Begin with a river. Such is the image that feeds the image of the southern tongue, as Mark Wagenaar conceives it. Begin with a departure and the name of the river it leaves behind. What the poets forge of this moment is a myth: the passing of the dead between the banks of what remains. What we find is a liminal space between irrevocable loss and stubborn reassertion. Of what, we ask? We ask again. Southern tongues (as they leave us) shine, as we shine in turn to mourn their leaving. Easy to say. But the brilliance of Wagenaar’s book lies less in the turn from grief to affirmation, less in the reassurance of an answer, than in the deep, abiding complexity of the mind that questions. Language appears as constituted of questions, however realized the diaspora, local the vantage, magnanimous the land.
Any wonder then the book opens with a refugee, a spirit caught in a body, between worlds, haunted by the fading of a native tongue that never entirely fades. The nine-pound hammer of the human heart is decidedly American, however foreign this America, however bitter, to the one who claims it in story and song. We could say, with some accuracy, that exile is the natural state of the poet. The imagination seeks to realize greater and greater participation in the past that made it, the one it lost, the one it is on the cusp of losing. That said, the ghosts that illuminate Southern Tongues long to be singular. They want to be set apart, named as bodies are, and yet (and so) bound by lineage and tongue to some larger order. The restless enormity of Wagenaar’s reach in these poems, the resourcefulness that makes its unities of such scatterings of culture, such agonies of servitude, dream-like awakenings of loss, embodies the longing to be ever more particular and yet inclusive, generous and yet unsentimental about the limits of a poet’s means.
Thus the light of his vision is ever out there, in the world, and in the stubborn absence the world leaves behind. But likewise, it is a deep inwardness that teaches us to care. “We come to know the world as a veil learns a face,” he writes, and thus, with characteristic speed and energy of resonance, he images the immanent unknown, its proximity to mourning, if not marriage, its face that gazes through us, as we, irrevocably, have looked. The deeply imaginative realism of the book refuses to expurgate its dreams. The voice and details of the speaker’s life remind us history is a local experience. Its context is the eye it passes through. Like a thread through a needle. To be clear, the story cannot be too clear. To be alive, it must remain undone. It must honor a certain measure of the ineffable in the all too sure. “Give it time,” Wagenaar says of the past. “Soon the faces / will begin to surface // like coins, like a well // giving up its wishes.” To “give up” as in “relinquish” or “make manifest.” To leave and, in departure, come, by deep analogy, to mind.
—Bruce Bond