THE CLERK’S TALE / SPENCER REECE

Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale tells the story of a marriage: the Marquis Walter marries the peasant girl Griselda, after exacting from her a vow of obedience which he proceeds ruthlessly to test. Griselda’s radiant compliance makes of the tale a parable of virtue which, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, flourishes in conditions of powerlessness. The tale is a problem for many contemporary readers, possibly because virtue unconvincingly disarms brutality, possibly because modern thinking is not inclined to equate moral virtue with obedience and patience, preferring, as its standard, action and protest.

Spencer Reece’s The Clerk’s Tale is no more a strict retelling of Chaucer’s tale than his ghazals are strict ghazals. Chaucer survives as resonance and parallel; for all its shimmering ironies, this clerk’s tale unfolds with an oddly objective, stoic clarity; its yearning toward goodness and understanding of fortitude suggest, but do not paraphrase, Griselda. And it begins, like Chaucer’s narrative, with the request for a vow:

Promise me you will not forget Portofino.

Promise me you will find the trompe l’oeil

on the bedroom wall at the Splendido.

The walls make a scene you cannot enter.

Perhaps then you will comprehend this longing

for permanence I often mentioned to you.…

—“PORTOFINO”

Reece’s mastery of tone and diction, his unobtrusive wit, show themselves in the exquisite disjunction between “permanence” and “often mentioned.” “Promise me you will not forget”: the fundamental human plea for corroboration. In this case, the promise, given, binds the beloved to the lover, the reader to the poet. The common referent is Portofino, not the place merely, but what was felt there, what was intimated there. What sustains the beautiful is loss: as the property of memory, the beautiful is elevated to that permanence and durability experienced, in perception, as its central attribute. Memory corrects time; in Portofino, infinite space turned into a wall; the eye was fooled, the illusory taken for the real.

Reece’s longing for permanence is rooted in a profound sense of the provisional nature of all human arrangements and a corresponding perception of an ideal. The scene “you cannot enter,” the world denied, recurs. The same hunger for permanence disposes him to find security in ritual and repetition; when the clerk, in the title poem, tells us “Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties, / of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,” he is not speaking in frustration. The mall is, in its way, a retreat; the fact that nothing happens here that has not happened before induces, within the clerks’ brotherhood of service, a nearly monastic composure. Medieval obedience has modulated into the clerks’ prescribed patter and repetitive tasks; in the mall itself “the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.”

Its light touch and connoisseur’s passion for surface notwithstanding, this is a book of deprivations and closures, each somehow graver than the external sign suggests. Expansive description is sealed off in terse sentences: houses are sold, dogs are given away. Against these cumulative finalities, the dream of permanence makes an alternative or corrective. And beauty, especially remembered beauty, which is insulated against erosion, functions in these poems like a promise: it holds the self firm in the face of crushing solitude and transience.

I say “self” (in Reece’s wonderful phrase, that “brochure of needs”), but these poems are filled with acts of unforgettable portraiture and complex social observation. Spencer Reece has something of Bishop’s passion for detail, her scrupulousness, something of Lowell’s genius for fixing character in gesture (like Lowell, he also chooses props brilliantly); the wild, inexhaustible fertility of his comparisons is, though, without exact antecedent, except perhaps in the similes and metaphors of children, to which Reece adds unique resources of vocabulary. Nowhere are these characteristics more striking than in the three major sequences that give this collection its weight and substance. By turns harrowing, comic, poignant, each in its own manner combines detached, elaborate refinements of scrutiny with an eerily skittish mobility of focus, so that the poems both see deeply and move nervously, like an animal in panic. It is an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play. The somnambulistic, corrosive violence of “Florida Ghazals,” its sense of grief beyond remedy, give to the surrounding poems an air of quiet heroism and deep suffering. The poem builds slowly, incrementally:

Consider the teenage boy again. His locked room is a diorama of loneliness.

He bucks his hips until his hurricanes of desire are arrested. Then comes a deep silence.

Weather. Weather. How’s the weather?

When I speak of the weather is it because I cannot speak of my days spent in the nuthouse?

Juan sinks into the swamp thick with processed excrement.

Nude paper ladies sink him like cement, silencing him.

The men in the gym slow down their repetitions, their biceps grow; they are silent in their strength.

When does silence go from being an asset to a liability?

The parallel isolations never fuse; isolation, for Reece, is plural, social. Rather, there is introduced, gradually, an event more absolute, more devastating. What would be in another poet an occasion for moralizing, a catalyst for change, is here merely another horror, absorbed into the swamp.

The long poems change the scale of this art, but Reece’s breadth and precision of gaze, his often fizzy inventiveness, are everywhere apparent, emblems of humanity and generosity. “Everyone’s a fugitive,” he tells us. “Everyone.” We meet many in these pages:

There was a yacht club meeting every summer

with a cannon that went off—baboom!

Women arrived in their thin Talbots belts,

carrying wicker purses shaped like paint cans

with whalebone carvings fastened on top,

resembling the hardened excrement seagulls drop.

Occasionally the purses would open,

albeit reluctantly, like safe-deposit boxes.

—“CAPE COD”

Or, in the title poem:

… Our hours are long. Our backs bent.

We are more gracious than English royalty.

We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.

Watch us fade into the merchandise.

How we set up and take apart mannequins

as if we were performing autopsies.

A naked body, without pretense, is of no use.

—“THE CLERK’S TALE”

Like Lautrec’s drawings: so much world in so few lines!

We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence. Like all genuinely new work, Spencer Reece’s compels a re-evaluation of the possible. Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft. And intelligence that postulates the cost of self-preservation, which is spontaneity:

I remember the ponies in the distance.

I remember you talked of a war, no, two wars, a failed marriage—

discreetly, without force or grandeur.

This was before they amputated your leg, before the stroke.

You rolled your r’s, spoke of Oxford,

recalled driving in the Quaker ambulance unit in China,

where you saw an oil drum filled with severed limbs.

Pleased to have your approval, I rarely spoke.

You were like a father to me and I was grateful.

I remember the ponies behind the fence, muscular,

breathing, how they worried the grass.

The ponies said: This day astounds us. The field is green.

We love nothing better than space and more space.

Ah, they knew what I needed to know.

They lived in their bodies.

If the ponies wanted to kiss, they kissed.

—“PONIES”

Artless naturalness is one thing in the field and quite another on the page, where its simulation tends to produce self-congratulatory tedium. Among the triumphs of The Clerk’s Tale is this tone, so supple, so deft, so capable of simultaneous refinements and ironies as to seem not a tone, not an effect of art, but the truth.

How are we to master suffering? Over and over, the poems in The Clerk’s Tale discover in modesty a discipline by which the desire to affirm can overcome repeated disappointment that threatens to become withdrawal or despair. They take solace in simple decency; they admire dignity, as they admire the natural forms in which spontaneity survives. But Reece’s art is not modest (as it is not sentimental or pious). By some bizarre alchemy, modesty of expectation fuels in this poet a profound capacity for wonder—at nature, at language, at human beauty and bravery, at vistas and interiors. I felt, reading this book, a sense of Herbert’s luminous simplicities somehow crossed with Anne Carson’s caustic epigrammatic brilliance and Merrill’s perfect pitch. An odd sensation, as though the ingenious confectioner were also the postulant. I do not know a contemporary book in which poems so dazzlingly entertaining contain, tacitly, such deep sorrow.

“The frankly marvelous has not always been in disrepute,” James Sledd remarks in his discussion of Chaucer’s Griselda. I felt emanating from Spencer Reece’s work a sense of immanence that belongs more commonly to religious passion; it is a great thing to have it again in art:

When the ficus beyond the grillwork darkens,

when the rind cools down on the lime,

when we sit here a long time,

when we feel ourselves found,

…

we will turn at last,

we will admire the evening’s fading clues,

uncertain of what the dark portends

as another season ends

and the fabulous visitors depart in luxury cars,

we will savor the sharp light from the summer stars,

we will rejoice in the fronds tintinnabulating down these empty streets,

these beautiful streets with all these beautiful names—

Kings, Algoma, Via Bellaria, Clarendon, Via Vizcaya,

Via Del Mar, El Vedado, Banyan, El Brillo, El Bravo, Via Marina.

—“CHIAROSCURO”

2004