RADIAL SYMMETRY / KATHERINE LARSON

The human fascination with beauty has produced many acts of tribute and imitation but relatively few insights, possibly because what transpires in the presence of beauty occurs in a mind initially mesmerized or stunned. Other sensations follow, none of them articulate: first a rush of excitement, this succeeded by a feeling of arrival, of completeness, and, with this new completeness, insatiability—the enslaved attention refuses to relinquish its object. The hand (for example) cannot turn the page.

This power to stun the mind has diminished the prestige of beauty in literary discourse. It compels awe, and awe is well known for its capacity to silence. Here is nothing of the sort of puzzle or dilemma the mind prefers. Quite the opposite: beauty seems a sort of all-purpose solution to everything, obviating the debate and argument by which the mind is energized. In consequence, it disappears from debate: by both poets and critics, it is mentioned offhandedly or apologetically, as an incidental virtue or mild defect, unlikely to advance philosophical understanding. It exists—serene, impervious—beyond or apart from the vicissitudes of fashion; it cannot be achieved in the laboratories of ingenuity or craft. Miraculous, and also patently at odds with the play of intellect that (no matter how labored or how trivial) monopolizes contemporary attention and stimulates elaborate response. Numinous and clear, the beautiful offends the mind with its quality of self-sufficiency or finality.

Nowhere is this schism between public approbation and secret power more intensely played out than in lyric poetry. This is one of Keats’s great themes: to suggest that beauty subverts the mind is not to suggest that its appeal is fundamentally or exclusively to the senses. It speaks to some abiding longing: for the pure, for the apparently whole. Song directed “not to the sensual ear”—in its presence, the suspicious reader is both helpless and exalted (not, I would say, cerebral responses). In such moments, the poem seems not a relic but an absolute. Time, narrative time, is abolished. The only close parallel is falling in love:

The late cranes throwing

their necks to the wind stay

somewhere between

the place that rain begins

and the place that it ends

they seem to exist just there

above the horizon at least

I only see them that way

tossed up

against the gray October

light not heavy enough

for feet to be useful or

useless enough to make

gravity untie its string. I’m sick

of this stubbornness

but the earthworms

seem to think it all right

they move forward

and let the world pass

through them they eat

and eat at it, content to connect

everything through

the individual links

of their purple bodies to stay

one place would be death.

But somewhere between

the crane and the worm

between the days I pass through

and the days that pass

through me

is the mind. And memory

which outruns the body and

grief which arrests it.

—“STATUARY”

How vulnerable it seems, this poem, how fragile: a narrow column of awareness, its movement too perpetual or too transfixed to seem headlong, despite its unpunctuated urgencies. The elemental grandeur of the oppositions—birth and death, heaven and earth, crane and worm—and of the mimetic structure, the explicit lesson that “to stay / one place would be death”: these could veer close to parody or sentimentality were it not for Katherine Larson’s grace and simplicity, her eerie purity of tone. “Statuary” (like most of the poems in Radial Symmetry) moves toward synthesis and repose (rather than toward ecstatic disintegration), toward containment as opposed to release. But containment and repose do not imply, here, a placid summary or moral. Larson’s repose is also a quivering suspension, in which multiple perceptions, multiple elements, are held in extended and mysterious relation. The shape is classic; in “Statuary” Larson has not so much made something new as she has given form to ancient knowledge.

This is a poem of great beauty. But beauty is also Larson’s subject. So much of earth is here, at once utterly natural and wholly illumined: a grave passivity infuses this collection; experience is less sought than received. The poet is a kind of dazed Miranda, so new to the world that its every ordinariness seems an emblem of wonder. “Either everything’s sublime or nothing is,” she writes, and, for the span of the book, everything is.

Larson trained as a biologist, but these poems do not seem (at least to a layman) a scientist’s work. They prize sensation over analytic scrutiny, the individual example over the category. Her education in science manifests here as a passion for detail (as well as a richness of reference): “I know I’m still alive because I love / to eat,” she says, and everywhere in this work is the sensualist’s grateful and specific avidity. The longest poem in the book, “Ghost Nets,” makes a kind of dreamlike diary of being; the precision and variety of Larson’s impressions, their layered abundance, correspond to the gleanings of some very lucky (and actual) nets. The implications of the title also make of the poem a protest: an informed defense of unprotected life in the face of casually pervasive human destructiveness. Each section seems a gift, an instance of harmoniousness between consciousness and flesh, the scientist’s fastidious attention to detail suffused with an unexpected gentleness or solicitude toward matter:

Yellow snapper, bright as egg yolk. I look at the sea and eat my toast.

Yesterday’s lesson—the jabonero de Cortés or Cortez soapfish

when agitated

secretes a mucus that lathers like soap—

—“GHOST NETS (I)”

And this:

                            “Not perfection,” the sea hisses, “but originality.” The innards

of a blue-eyed scallop scraped onto a plastic Safeway bag.

Soul and meat—

—“GHOST NETS (V)”

And this:

                             Every day, it happens like this.

We emerge from the pale nets of sleep like ghost shrimp

in the estuaries—

           The brain humming its electric language.

Touching something in a state of becoming.

—“GHOST NETS (VII)”

And this:

I remember Agassiz and the sunfish. The dream in which each

breath is a perfect sphere, in which the only explanation is

                                                                                                 pink and voltaic—

life! Sealed inside itself like barnacles at high tide.

…

Down the road, large piles of murex shells—

                                                   their insides like the insides of ears.

—“GHOST NETS” (VIII)

Sequence and consequence, the drama of unfolding story, play almost no role here. Nor is data organized into argument. Rather, events and images are held together in some fluid medium that preserves them without changing them: the whole sequence has the fascination of a prism. Or perhaps the spectacle of a cell under a microscope with its unfolding revelations.

Intense sensation—I suppose the accurate word is pleasure—is not subjected to overt judgment or intervention. But the book as a whole is far less celebratory, less contented, than this description suggests. Larson’s passion for detail carries with it, for poet as well as reader, awareness of the transience of matter, so these luminous poems give off an atmosphere of foreboding: darkness is omnipresent, encroaching.

This is especially pronounced in the love poems; erotic ravenousness is mirrored in the rapacious greed of the spirits: “… everywhere the spirits are hungry,” she writes:

Say you leave a crust of bread on your plate.

A hundred of them could last for weeks on this.

If you said a prayer with your meal,

the offering might feed a multitude.

But then the sea always asks for more.

The speaker remembers the evening, dinner with her lover:

Sawdust floors. A mussel split and rusty

against the polished ebony of the bowl,

its sea smell like the beach at low tide …

And later:

She is suddenly aware of her desire for him

across the table, next to him on the bus.

But it makes her shiver, the way

those shells split apart—like half-black

moons that gave off no light, only

shadows. And they were legion.

—“LOW TIDE EVENING”

Excerpts cannot give a sense of the power such lines have in a poem that has taken its time accruing. Pacing is essential: the gravity of these unequivocal, summarizing assertions depends absolutely on the sustained images and vignettes that precede them. Statement, as it works here, has the force of inescapable truth. The last section of the four-part “Love at Thirty-two Degrees” is an example, particularly stunning in its succinctness. Here, in part, is the section preceding:

Then, there is the astronomer’s wife

ascending stairs to her bed.

The astronomer gazes out,

one eye at a time,

to a sky that expands

even as it falls apart

like a paper boat dissolving in bilge.

 …

The snow outside

is white and quiet

as a woman’s slip

against cracked floorboards.

So he walks to the house

inflamed by moonlight, and slips

into the bed with his wife

her hair and arms all

in disarray

like fish confused by waves.

The final section follows:

Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you.

This is a collection notable for its variety: formal, tonal, and—strikingly—environmental. It occurred to me that most poets who are, like Katherine Larson, deeply attuned to the natural world tend to be specifically attuned to a particular landscape. Radial Symmetry has no one context; its shifting backgrounds take the place of motion, giving the collection a feeling of progression or drama, as though movement in space substituted for movement in time. The effect suggests the old Hollywood mechanics of action: the driver and the passenger in the stationary car while the background lurches wildly forward and the wind machine blows apace. In a collection of poems remarkable for the stillness of the individual lyrics, such variety of setting suggests the conveyor belt, a relentless momentum alluding to the brevity or insufficiency of human life.

The overall dreamlike ambiance of this work is vividly interrupted, here and there, by poems rooted in literal (or brilliantly invented) dreams—on display in such poems is a pointed and seductive wit:

In the dream, I am given a monkey heart

and told to be careful how I love

because of the resulting infection.

And later:

A voice says, Metamorphosis

will make you ugly.…

We find ourselves, soon enough, “On the lawn of my childhood house, / an operating table, doctors, / a patient under a sheet.…” When the sheet is lifted:

It isn’t my mother. It’s the monkey.

I bend my ear to its dying lips

and it says: You haven’t much time—

risk it all.

—“RISK”

Wise monkey. There are other dreams, one, notably, involving Baudelaire and Margaret Mead.

But ultimately, I think, a reader will remember these poems for their beauty, the profound sense of being in the present that their sensuality embodies, and a sense, too, of its cost.

Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted. The poems in Radial Symmetry are comparatively direct, accessible, easy to read. But Katherine Larson has that gift Yeats had, what Keats had, a power to enthrall the ear, and the ear is stubborn, easily as stubborn as the mind: it will not let this voice go:

The Milky Way sways its back

across all of wind-eaten America

like a dusty saddle tossed

over your sable, lunatic horse.

All the plains are dark.

All the stars are cowards:

they lie to us about their time of death

and do nothing but dangle

like a huge chandelier

over nights when our mangled sobs

make the dead reach for their guns.

I must be one of the only girls

who still dreams in green gingham, sees snow

as a steel pail’s falling of frozen nails

like you said through pipe smoke

on the cabin porch one night. Dear one,

there are no nails more cold

than those that fix you

underground. I thought I saw you

in the moon of the auditorium

after my high school dance.

Without you, it’s still hard to dance.

It’s even hard to dream.

—“BROKE THE LUNATIC HORSE”

2011