It’s early morning. I’m sitting in a corner window on the thirty-fifth floor of a hotel in San Francisco. Outside, nothing but fog, saving me from my own strong fear of heights. Where yesterday I could look out on city streets, moving lights, water in the distance, today there is nothing. No little cat feet, but a dense gray wall of impenetrability. Though if I should go down in the elevator and walk out the door, I could move through it easily enough.
Suddenly, a whir in front of me, and a wire mesh cage holding two men appears from above. They move past and disappear; I only know they are there because the ropes outside my window sway back and forth, revealing the tension of the cage in its circumscribed movement below me, thirtysome floors above street level. Looking through the window on my right, I see two more men in a similar cage, though theirs is narrower, surrounded by what looks all too much like flimsy green canvas. They wear hard hats—one yellow, one white—and are tethered to their narrow walkway by yellow fabric straps. For fifteen minutes, with black tape and a razor, they work on one section of a ledge. Holding the building together with black duct tape, or so it appears, though now they are rubbing and rubbing. Out of the fog, the sudden appearance of the technicians who hold the structure together.
When I look out again, one of the men is gone, the one with the white hat. Where did he go? and how? He’s thirty-three stories up, and the windows don’t open, do they?
Sometimes the world hands you metaphor. For the past hour, I’ve felt a bit unsettled, the way I feel when reading Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”—the mystery that still resides in the phrase “fearing the chronic angers of that house.” I’ve also felt astonished, the kind of astonishment that quickens every time I hear “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and think, Where did that come from? And I’ve been unexpectedly delighted, as in “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” At my window I have, I now realize, experienced the underlying tensions of a poem.
What has happened to tension? That tug of war between the line and what the line can contain? The standoff between form and content? The tectonic slippage between what is stated and what is implied?
Tension is not simply a matter of craft, but of something internal—the poet’s willingness to launch him- or herself into unknown territory. All too often, I open a book to find what I have come to call the “standard poem of self-expression”—slack lines of reportorial poetry in which the poet recounts circumstances with the assumption that, because he or she is thinking “correctly,” the reader will, by definition, agree with what is being said. And I may. But I do not read only for confirmation of my own ideas. So the sameness—if not of content, then of technique and, worse, stance—worries me. What is the future of an art whose practitioners won’t take genuine risks, including the risks of self-discovery, and who congratulate themselves for speaking what amount to no more than preconceived or prepackaged “truths”?
Randall Jarrell worried about something similar—but he was concerned about the critics: “May one of them say to the others, soon: ‘Brothers, do we want to sound like the Publications of the Modern Language Association, only worse? If we don’t set things straight for ourselves, others will set them straight for us—or worse still, others won’t, and things will go on as they are going on until one day even you and I won’t be able to read each other, for sheer boredom.’” Now poets seem to have left themselves vulnerable to the same charges. Sometimes I suspect my own abilities to keep an open mind, but mostly I’ve come to realize that my boredom is at stake—and that contemporary poetic practices have done little to alleviate it. In a profound way, boredom is the ultimate test in art: if the work stops being genuinely interesting, it doesn’t matter. Art that disturbs us is always more interesting than art that proclaims, or just solicits approval. I like the risk-takers. The poems that hold my interest are the ones that exhibit some form of tension.
The one remaining man (the one with the yellow hat) pushes a button and one side of his walkway drops a few inches. He’s standing on a sloping board! I’m terrified by the very thought of it. And then a hand—only a hand, seemingly disembodied—appears through the railing above him, handing him something—more tape? some putty?—but whose hand is it, and how did it get there?
When Robert Frost wrote in his Notebook “for my pleasure I had as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down,” it was necessary to think about what he conceived of as his “net.” Surely it was not merely the empty husk of traditional forms—the sonnet without substance—but a second net of his own devising. Jeffrey Meyers, a recent Frost biographer, has stated that “he maintained that his verse sprang from the strain or tension that evolves when a strong rhythmic pattern, based upon strict or loose iambic meter, is played against the irregular variations of common speech.” So Frost built his own net, a warp of form through which to weave the weft of colloquial speech, the “sentence sound” that gave his poems their particular flavor. Note the surprising force in the ten one-syllable words that open the blank verse of “Directive”: “Back out of all this now too much for us.”
The concept of warp and weft is a useful one—although it’s often impossible to tell one from the other in the finished fabric. Still, we do know that the warp provides a structure across which the weft has been woven. Form, of course, supplies one external frame, but often the warp is internal. The poet may choose any of a number of aspects of craft—patterns of speech, patterns of sound, an appeal to the visual, extended metaphor, image, tone, narrative, lyric intensity—and then put them together in any of a number of combinations. That is, one poet may seem to work sound against a structure of “given” metaphor while another may do the opposite, working metaphor against a pattern of sound. The problem is to tell warp from weft, and possibly it can’t be done in any ultimate sense. Yet it’s an interesting way to think about poems, and it may be that readers intuitively understand when a poet is working in more than one direction. The result—the individual poet’s unique blend—can be seen as one source of tension in a poem.
In the 1960s, when both Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath shifted from formal structures toward free verse, the result was an emphasis on content. But it was content enhanced by the way their lines became more compressed, their imagery more raw and urgent. Interestingly, their poems remain compelling when so many modern-day “reruns” do not, so it cannot be merely the confessional mode (now all too familiar) nor the content itself (the ante of victimization has been raised in several successive rounds) that makes their poems survive the test of time. I suspect that, for both Lowell and Plath, the poem was a quest, a necessity, rather than a statement.
Personal experience makes a natural warp, but over the years I’ve realized that, without some other element of craft, content is what is ultimately boring. Content-driven poems are good for the first reading, but they often have little to fall back on—and any retold story usually does begin to fray. The poems that remain as surprising the twentieth time as the first (and perhaps more surprising for some newly perceived nuance) have elements that hold our interest over and above content, and in the face of shifting attitudes. Pablo Neruda infuses his work with the magic of metaphor, welding the abstract to the concrete. William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore intrigue the eye, while Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke pique the ear. In this way, they create intricate spaces for new and ever more intricate readings.
And now the hand is hitching a strap to the railing and the second man (the white hat) is climbing back over it into the cage. The scene looks exactly as it did before. If I’d looked away, I might never have known what had gone on, how they went about their business in and out of the cage. And in front of me, still the fog, still the ropes that sway with the weight of what they are holding, out of sight below me. And beyond them, the city I cannot see, but know is there.
Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape by George Szirtes is one of the most elegantly formal books I’ve read in recent years. Szirtes is a master of iambic pentameter, of the sonnet in particular, and seems to have found ways to make English rhymes sound new. One way he does this is through innovative use of enjambment; the stanzas unfold seamlessly while the intricacy of the pattern establishes itself, as in the second section of “Busby Berkeley in the Soviet Union”:
This music is in your blood, slithering through your arteries.
It’s no longer 1934
but whatever you want. Call it today if
it pleases you. You’re watching TV, some series
about hospitals or cops, an investigator
on the scent or a plaintiff
in a court case of a documentary about fish,
it doesn’t matter what kind of tripe
you fancy, you get it all, good quality.
So you think you are safe, but under the rubbish
it raises its head. Sweet music. Suddenly you wipe
your face. Electricity
courses through you, or is it nostalgia?
The rhymes here, almost invisible (though not inaudible), constitute the poet’s “net” or aesthetic game. But it is the wedding of form and content that gives the book its characteristic tensions.
The title of the collection sets up the classic opposition of father/son, homeland/exile. At the heart of this book is the family’s flight to England during the Hungarian revolution in 1956 when the poet was six, and his growing realization that his parents speak not only a different language but a different experience. Here, on exhibit, is the son’s mastery of the father’s second tongue. Doubled by the barriers of language and politics, the gap between what Szirtes can know and what he can never know of his father is what this work can’t master. So, for all their linguistic shimmering, for all the clever puns or references to art and literature, the poems crackle with the tension of the inaccessible.
The sonnet is Szirtes’ natural form, and this book culminates in three separate Hungarian sonnet sequences—each sequence a series of fifteen sonnets, every sonnet beginning with the last line of the previous one, and the final one incorporating all the repeated lines in order. That Szirtes can do this once is impressive enough; that he created three such sequences is staggering. But here again the question of tension raises its head. By increasing the aesthetic stakes, Szirtes almost forces us to examine these three long sequences not for their similarities but for their differences. “The Looking-Glass Dictionary” is a postmodern look at language itself, opening with the obvious: “Words withheld. Words loosed in angry swarms. / An otherness. The whole universe was / other, a sum of indeterminate forms / in motion. . . .” These flat statements about language do not have the force of the lived experience in language, and the poem suffers from this, though it seems to know what is at stake. In the ninth sonnet, Szirtes stares into the mirror of words and then movingly describes his father with the simplicity of pure sight:
The language outside meets the ur-language within
with the consistency of dream
which sits like a faint moisture on the skin.
My father’s voice. A gentle coaxing lost
in the depths of his chest. His musculature
is iron swelling in his arms. Thin frost
covers him in a Russian forest. Pure
narrative lines run through him. He stands
in the street with the city in his hands.
But in this sonnet sequence overall, the content pales before the perfection of the form, and the form feels somewhat empty when its content is language—and writing—itself. In the final and title sequence, “Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape,” content and form blend in such a way that the tensions are perfectly balanced. The variations in the repeated lines and the repetition of images in different patterns add to the formal pressure, giving form an equivalency with the biographical material of his father’s exile. The poem tugs equally in each direction (though sometimes loses sight of itself in such lapses as “Language slips, words slide / and take pratfalls”—a carry-over from the former sequence). In a series of fragmentary snapshots, Szirtes creates the collage that must stand in for the portrait—the incomplete picture of a man seen in the context of European politics, experienced and partially understood.
Form, however, allows for another kind of understanding. Szirtes gives us not only the historical perspective but also the wonders of our own language. The final sonnet (the one that seamlessly weds all the first lines of the other fourteen) reveals the power of this particular form. It’s the old chicken and the egg—which came first, the conclusion or the individual lines? How and when did the poet construct the rhymes so that they would play themselves out in the final sonnet? The reader is asked to peel away the layers of abstraction by remembering each line in its earlier incarnation while seeing it fresh in a new one. This must be the hardest of poetic tasks, and Szirtes is one of the few poets writing in English capable of such a synthesis.
The classic shot of my father is one
easy to destroy. Historical whim
preserves a secret well worth sitting on,
though even on clear nights its stars are dim
particularities of luck and guilt.
He is a light that must be interpreted
through chains of command, cracked bones and blood spilt,
through women crippled, and often left for dead.
A presence, like the ghost in a photograph,
a surfeit, a core that can’t be truly known.
The wolf is in his lair. The children laugh
in the high street at the old loner with his bone
and bandana, his edges neither straight nor true.
Their father waits for them and calls them You.
And now the fog is lifting a little, and two more men in shirtsleeves are standing by the railing, kibitzing, and everything looks ordinary, almost commonplace. They’re even drinking coffee.
Paul Muldoon is America’s master of form. (That’s right, he has become a citizen, though Ireland may not gladly give him up.) He is so adept, has so much dexterity, that in fact form doesn’t serve as much of a “net”—he seems to need to generate increasingly elaborate superstructures (forms within forms), almost as though in building them up he can create the effect of tearing them down. For Muldoon, it’s ideas that matter. He is so referentially brilliant that idea and form together can strike spectacular sparks—but only sparks. Muldoon needs to engage emotional as well as intellectual material in order to create the great poems of which he is capable. In his previous book, The Annals of Chile (1994), he gave us one of the most important poems of the last half of this century in “Incantata” and a significant long poem in “Yarrow.” I find it hard not to read his new book, Hay, in the afterglow of this accomplishment.
But what is a poet to do after he or she has written something of genuine importance? Wait years for the next great poem? Or follow William Stafford’s advice to “lower your standards and go on”? Muldoon seems to have opted for keeping his engines idling, demonstrating once again his ready wit and facility with words as he explores just about every aspect of living. “Sleeve Notes” is a commentary on twenty-one pop musicians or groups from Jimi Hendrix to Dire Straits; a sequence of one hundred haiku chronicles the changing seasons in New Jersey. Some of the latter work beautifully in the traditional sense:
Beyond the corn stooks
the maples’ firewood detail.
Their little red books.
Others have the feel of mere reportage:
I’ve upset the pail
in which my daughter had kept
her five—“No, six”—snails.
Rhymed haiku, perfect syllable counts, but to what end? The enterprise does not quite live up to its promise, reveals nothing new about the old form, marks time but does not remake it.
In Hay, Muldoon reveals his linguistic agility, his erudition, his knowledge of pop culture, his cunning wit, his playful perceptions, and his ability to toss them all into one grab bag and pull them back out in innovative poetic exercises. What this collection hints at, gives us glimpses of but does not truly provide, is poetry—the kind that takes off the top of your head. The poems of Hay are mental puzzle-making, material looking for significance, causing me to suspect that this book was published too soon after the last one, that his publishers have done him no favor exhibiting his facility without demanding more depth. Even poems with the immediacy of personal content, like “Longbones,” end up feeling a bit contrived, orchestrated to fit their rhymes rather than allowing form to reveal inner urgencies. The long finale, “The Bangle (Slight Return)” is so playful—it takes its cue from Oscar Wilde, adds Australian geography and slang, incorporates an earlier play on “errata” to undercut its own vocabulary—that, while it is decidedly a tour de force, one wonders what force it is touring.
Oddly, the book’s two concrete poems are among its most moving. “The Plot” simply spells out “alfalfa” over and over until the empty space in the middle of the poem asserts its “alpha” between two “alfas,” and something begins to sprout. “A Half Door Near Cluny” takes “stable” and makes the reader see stables, table, tables, able, lest, stab, blest, until the brain cannot but add blessèd, establish—house and stable meshed with what the door reveals, conceals. With stark simplicity, Muldoon has shown us how a word can contain multitudes.
Three poems in Hay demonstrate the tensile strength of Muldoon’s best work, easily walking the tightrope of craft while below him content swirls and boils. “Wire,” a sestina in which the repeated words become increasingly ominous, superimposes memories of war-torn Ireland on an innocent walk in the Connecticut countryside until the speaker imaginatively enters the territory of the terrorist, all innocence transformed by the distorting lens of suspicion: “the endless rerun / of Smithfield, La Mon, Enniskillen, of bodies cut // to ribbons as I heard the truck engine cut / and, you might have read as much between the lines, / ducked down here myself behind the hide. As if I myself were on the run.”
“Third Epistle to Timothy” also contains an imaginative entry into the life of another, as Muldoon reconstructs his father’s days as an eleven-year-old servant to the Hardys of Carnteel. The boy is subjected to hard physical labor and the fire and brimstone of his boss’s religious fervor, coupled with the fervent history of the Irish cause. The tenth and final section fuses that experience with those of literature, ending with as dark a vision of the future as of the past:
That next haycock already summoning itself from windrow after
wind-weary windrow
while yet another brings itself to mind in the acrid stink
of turpentine. There the image of Lizzie,
Hardy’s last servant girl, reaches out from her dais
of salt hay, stretches out an unsunburned arm
half in bestowal, half beseechingly, then turns away to appeal
of hay treaders as far as the eye can see, the coil on coil
of hay from which, in the taper’s mild uproar,
they float out across the dark face of the earth, an earth without
form, and void.
In a substantive and quite astonishing feat, “They That Wash on Thursday” rhymes each of its fifty lines on the word “hand”—fifty lines in which Muldoon moves from the initial gamelike quality of his rhyming to a hard look at the hard life of the speaker’s mother and the hands of the women he has loved, from wry self-mockery toward a serious conclusion where Ireland and America coexist in his daughter’s freehand drawing of “a green field on a white hand.”
I believe that Paul Muldoon will be seen as one of America’s finest poets (as he is already considered one of Ireland’s); added to his previous accomplishments, the range and substance of these three poems confirms this prediction. For Muldoon, content is the tension because he always plays his tennis with more than one net.
And now there is a third figure—a dark-haired young man without a hat, wearing blue straps—in the cage. The two others are lowering the cage and he is leaning out, examining the corner of the building, testing the windows for tightness. The two stand by with their razors and tape. Now the one without a hat is talking on a telephone. He cups his hand around his ear, as though to hold some sound at bay. I, of course, can hear nothing.
If Paul Muldoon has a counterpart it is, oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), Albert Goldbarth. Each is an aficionado of pop culture, each has a supremely quirky mind, each plays with ideas to create a style that is absolutely unique. While Muldoon has form and meter, Goldbarth has a natural rhythm—one both physical and mental. His natural rhythm might be called “fairly iambic not-quite pentameter”—but really it’s the rhythm of thought, of the way one thought leads to the next so that reading him is like watching a three-ring circus. It’s not that his verse is freed, but that poetry itself is freed. Freed of preconception or expectation, freed to become whatever this most free of minds might discover it to be. In Beyond, Goldbarth articulates his responsibility for rescuing singular events from the fate of “data chaos,” which
leaves me wildly trying to think of pockets adequate
to everything: The ashtree staff of the hermit
on his mountaintop for seventeen years. The latest Nintendo
epic, Callow Drooling Wombat Warriors. The doctors
cracking open Nicky’s sternum like a matzoh—he was five.
The perfect wedge of brie John found one day on his car hood.
Gunshots. Twill weft. Owl-hoo. Storm, and calm.
The poem as fit receptacle. Sure. Right.
I’ll know what to do with them.
A Goldbarth poem is a common denominator, does become, in his own words, a “megamatrix substrate (God, / or atoms, or Imagination)” holding the “infinite unalike dots”—or their equivalents—in the whirring mixer of his mind. So his tensions are those of one idea in relation to another, concept as it clashes with belief, notion wriggling out from under judgment, science as it faces the unanswerable. Beyond is no exception to this rule, and in some ways there is little new to say about this book because it’s been said about the previous books. Goldbarth has not embarked on some new project, nor has he deviated from his regulation beyond-the-norm fare—but just that he can maintain his wonder at the multiple facets of this world (and the worlds beyond our comprehension) is, in fact, our wonder. He opens to us the cosmos with all its mysteries; as old mysteries are explained, new ones unfold, and Goldbarth is there to see even mystery in a new light. “The Red Shift” finds an equivalence to the universe in motion in a man standing in the heartland thinking he still smells of the fish in his hometown, what he was born “away from.” “Even; Equal” moves from the real world to the netherworld, as the speaker watches snow bridge the gap of class until he imagines his deceased father playing poker with the tailored oil barons on the other side of the cemetery: “Death—the way snow makes the ditch / and the window sill even; equal.”
Those “other” worlds—where things remain unknown, possibly even unknowable—intrigue Goldbarth and become a part of his ongoing cosmology. He likes to look at what cannot be easily explained, to contemplate the profound along with the mundane. His lightning-quick shifts between one realm and another are part of his poetic bag of tricks; the resulting implosion in the reader’s mind make reading this poet a joy, but an arduous joy. Perhaps this is why he hasn’t received still more attention, which this work deserves. I only know that I can’t describe the pleasure one feels in reading a poem like “Believing a Resonant Chord Exists Between His Work and the World, Pieter Bruegel Attempts to Help Banish the Tarantella.” Goldbarth brings to bear everything he (and we) know of Bruegel’s work, as well as new “factoids” such as how the Dutch once tried banning the color red and pointed shoes to stop an epidemic of dancing. In the first section Bruegel banishes red from his paintings, in the process altering the world. The middle section questions cause and effect as the poet imagines a contemporary woman who dances in a nude bar, a woman with a six-year-old daughter to feed, a woman who’s been banished from the world of PTA and parish bazaars even though, as the poem points out, over $42 million a week are spent in nude bars—on cover charges alone:
Because someone is marrying, someone
in another painting is walking on stumps. Because somebody
is an entomologist tweezing a living dot into the light,
somebody else is resolving the orbits of planets. Because
this happens, that doesn’t. Listen. . . . Quiet. . . . You can hear
the Possible issue its tiny cries at the edge
of our actual world. Because somebody’s dancing,
somebody isn’t: somebody’s painting dancing, in a room,
in a mood, in a head-encircling cloud of linseed and solitude.
The final section strips the paintings down to black and white, to the ghostly shadows of black and white, a “silence as stark as this duochrome world” where life suddenly intrudes with its sounds (“pain, perhaps, or sexual fervor”) and Bruegel paints in the dancers, in red, for “who is he to stop them?” And the reader ends up pondering the purpose of art, the very act of imagination (with a capital I).
In Beyond, Goldbarth seems to want to test the powers of poetry: “When / Ginsberg writes ‘I declare the war in Vietnam over!’ // —is it over? in the ‘real world’? or in the poet’s own / apocalyptic and love-marbled heart? I don’t know.” The underlying tension in Goldbarth’s work may be that he knows poetry resolves nothing. Answers nothing. For all his bravado, for all his Imagination, the poem does not redeem the past, does not give life any ultimate meaning, does not bring his father back. Loss is at the heart of every poem, adding its pungency to the mix of ideas, its flavor to what it is to be alive.
Beyond ends with a long sequence in many voices called “The Two Domains.” It won a science fiction award, and it’s Goldbarth’s version of Ghostbusters. The narrative is simple: an agnostic woman hires an “exorcist” to rid her hotel/warehouse of the ghosts of two young lovers who were killed there a century earlier before they could consummate their marriage. You guessed it—the prim and proper warehouse owner is seduced by “otherness,” and the resulting lovemaking somehow assuages the itchy ghosts. The idea is fun, the poems are fun, the voices are fun, the idea is fun all over again—but for me this sequence lacks the atomic explosion of real, and surprising, insight. I’ll vote high honors to the first half of the book and give honorable mention to the inventiveness of the rest. Meanwhile, cause and effect: because Goldbarth is, somebody isn’t. Albert Goldbarth has the all-encompassing vision of Whitman or Ginsberg, the precision of Bishop, the knife-edged refinement of Stevens or Plath. This is a recipe for originality, and Goldbarth just may be the American poet of his generation for the ages. He’s out there now, without his hat, winging it over the city.
And now all three men are gone, dropping somewhere below my sight level—and with them half my morning. What of the window in front of me, those first ropes that appeared from nowhere and sway, now, as mere evidence of another drama somewhere below? Sometimes they whip back and forth, or jerk crazily, and I imagine the wire mesh cutting through fog, making a pattern, a filigree of fog moving in to fill the incision.
Suzanne Paola’s Bardo, winner of the Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press, looks to the Tibetan bardo journey (where the soul wanders through various realms trying to avoid rebirth) as its central metaphor. Paola effectively fuses this with classical Western tradition, and her explanatory notes in the introduction give just enough information to enhance the reading of the poems. Unfortunately, the biographical material supplied in the same introduction diminishes the element of surprise necessary to some of the poems. Discovery—or revelation—is undercut by prior knowledge.
The bardo journey, especially the various colored lights associated with different “heavens,” serves Paola well as the warp on which she weaves her story—itself relatively simple: youthful indiscretions, drug usage, a depressing death of the spirit followed by renewal and education, an emerging self eager to enter womanhood, desire for children and despair at the body’s inability to bear them. But Paola has managed to make a poetry of innuendo and implication so that the story unfolds in fragmentary sketches, filtered through the associative vagaries of the mind, as much a poetry of what is unsaid as of what is stated. Consider the fifth (and last) section of the opening poem, “In the Realm of Neither Notions nor Not-Notions”:
Pale, painted, body
geographic with bone: this girl who lived
as myself—
She’s become
a thing I carry: unsure, watching her sleep
from Coeur d’Alene to Seattle to Bellingham. Hip-
bone, ribcage, imperishable breath.
We looked too hard then: we boarded the wrong ships.
In the one drive
for a stillness so tangible even the shadow stops.
All things, as the Buddha said, of one pure Suchness
free of arbitrary conceptions derived from sense
& inconceivable, as a river of rock, as a mountain opening its
drecked passage,
the small shadow frantic there, & our car’s shadow
crossing, seemingly at will, the stygian black.
Paola carries that self with her through the rest of her journey; oneness of spirit will contain her former self as well as who she has become. She never quite frees herself from the arbitrariness of sense, however, finding herself in a sensual world composed of the odor of “singed onion,” the “soft flesh” of poppies, the sound of rain drumming its “bored fingers” on the roof. Again and again, the poems draw us into that tactile world even as they resist it in their search for the spiritual.
If anything mars these poems, it is the writer’s self-conscious awareness of their extended metaphor, spawning such lines as “I’ve interrupted with my mind / the elegant flow of one thing to the next” or “I failed in what I tried to do: / I looked for something that is less than God.” I suspect that what looks like (but does not function as) an intuitive leap is not so much a part of the associative process as a concerted attempt to make one thing flow into the next, less a reflection of the spiritual world than a willed representation of it. I prefer Paola’s more spontaneous moments—for example, the celebratory sound and the quick wit of observation found in “Fall Landscape, with Empty Places & Sound”:
Gulls yawp, strung
like worn teeth on the power lines.
Crows awk, & the porch swing
rasps a vowel in the wind.
And I cherish the all-too-true description in “Seeing It All as the Bardo”:
Sometimes there’s a stammer in my ear
an I,I,I,I bird of self chirping through the lips.
The soft red light of the jealous gods. The ones
who are always softly bickering. A realm
where envy pulls. But I didn’t realize
how much and how truly I enter it—
My words, the bird says. My
articles. I, I.
High-pitched song
but my own.
Suzanne Paola achieves her tensions through indirection and a seemingly natural ability to leave things out. The poems float on nuance—and thus I reiterate the point that her introduction detracts from the power of the poems to imply narrative. “Columbines,” perhaps my favorite, is a simple lyric which demonstrates the elasticity of metaphor:
I promised myself I wouldn’t love you
anymore, being beyond you: little
spoonfuls of impermanence.
The flowers I could never stop looking at—
tiny flutes honeycombed
with tinier pleating, five
nectar-swollen spurs, five petals
unfolding like a cartoon cry around your mouth.
Such a terrifying articulation of a small idea—
I would never have done
what I’ve done, if I’d heard you—understood
you, then—what it takes
to make one small, barely visible, quickdying thing.
With no overt reference to infertility, the poem gathers up its grief in imagery and in the accumulated long i’s that culminate in the quick “dying.” The longer poems in Bardo contain shorter sections that function much as this poem does, and it is in these moments that Paola successfully bridges the tensions between lyric and narrative. Of far more interest than the subject matter of these poems, this balancing act catches the attention as Paola struggles to say, without saying, what needs to be said. The tapestry of Bardo is a wall-hanging in which there are gaps; the warp is revealed through the absence of weft. There’s a kind of disjunction—details omitted, narrative leaps beyond the ordinary. The result risks obscurity, but rewards us with a vision that reveals the holes to be part of the whole.
And now they are back, risen again to my sight, three men pointing to windows, gesturing with their hands, a high-rise mime show with an audience of (as far as I can tell) one. It’s clear they don’t quite see eye-to-eye. The yellow hat looks down toward the street, the one without a hat makes an adamant gesture, the white hat opens his hands in conciliation. Something is at stake—but what? Oh my god, the one without a hat is suddenly standing on the ledge, outside the railing, turning around to say something to the others, standing there (okay, so what if he has a short strap holding him to the rail) having the last of his conversation thirty-three floors up on a ledge no wider than the length of his (what look to me to be) fine Italian shoes.
Sometimes there is a spontaneous response to being alive that manifests itself in the natural use of language, the world seen anew in simile or adjective, deliciously varied, offering up its mysteries through the tilt of the head and the slightly altered angle of vision. Neruda’s “perpetual cup of water” or his “elusive butterfly of time,” his “red noise of bones” or the “day withdrawing to its own local cemetery” are examples of such a response. In contemporary America, the poems of Naomi Shihab Nye have this special kind of spontaneity. They leap from the pages with their exuberance and their genuine delight in looking hard at anything and anyone that comes into view. In fact, a quick glance at some of the titles in her latest book, Fuel, would suggest Neruda’s Odas Elementales—“Morning Glory,” “Luggage,” “Feather,” “Butter Box,” “Bill’s Beans,” “Alphabet,” “String.” And a sampling of phrases underscores this affinity: “From this distance every storm / looks like a simple stripe”; “We’re fat with binders and forgetting”; “the high bouillon surge of joy”; “& only birds with their sharp morning notes / had the sense for any new day”; “Daily the long wind brushes YES / through the trees.”
Nye’s particular challenge is to shape the material so that it speaks for itself. The risk here is the risk of the ordinary. As her previous book Red Suitcase suggests, Nye is a traveler and her poems record her encounters with other people, other places. Fuel continues in this vein, feeding on her experience of the actual world. There’s universe enough right here on earth, she seems to say in “Luggage,” surveying the basket of apricots, the smiles of strangers, “thinking / how this world has everything and offers it / how it is good we only have two hands.”
There’s courage in writing of the human, of the everyday: your young son’s first ride on a bicycle, or attending an estate sale, or the pancake breakfast with Santa, or no. 2 pencils. There’s either courage or confidence that, whatever the topic, something interesting will happen. And something always does happen in the hands of this poet who trusts her instincts, trusts her observations to lead her into new territory, another place to “visit.” Nye finds the complex in the simple, as the small vases from Hebron which “tip their mouths open to the sky” become vessels for the history of the Palestinian struggle. Conversely, she finds the simple in the complex, moving from the complicated human emotions of “Snow” (a poem about sledding with her younger brother in order to avoid family tensions) to the realization that “there can be a place / so cold any movement saves you.” From there, it’s simple to break the frosty barriers between people, to unravel the complex maze of disaffection in the name of love.
The poems of Fuel are refreshingly easy to read and understand, yet they continue to haunt you, insisting themselves long after you’ve finished reading. They force you into unexpected corners and hand your own ordinary world back to you tied in a shiny ribbon, curled with the scissors of Nye’s acute eye, held in place with her perfect adjectives. This is a collection of disparate poems; there is no continuous narrative here other than the story of active receptivity. The lesson seems so simple—live fully, contemplate what others say, let that lead you into your own interior spaces—but few of us remember it so wholeheartedly. Here’s what happens when you do:
The Rider
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free in a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.
How skillfully Nye identifies herself as the rider, acknowledges her own experience of loneliness, pays homage to that of others, and, in the final gesture, moves from inside to the exterior world with its tiny messages of hope.
These inviting poems are optimistic, but Nye is not Pollyanna. She does not shrink from the realities of the Middle East, from the pain of memory or empathy with the grief of others. She enters the human drama knowing that, as in “Wedding Cake” when she is asked to hold a stranger’s baby on an airplane, she will be left with a crumpled skirt and an aching lap. But she’s had the pleasure of an hour with a baby in a frilly dress and observed with wonder that “already she knew the small finger / was funnier than the whole arm.”
Fuel leaves the reader with a new appreciation for the ordinary made extraordinary, a feeling that the lives we live do matter, a sense that poetry is in the beholding rather than in what is beheld. They leave us with our own version of an aching lap. We want it back—that way of connecting—knowing that falling pears make a “round, / full sound in the grass,” or that painted signs dry more quickly in English than Arabic (the thick swoops and curls stay moist), or that her uncle, in his adopted coffee shop, is still shaking his head “back and forth / from one country to the other.” We want the simple pleasure of “Eye Test” where the letters, “tired of meaning nothing,” long to become words. And we want the complex pleasure of the long elliptical lines of “String,” wound into their own ball of perception:
though so many days have driven in between us and original hopes
as a boy stands back from his earlier self mocking it
and the light of fireflies blinking against an old fence has become
as sad as it is lovely because so many hands are gone by now
it is not that we wanted the light to be caught but reached for
that was it
Tonight it is possible to pull the long string and feel someone moving
far away
to touch the fingers of one hand to the fingers of the other hand
to tug the bride and widow by the same thread . . .
The poem ends with a delicate fusion of lives in the first-person plural, including the reader in its realized spaces, tugging us, through language, into the world at large:
Just then a light clicked on inside tall windows draped tablecloth
pitcher of flowers lace of evening spinning its intricate spell
inside our blood and what we smelled was earth and rain sunken into it
run-on sentence of the pavement punctuation of night and day
giving us something to go by a knot in the thread
although we did not live in that house
Sensuous, imaginative, and surprisingly surprising, Nye is a poet who spans cultures. What scholars call “otherness” dissolves in her embrace. Fuel begins with “Muchas Gracias por Todo,” giving thanks for everything. And at the book’s conclusion we must give thanks to Naomi Shihab Nye for reminding us that our everyday lives can be the source of infinite wonder, that the simple juxtaposition of noun and adjective puts the lie to pretension, that in thinking about our own lives we would be wise to echo her last line: “I would not trade.”
Now the dark-haired man is back on his side of the rail, and the other two are in their cage, and all’s right with the world. White hat and yellow hat are working away, rubbing and wiping and, yes, lifting off the tape and throwing it into their trash can (the cage has a beige plastic container for just such a purpose) and suddenly there is an array of familiar-looking tools—screwdrivers and sandpaper and measuring tape—to reassure me. There are patches of sky. A gull traces the canyon of the street. The city is emerging from fog, spreading itself out block by block under the absent noontime sun. And I go back to my book.