, these deflations represent possibility, the possibility of a literary landscape constantly ruptured by popular culture, and vice versa. His verse is populated by both “obscure Midwestern people” who speak only in video game music, and Rimbaud, who leads the poet on a rapine rampage through coffee shops and “pastoral settings.” Cistulli’s absolute immersion in the current and the quotidian is of a piece with the “I do this, I do that” poems of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, but lacks the touching grit that finds its way into those authors’ poems. But unlike some of his contemporaries who use pop culture to mask their sincerity, Cistulli sincerely engages with pop, finding in it as much depth and insight as others find in the conventionally poetic. In a poem dedicated to the former journeyman forward of the Boston Celtics Jiri Welsch, Cistulli contemplates the genesis of his poetic approach, “Later on, ‘The God of Post-Game Analysis, along with his cronies Empty Rhetoric and Retarded Catch-Phrase, raped the Goddess of Acute Observation, who then bore The God of My Creative Powers, a sickly waif tormented, constantly by Nervous Temperament and Boston’s Offensive Woes.’” Like a televised sports–crazed Whitman, Cistulli embraces his status as the bastard child of pop culture and the poetic tradition and merrily sets off to create the verse of the Pepsi Generation, for the Pepsi Generation. It is a refreshing change.
—Nicholas Bredie
The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition
César Vallejo, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman
University of California Press, $49.95 (cloth)
In many ways, Vallejo can be touted as a bona fide modern mystic, perverting the language of the Catholic Church with the hope of achieving more personal, idiosyncratic spiritual experiences in his poetry. The result is most often deeply hermetic, either mysterious, or just mystifying. “Penetrate the ecumenical mary. / Oh saintgabriel, make the soul conceive,” he writes with such self-seriousness it’s hard not to laugh. Yet when he points his “deicidal finger” at God in one poem and, in another, writes, “Don’t I know that never does one say ‘never,’ on one’s knees?” the reader may get the sense that the only true believer is the blasphemer or heretic who rages against the inadequacy of his faith. In “Love,” a convincing early poem that is uncommon in its rhetorical clarity, Vallejo closes with this exhortation: “Love, come without flesh, from an astonishing ichor, / so that I, in the manner of God, may be a man / who loves and begets without sensual pleasure!” Equally direct and moving are the “Songs From Home,” a series of poems about his family from Black Heralds, a collection whose integrity and narrative intensity make it hard to pull isolated lines. But Vallejo’s early clarity is quickly mussed in favor of the exuberant experimentalism that finds its apotheosis in Trilce, with its personification of numbers, deliberate misspellings, and overall zaniness. (It is also in Trilce that the poet dispenses with self-denial and abandons himself to sexual pleasure.) Throughout his work, Vallejo delights in acts of transgression, as when, in “The Nine Monsters”—one of the Human Poems, a dazzling catch-all collection of posthumously published poems—he confesses a desire “to put a little bird on the evildoer’s nape.” As Vallejo becomes less Catholic and more catholic, embracing an improbably wide range of human experience—he “wants to help the killer kill”—the reader may excuse his gluttonous relationship to suffering. If the reader still has reservations, Vallejo at least anticipates them in “Violence of the Hours”: “In the world of perfect health, the perspective on which I suffer will be mocked.”
—Tanya Larkin
Frail-Craft
Jessica Fisher
Yale University Press, $16 (paper)
Reading Jessica Fisher’s first collection of poetry is like wandering through a garden of forking paths that at times give suddenly, astonishingly, onto the sea. This is above all a book about seeking, though for just what is never wholly clear; like Hamlet’s, the mind that moves so sonorously through these poems must constantly sift through memory to recollect its task. At Frail-Craft’s imaginative center is the disappearance of François, a Wordsworthian “Lucy Gray” figure whom we seek through an enchanting series of prose poems called “Novella.” A kind of interior paramour, François is himself a seeker lost in seeking, “who would, I imagined, have made off for the woods, looking again for whatever he’d seen. Like trying to find a passage in a book, he’d said, when you remember only that it was in the middle somewhere.” We, too, are invited to lose ourselves as the eye pursues its hunger through the bright involutions of these poems, just as, in “Nonsight,” light “lures the fragile eye / toward blindness // glints along the line that links / body to the disembodied.” Disappearances multiply from page to page; lovers, birds, and brothers slip into the disembodied silence between stanzas. Yet what is so extraordinary about this book is that it is as various as it is cohesive, so that placename and dreamscape, autobiography and myth, prose and lyric are refracted through each other and converge. The stunning final poem is titled “Stereography,” and the stereograph’s fractious unity is an apt metaphor for what Fisher has accomplished. In the exquisite precision of a sight that notices, for example, how birds “flit from tree to tree / in the light rain / eating berries, the centers of flowers,” the familiar is made luminously strange, the lyric surface cleaved to unanticipated depths. These poems are reminders of how great a burden their frail craft can bear.
—Amelia Klein
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