RECENTLY, ON THE RADIO, I heard about an experiment. Several people were told they would be participating in a study and would need to be interviewed. They were each, in turn, brought into a waiting room where they sat for a few minutes before being called into the interview room. The interview, however, consisted of asking them to describe the waiting room. That was the experiment.
There were interesting differences in the descriptions—and they broke down, to a large degree, along gender lines. The men were usually quite vague. It was just a room, after all, and they were only waiting for the interview to begin. Pressed, they might guess at the colors of the walls. There were a couple of chairs, they thought. A desk. A window to the left. Yeah, looked out over the parking lot. Asked about the size of the room, they were more specific. Fourteen-by-sixteen, they guessed. Maybe sixteen-by-eighteen.
The women, on the other hand, had no idea about the size of the room. Medium-sized, for a waiting room. Reminiscent of the old breadbox routine, it was bigger than the dentist’s, but smaller than a classroom. Medium. The walls, oh, they could argue about the tint, but they knew the color—mauve—or a variation of mauve, with white trim, and they remembered the curtains as having a kind of mauve and gray pattern. And Venetian blinds. On the desk there were three books, maybe four, placed near the outside corner, some paper stacked neatly, a phone. Some pencils, in a holder. It was an orderly desk. Pressed, they might be able to tell you the color of the book jackets. A couple had even peeked at the titles. They went on—the colors of the chairs, the design, where they were placed. The pictures on the walls.
Without getting into whether these differences are brain- or culture-induced (though the recent mapping of the X chromosome suggests greater differences than previously thought), it is clear that, for the few minutes that the room became a part of their ongoing stories, different people noted its details in varying degrees of specificity, and they noted different details depending on their own interests and inclinations. Thus the men’s ability to gauge dimensions, the women’s sense of the décor. And they had varying degrees of curiosity, or decorum, that led them to snoop (or not) at the contents of the desk.
If it had been my experiment, I’d have asked for more than detail. I’d have wanted to know what they had been thinking about while they sat in the room. Why did they notice certain objects? Had they speculated about the interview? The interviewer? What kind of person did they think worked at such a desk?
We all pour the facts of the world through the sieve of our interests and inclinations. Now that I have young grandsons, I notice other people’s babies and toddlers. A few years from now, I’ll notice kindergartners at play. Now that I live in the Northwest, I remark on how small the trees seem when I drive through New England. My world has expanded to include orcas and the warning signs that tell you to go to high ground during a tsunami. On the other hand, the facts of mid-April snowstorms and white-tailed deer have been tucked into something we’d call “memory,” but which is really facts-in-absentia—something to be called up when needed, though no longer part of daily living.
By the same token, we’ve come to expect that our poets will give us a special filter through which to experience the things of the world, one that employs the lens of insight, or the shaping frame of metaphor. We believe that they will hand us back the room—the fact of the room—somehow transformed. We will see it with fresh eyes, will note its details and make meaning of them. We will imagine who is beyond the door and what other worlds will open when we open it. I’d like to look at the “things on the desk” of six very different kinds of poets: at how, and why, they handle facts—and how, and why, they hand them back to us.
In Albert Goldbarth’s case, the desk is more than cluttered; it has shoes and ships and sealing wax—a jampacked ecstasy of found objects spilling over its edges, stuffed into the drawers, piled knee-deep on the floor. Comic books, nudie magazines, 116 postcards of the Eiffel Tower (one for each year of its existence), a windup sushi.
The cover art for his latest book, Budget Travel through Space and Time, is a 1727 print called “A Voyage to Cacklogallinia,” used with permission of the Ordway Collection at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I’ve been to the center, and it’s full of fascinating detail of man’s probe into space—but I never saw the likes of this eighteenth-century imagination that pictures a palm-covered shoreline, galleons in the bay, and above, looking a bit like migrating geese, a flock of chickens bearing a canopied litter with one (he must be) scientist off into the cloud-filled sky. It’s the perfect cover for what happens on the pages in between.
At first glance, it might seem that Albert Goldbarth seeks out the oddball tidbit, the strangest of the strange—the clothes Martin Van Buren wore to campaign in 1828, the nation of Tuvalu sinking into the Pacific, the (by now) myriad test tubes growing HeLa cells named for Henrietta Lacks, whose tumor furnished them—in order to take us on a kaleidoscopic romp through the outlandish. True, but only partly true—because Goldbarth feeds on fact. In fact (ha!), a direct IV line of fact flows constantly into his imagination, creating something new, something of Goldbarthian proportions, which is to say something both wonderfully fanciful and devastatingly true. And we are the lucky recipients, transported into realms we hadn’t thought to think of. Budget travel, yes, when for a mere fourteen dollars you can go out so far and in so deep.
Goldbarth goes to fact for some of the same reasons he went, in “Scale-Model Sketch,” to a Mexican village:
And why
I was there?—the skin I’d been born into
wasn’t enough, I guess; its far-outfurling mesh
of connections wasn’t enough. I wanted more
inside me, more digestion stones, the way the owl has,
and more for them to go to pulverizing
work on.
Why do I act so confidently as though the “I” of the poem—the one who saw the moon reflected in a jar of water on his backstairs in a village “unmasked of anything urban”—is as close to being Goldbarth himself as it’s possible to be on the page? Because Budget Travel makes of this “I” not so much a narrative persona as a prober and prodder and synthesizing sensibility, in short, a roving imagination in the process of putting things together. It enters the poems at will and it speaks directly to the reader, both in offhand comments (“Was she a clock? Well, yeah: of course / a body’s a clock) and direct address (“Now this is the part where you / enter the poem. You heard me: // you”). And this “I,” in turn, becomes the object of its own inquisition: “God, / Did I write that? Did I write that?” Like the cells in the body that keep changing, this self is protean, constantly revised and renewed and reconsidered.
Albert Goldbarth may be interested in facts, but Budget Travel through Space and Time is far more concerned with what can never be known, the spaces where edges blur—as in all the lost histories in the old people’s home, as in the moment when twilight banks toward night, as in the inaudible inspirations between life and death, as in fog (the operative image in the book), as in the air through which the present self reaches back to the adolescent he was (now “only a hole in the air”), as in “the moth / invisible against a ground of jungle moss and guano,” as in all things (Goldbarthianly graphically) indistinguishable, “like spit on cum.” All the facts crowd around, putting pressure on meaning. But nothing means more than the invisible arc between the facts, the energy generated simply by touching one wire to the other, and the belief—yes, belief, as in the moment when you know (there’s no other word for it) that the derivative exists, that you’ve crossed the indefinable territory between Δ and d—that something new has come into the world. Not just the poem, but new meaning.
Budget Travel shifts its emphasis from the micro and macro of Goldbarth’s earlier books (“the far perimeters—the bugs; the stars—inside of which our little, loopy / human selves get lived”) to the selves themselves. Using his own “self” as a ground, the poet names himself, his friends, his family, his haunts, his various activities (topless bar, library, late-night conversation), or calls up historical figures or events, in order to establish the substantial through which the insubstantiality can be measured. He is unadulteratedly the writer of the pieces, often reminding the reader that he’s mentioned something before, remarking on the typo in the epigraph he’s used as a point of departure, inserting the notes he’s written for himself, footnoting the poems, even forcing the reader to look back (“But it wasn’t a deer / I was talking about in section 3”), or into (“But aren’t all prayers aerosol?”). He even takes on a reviewer—enough to make you worry about what you say—and he does all this to establish the umbilical link between writer and reader. These poems demand not only our attention, but our participation. For Albert Goldbarth, the facts he unearths are merely a vehicle for the journey they will launch—budget travel inside the brain. He gives us the facts as he encounters them, and thus we take part, traveling along the dendrites to unknown worlds. The ubiquitous question mark that reveals his thinking process also asks that we follow its logic; we write ourselves into its foggy ambiguities and emerge still questioning.
Part of our willing participation comes from the enticing informality of the voice, its conversational style, and part comes from the way Goldbarth continually startles us with his coined combinations. Nothing is more fun than when he goes through a list of antiquated words, imagining a future when “clit ring” has gone the way of “pinafore.” There’s a balance even in the universe of language; we can’t gain “wonky” without the loss of “sillibub.” And nothing is more moving than when Goldbarth touches some part of our shared humanity, as in the ending of “Scenes from the Next Life” when he speaks for the boy whose mummified body was found with the wing of an ibis attached to its shoulder:
To be half a bird is to be
completely a monster. Even so, I love to feel this delicate
comb of bone—that I’ve been given instead of an arm—
accept the rush of evening air; and if I lift it then,
I can be played on like a harp. If I don’t know
the euphoria of flight itself, at least
I know the quieter joy of its blueprint.
Paying homage to both space and time, Graywolf Press has found the perfect format for these poems. The oversized pages do justice to the lines and allow the poems to remain visually intact. Budget Travel is a long book (162 pages), but its nine sections seem to float on air—like skipping stones hovering over water, marking time in quicker and quicker intervals. And Goldbarth pays homage to the past (about a quarter of the poems are written in segments comprising “a sonnety fourteen lines”) even as other poems leap into a future of omitted letters, long prose sections, embedded research, and the implied questions to which imagined answers abound.
To demonstrate the spandex elasticity of these poems, one would, well, need to print an example in full. But Goldbarth’s poems are long, complex, unwieldy beasts, averaging around four pages. Thus the reviewer is reduced to some approximation of an approximation.
The back jacket of Budget Travel claims that Goldbarth is now “creating at the height of his powers.” If this is so, what can Goldbarth do next? Offer up more of the same (which he more deftly phrases “enough the same / to be the same”) until it ceases to amaze us? Luckily for us, it will cease to amaze Goldbarth first, so we can predict that he’ll find something new to do. Meanwhile, he gives us a book that shimmers with love and sex and friendship and aging and death and a zillion other things in equal measure. Hovering over this particular collection, the BIG QUESTION accumulates its own power. “Some Ways” puts it this way:
It happens as many ways as there’s us.
The image I prefer is simply the end
of an ordinary day, when the colors are deep,
and we stand outside, and silently, as one,
the shadows are called back into our bodies.
As if to confirm the singular experience of death, Goldbarth provides a matching definition of life: “For this we fight, to be a single cohesive perimetered thing. And if not?—‘senescence,’ we call it. ‘Transcendence,’ if it’s desirable.” Budget Travel through Space and Time encompasses the very recent technologies that can take us to the first instants of time and space, and also to the mysteries that remain mysterious, as in the individuality we bring with us on our journey through the fallopian tube. The book’s aim is wonder—a wonder that, in an age of “überglobal, multizillion-dollar, telecyberfiber transport system(s),” taxes the imagination at ever-increasing speeds. And its aim is unadulterated joy—at the whole shebang, the gist and jism of the universe.
Quan Barry’s desk is divided into two distinct areas: on the left, one pile of objects—a velvet-lined box, carved ivory, a blue and white porcelain vase, but also a neon-yellow highlighter and a pocket radio; on the right, another pile of objects, slightly less defined but including driftwood, a marble with a green hue, cotton batting. In between, the slippery space in which the mind flits, making connections between the two piles.
Each of the forty-nine poems in Barry’s second collection, controvertibles, juxtaposes disparate things/events/concepts, viewing one in terms of another. Each title (e.g., “the seahorse as transubstantiation,” “the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 as allegory,” “Vietnamese Dictionary Definition as Self-Portrait,” etc.) provides the framework for a kind of large-scale logopoeia. The word controvertible (Barry has borrowed the noun Dickinson made of an adjective, and even the adjective is somewhat elusively defined in my dictionaries) seems to claim some element of the debatable—the competing emotions/responses that swirl up when two images/ideas collide. The rhetorical construction is not quite a conceit, but a vehicle by which each side of the “equation” informs the other, somehow in the mix defining a new, and hybrid, space. Even before entering the poem, the mind rushes quickly to bridge the gap.
And here lies the rub. The “facts” are given primarily in the titles. For the most part, we can follow the generated sparks that arc between the two poles of the poem’s inception, and can feel the combustion, if you will. But some of these poems work better than others simply because they depend on the reader’s knowledge or sophistication. Suppose one reads “snow angels as Michael Furey” having made angels in the snow (thus responding to the question “What makes the short-lived / beautiful?”) but without having read Joyce? Or maybe having read “The Dead,” but having forgotten the name of the man in the distant graveyard over which the snow is falling? What would you then make of these lines: “Why does everyone need to believe that someone / would die for them?” The generated space of the poem rapidly loses intensity when the concepts or images through which things are transformed are rarefied. This happens most often when the second half of the “equation” is abstract or theoretical (as in “metempsychosis,” “psychostasia,” “resipiscence,” “semiotics,” or “jeremiad”). Yet this cannot be the only indicator, because two of the most powerful poems in the collection are “purdah as polemic” and “ultrasound as palinode.” In the latter, Barry names her own nemesis:
Or the dilemma of having a critical language before the poem physically exists—
i.e., theory superseding the line.
Yes, there is a beauty in transparency, in explanation,
in rendering.
But I want the difficulty, the first there was nothing
& the then there was light.
In my hands the image of her body like the prow of something
wriggling into being.
Because poetry should inform theory & not the other way around.
Sophie.
The naming of this “small moon” supersedes any theory the poet has previously called upon. And Barry positions the poem near the end of the book, as a kind of overarching commentary on her own methods.
The facts in controvertibles are often high-toned (paintings, theater, music), sometimes making the poems feel a bit too clever or esoteric. A few are culled from more recent history or pop culture (Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign, Doug Flutie’s 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary pass), thus making of the poem an intermediary between the public event and something intensely personal. The reader is transported into an arena where, as in “the seahorse as transubstantiation,” private associations are given context:
I imagine it was a creature like this at the annunciation, something mysterious & derivative & spiked w/grace. Something extracted from the sea five thousand by five thousand times. Something medicinal & tidal. A conveyance.
Who doesn’t want to be altered?
When I take you into me, I become you, we are thirded & furious. The night spreads like oil. When we rise salt-skinned from the water, everything is demonstrative.
Interestingly, the most private (even obscure) poems benefit most from Barry’s rhetorical device. By filtering experience through an intervening image, the “I” seems, somehow, more available. Vietnam (“that some of us were foundlings / & that some of us were given up freely”) becomes a window to perspective (“Who made this shard-filled thing winged like a butterfly? // All week I expected to see that light, to put my foot down on the earth / & come away changed w/what only the body knows: // emanation. The fallacy of closure”). Or the poem can reveal the undersides of what inspired it, as in “domestic violence as Noh play,” where brutality is all the more shocking presented in this formal guise:
Don’t let the stylization confuse you—the koken cloaked in black, how each stagehand materializes in the scene, deals the protagonist his weapon, & vanishes.
That night the only music was the phone’s ringing.
Afterward I remember looking at her face—the carved wood’s deepening azure—& the moonlight slashing through the window like a sword.
The poems of controvertibles are best read two—or three—times so that the carved space they generate becomes a solid sculpture of its own. These poems are smart and savvy—perhaps, as the saying goes, too clever by half. They smack of the academy (no blurb should use the word contextualizing), so they may deter as many readers as they entice. And they suffer slightly from their formulaic conception. But to turn away too quickly from the intellectual challenge they present—or to miss the lyric impulse that fuels them—would be to overlook Quan Barry’s genuine achievement: the recombinant DNA of metaphor that hands back fact, transformed.
Joseph Stroud’s desk is orderly, even ascetic. Three white sheets of paper. A black pen. On one corner, near the back, there’s a globe. And the room—its white walls, its simple rug, the hand-hewn rafters. Stroud’s fourth book, Country of Light, is a study in various simplicities. He uses facts not as a springboard for imagination but to ground us in the slow, steady reality of daily living. They are as cleanly, and as honestly, given to us as the potato handed to the poet by a peasant on his way to Machu Picchu. They serve to remind us that things are sometimes simply what they appear to be, surfacing in his poems the way the turtle surfaces in “At the Well of Heavenly Clarity”: “It turned its head a moment, looking around at the world, then sank back into the well.” For Stroud, the naming is sometimes enough. The holding to the light.
The informing spirits of Country of Light are Li Po and Neruda, and Stroud moves easily from the concise to the voluptuous, from “I have much to learn of patience” to “Like a hand / from the dark house / arose the intense / perfume / of firewood. / A visible scent / as if the tree / were alive.” He also moves easily between the lyric and the narrative, the compression and brevity of his series of six-line observations and the expansive informality of the prose poem—one whole section consisting of prose poems in the voice of Giotto. Stroud’s poems roam the world—Latin America, Spain, thirteenth-century Italy, a cabin in the high Sierras, Vietnam. Along the way, they explore a range of emotions, embracing the capricious humor of “The Old Poets Home”—
What do you do if you’re a poet and you come to that place where there are no more poems, when the words are all used up for you, when the muse won’t give you the time of day, or night, what do you do, do you go to the Old Poets Home, sit around with Orpheus and Homer and all the other silverbacks, Sappho in a bouffant blue-gray wig sipping sherry, Eliot with his mouth like a prune, and what do they do there, trade images, recall great lines, complain all day how all the new poems seem so slick, so enameled, so gussied up, so much froufrou and decoration, such silliness strutting around acting important . . .
—along with the contemplative reflection of “Reading Wallace Stevens” (printed here in full)—
I close the book and look out the window
up the hillside from the cabin where a stag
and two does pass through the sunlight
and through shadows between the pines,
disappearing among the colors they are,
appearing among the colors they are not.
—as well as, in “Stitching the Woe Shirt,” the stark factual facing of grief:
*
As if a word could name it
*
As if sorrow were an ax
*
As if a prophet opening the body could read the future
*
As if a god reached in and scattered her across time
*
Inconsolable
*
As if grief and anguish and desolation were threads
*
As if this poem were a needle
If these poems are about learning how to live in the world, part of the learning process is reading other poets. Stroud almost literally communes with earlier writers, bringing them to life by fitting his moods to theirs. “Reading Joyce in Winter” brings snow to Shay Creek (“the silence so huge / I can hear snow falling over the Spur”) until it falls also on the Shannon waves, ending with the final words of “The Dead.” “Late Night, Year’s End, Doing the Books with Tu Fu” rather raucously takes the Chinese poet into his balance sheet: “Instead of numbers, let me enter words / into the ledger, this account of our friendship, this little poem from me to you.” And “Dancing with Machado” moves through personal grief to celebration:
Machado danced
the color of light on the mountains—
I danced the silver of leaves—together
we danced the sun on the river—
just the two of us, two men
dancing alone in the shimmering
fields of Baeza.
However, in “The Death of Lorca” imagination is usurped by fact, and the poem ends with this account: “An hour after the executions, the gravedigger arrived. He recognized the two bullfighters, observed that the third man had a wooden leg, and the fourth wore a loose tie—you know, the sort that artists wear. He buried the bodies in a trench, one on top of another, in no particular order.” Stroud finds fascination—and horror—in what the world has to offer up; he seems more intent on the experience itself than on making something of it.
In Stroud’s hands, the poem itself becomes a fact, with the weight and solidity of a made object. Within that object, however, there is a fluidity, a sense of its coming into being, something like watching as the potter spins his wheel and the bowl is pulled up out of the clay. “Wintering” is a good example. Time ebbs and flows. The poem slowly unfolds, beginning in the recent past—“Woke this morning”—and touching lightly on details: woodstove, coffee, silence. Looking ahead, the speaker makes plans for the day, then steps back into a memory of the day before—stacking firewood, the clouds, the impending storm—only to arrive at the present moment again (“now this morning the first snow”). Dipping into a more distant past, he recalls a line from an ancient poem, then pictures the future—“I think of the winter to come.” Again detail, but this time it’s anticipatory: light, canyon, woodstove, logs, silence, where he can envision himself “honing my spirit / in the country of light.”
The book’s fourth section, “Passing Through,” ends with a sequence of six poems set in contemporary Vietnam, a combination of travelogue, conversation, dictionary, history, and hallucination. Whether through the violent imagery of the war and its lingering effects, or the six tones of ma that differentiate ghost from mother from which from rice seedling from tomb from horse, the reader steps into the poet’s shoes. We travel together, moving from AK-47s, bomb craters filled with water, and white silk ao dais up through the jungle, the mist, and the mountains, until, in “Country of Clouds,” we hear an echo of “Wintering”: “so we climb higher / until at last we come out // into a country of light.” Although the poem goes on and we descend, Shay Creek and Vietnam are linked linguistically—as if, in Joseph Stroud’s perception, all poems are one poem, and we can watch it crystallize around the stark, salient fact of his being in, and of, this world.
Ann Townsend’s desk—rich rosewood with a teak inlay, a deep blue old-fashioned blotter, a photo in a silver frame—fits neatly under a window looking out at a garden basking in the stilled, late-afternoon light. Three leather-bound volumes, open, with bookmarks at specific pages. A yellow pitcher, filled with bright red tulips. The tulips have been gathered from Townsend’s second book, The Coronary Garden, which takes its title from an unfinished chapter in a seventeenth-century botanical treatise with a focus on flowers that can be fashioned into garlands or crowns. And the poems, likewise, have the formal elegance of an English garden.
The cover jacket praises this book for its love poems, and it’s true that love is their subject. The speaker pays attention to its every detail (her lover’s short-cropped bristling hair, his muscles as he mows, the missed heartbeat of the first kiss), and she perfectly captures the giddy charge of physical attraction in “Mindful of You,” where the odd setting only fuels the speaker’s awareness of the other: “It was a funeral / but I felt happy shame pressing / against my eyelids.” Yet love threatens privacy and complicates the emotions, so these poems are really best characterized by one of the titles, “Love Poem, Unwritten.” “Something keeps me / from saying the words,” the speaker says, then she says them instead in image, in her rapt attention to the sound of the neighbor’s earthmover whose stutter calls up memory, becoming the “stammering letter to you / that I fail and fail to send.” Often, as in the final lines of “Your Body’s Weight upon Me,” the idea inherent in the image remains deliberately mysterious, unable, quite, to bridge the gulf between fact and implication:
Exactly how you claimed me
is best left to the ellipses, the silent margins—
better to say
that in the market place
the vendor wraps his flowers in butcher paper
and twine, and ties the knot twice:
when you buy it you take it out into the cold.
The operative image of flowers often serves Townsend as an objective correlative: “They Call You Moody” looks into a “proneness to sadness,” and suddenly everything—the jack-pine, the crows, the whole turbulent sky—seems to mirror the mood while “the crocuses snap open on their crazy / hinges.” Or, in “Geraniums,” the flowers “fail to thrive,” reminiscent of what a doctor said when speaking about a baby. By the end of the summer the geraniums have withered, and the speaker, haunted by the terminology, says, “I watched the boy die, leaf by leaf.” The world is too much with us in these poems: it presses against the eyelids with its colors and sounds; it hurts us with its knives. No wonder that, in “St. Veronica’s Trials” and “Just Toast, Thank You,” Townsend explores the ascetic impulse to renounce such a world. Love is continually undercut by its own fragility. It is fraught with death, with the unbearable beauty of a transitory garden.
This is never more true than in the title poem, on which the book opens. The speaker is addressing someone who has attempted suicide, someone whose bandaged wrists are seen as tulips. It’s a poem of helplessness, handled with reticent dignity. The speaker moves in and out of time, fascinated by the properties of blood, fascinated by the botanical descriptions of the various flowers, alternately courting and fending off the poem’s understated anguish: “and if I loved you better // would this mortal scene stay unwritten?” But love is not sufficient:
Despair needles you with its whisper,
it is agnostic, it believes in irony,
like a fly’s buzz it is perception, a busy
blood clot that stays alive, alive.
The speaker remains mindful of the separation: “I’m not the stopped motion, the straight line out.” To love is to be vulnerable, and throughout the collection the narrating sensibility explores that vulnerability, never quite learning to live with the questions it raises.
The “things” of this book are not so much facts as they are the markers of everyday living: food (there’s a deliciously acerbic poem about cooking for a guest), garden (which extends to field and the nameless horse who owns it with such presence), immediate family, friends. The “facts” here are emotional truths, and Townsend feels her way delicately through them. She distinguishes her poems from more traditional pastoral poetry by complicating the emotions, embracing human complexities, and introducing an inquisitorial narrator, as well as by liberating the line so that everything—detail, description, and doubt—floats free and unfettered. The poems link interior to exterior in the hesitant spaces surrounding the lines. For example, in “Mouse’s Nest” the cumulative facts, as such, are subsumed in the larger movement of the poem, so that its ending, in which the speaker tosses the baby mice outdoors, juxtaposes a dozen solid images in such a way that the result delineates the ephemeral:
so with a shudder
my hand apprehends
the scoop
and spoons them furiously out
the open door,
into snow melt,
first light, grains scattering
with the bodies,
grain wriggling with the life
that feeds on it.
My breath’s a scattershot,
an arrow, her answer.
Now, breeze:
silence wisping in the barn.
For all its emphasis on frailty, this collection is unflinchingly tough, and the candor here is layered with a subtle musical intelligence. Like the two arteries of the aorta, Ann Townsend’s poems supply blood directly to the heart; the dichotomous threads of The Coronary Garden—passion and its terrifying counterpart—force us to face the thorny nature of our lives, and loves.
Latin texts are strewn all over the sleek modern surface of Kevin Prufer’s desk. Stack upon stack, interspersed with yellowing newspaper clippings, back issues of National Geographic, and a worn copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, so that to find something you might need to dig down through the ages, so to speak. A bullet casing. A box of matches. A glass of red wine.
Prufer’s third book, Fallen from a Chariot, seems to pick up where his previous one, The Finger Bone, left off. It is filled with images of violence, not least of which is the cover photo “Corona del Mar,” which shows a mangled car that has clearly careened over an embankment and crashed into a telephone pole. Its engine and hood are crumpled into the shattered windshield, and the viewer cannot help but imagine the rest. The title poem opens the book with a scene that seems—except for the snow—to emanate from the photo, as though memory itself has been stirred:
There is, first of all, her body,
and the snow around it
so, at a glance, it is the glittering body of a god who fell
too far
and can no longer rise, cannot transform—
a bird, a deer—away.
Throughout the first section of the book this body and this snow and then the ensuing ambulance take on transformative lives, moving through the subsequent poems, shape-shifting, seen first from one angle, then another. Sometimes Prufer speaks in the voice of the dead, sometimes from a narrating persona who recalls scenes from his childhood and his mother’s own death, sometimes in the vast impersonal third person (“To the body, the snow is neither cold nor gentle. To the body, there’s / a zero where the field should be”). The “I” of these poems is always “the speaker” because Prufer positions himself outside the poem as a presiding sensibility. Thus, as the snow becomes a fallen angel and the angel becomes a doomed airplane and the plane becomes a bird, open for dissection, the roving “I” slips from observer to the one to whom it is happening, the one who can buy a drink as the plane goes down, musing to himself: “that America loves a doomed and falling / populace as much as it loves anything.”
So it is that the second section takes the rise and fall of Rome as a presiding metaphor. The lives (and first-person voices) of the emperors play themselves out against a contemporary backdrop. Caesar, Augustus, Nero, and Caligula hover over the conversations of Gracie, Paula, and Wilson, along with the ubiquitous “I” (who sometimes appears in self-referential third-person, as in “He looked up from his book”). Thus the reader comes to understand that the child’s history book informs the man’s sense of a nation in trouble, probably doomed. These devices are exciting, but the poems must be even more intensely felt by someone who knows the specifics of Roman history. Almost as if to make this point, images from the first section begin to inform the second so that, when we see a horse that has fallen in the streets of ancient Rome and “did not rise when it blew snow against its back / and buried it,” we cannot help but associate the horse with the mangled car.
“Facts” abound here, but they are provided from outside instead of originating in lived experience, thus acting more as symbol. Rather than weight the poems with their solidity, the facts seem to liberate them from specific contexts. Prufer’s method is collage—a kind of REM amalgamation that is almost, but not quite, surreal. Sentences begin, but do not always end. The poems proceed through association, mixing history with contemporary images of bombs and falling buildings, Nero’s fires with modern conflagration, until they act as warning: “The watch ticked on its chain, / but who could read it? Not the Romans, who loved the lukewarm air / of the trepidarium, / who sank, one by one, into the elegant baths.” As in “Caligula, Clairvoyant,” it’s impossible not to conflate our time and theirs, not to read prediction in Prufer’s images of the destroyed city:
And under the park bench, the shadow of the man
looked toward the ruins of the square, where the cafés had closed,
the umbrellas folded away—
It was a lovely city,
in its gold coins and arches, splendid where the fires
spread up the walls like vines.
Triple exposure, rot
where the dulled brain died. And distance
made a drama of it.
Distance allows Prufer to dramatize his warnings. The third section posits the endgame. Death comes calling, trailing all the old images
Snow will continue to sift into my eyes fill my eyes
or rain like hot glass or wind
and introducing a new one: death by drowning. The speaker stands on the shore, singing like Nero, as the dead have their say.
The fourth section, not surprisingly, reassembles the imagery to build further pictures of destruction. In one poem, the empire is a hidden bomb, ready to split the airplane “like a milkweed pod”; in another the empire is already falling, along with the businessmen, “their red ties streaming behind their necks”; in another it has fallen and, when it fell, “the internet closed / like a refrigerator door.” The “chord of bombers” has left smoldering cities, the gladiator’s blood has “feathered” on the pavement, in contrast to the active first image in the book, the cars in “Apocalyptic Prayer” are now
dead on their empty tires,
their needles on zero and still. The bridge folded
and the grass grown wild—
The facts of this particular closed world have been made public—and their symbolic implications are unmistakable. Personal nightmare has been transformed into a societal vision.
As Fallen from a Chariot catches up the confusion and insistent energy of a mind trying to make sense of the inconceivable, it has the feel of Apollinaire’s “Zone” (certainly lines like “The airplane lands at last without folding its wings” or “You have had enough of life in this Greek and Roman antiquity” would fit perfectly into the book’s method). “Lemure,” spoken in a voice from the tomb, concludes: “The plow goes overhead like an excellent idea, fading when it reaches the corners of the field, then rumbling back.” So, too, the excellent ideas of these poems resound. But Prufer’s achievement—the beauty he carves out of horror, and the brooding distance through which he compels us to confront our times—could also pose a problem. Precisely because they share a deliberately common imagery, the poems begin to blur into one poem, giving the book the cumulative feel of a project more than discovered insight. And precisely because they stem from a preconceived political position, they seem to want to prove a point. The apocalyptic note may, in the end, prove visionary, or it may date this collection. What will unquestionably not be dated is Kevin Prufer’s invigorating talent—the energetic force of his lines as they sing their way across the page.
Linda Bierds’s writing table is one clean sweep of mahogany—computer, printer, keyboard, strong black tea on a lacquer tray. Books in floor-to-ceiling cases, perfectly alphabetized. You have to walk into the study, inspect it closely, to see the ancient telescope folded neatly in the corner by the window, to notice the dog’s bed covered with a Jacquard quilt, slightly worse for wear. Outside, the sound of the sea, or less than a sea, but still a muttering of water. It swirls up to fill the cover of her seventh book, First Hand, with its watery hues of blues and black.
Bierds opens the book with an author’s note that recounts her peering into the microscope in the biochemistry lab at the University of Washington. Recalling her first flawed microscope, Bierds finds in her own experience a version of the scientific strides that have opened our understanding of who and what we are. First Hand contemplates a variety of historical figures who have opened scientific doors, beginning in “Prologue” with the child Galileo, who slices through a hailstone with his father’s violin string in order to see into the mystery that made him think horses, hearing them on the cobbled street. Yet the layers of ice blur even as they are revealed, and the child wishes for better instruments, more perfect conditions, something “without a hint of song.” But song accompanies science in this breathtaking book, becomes its companion as Bierds’s own meticulous rhythms extend the mysteries of art.
The operative device is repetition: phrases recur in carefully worked patterns, but they mutate, rotating on their stems until, like a helix of DNA, the words themselves recombine to produce new meanings. And certain images reappear in different guises, connecting scientists across the centuries. What is the source of insight? Does art mirror, or predict, the science it so closely resembles? Using a scientific method of her own devising, Linda Bierds tackles the large questions, moving continuously between insight and its inception, trying to bridge the gap between conjecture and proof, the leap of faith that precedes confirmation, that space between teakettle and condensation that is, in fact, the steam. Invisible reality, and the knowing that makes it visible in the mind’s eye, unfolding in “Elegance” as definition:
Elegant, that formula, that sudden click of harmony
when facts aligned, and matter, from the bee or from
the bath, lost not itself but simply its perimeter.
Elegant, that sudden shift beyond the eye, that soundless
click: clear stone across some greater clarity.
Greater clarity is what First Hand is all about. Bierds looks to those moments at the brink of the discoveries that form the foundation for contemporary exploration: Archimedes, Newton, Mendel, Curie, and Watson, along with a number of more obscure scientists. She adds to these the voices of artists and inventors—those whose explorations also realigned our sights, from electricity to moving pictures, from the chiseled stone of Bernini to the chiseled words of Keats. And she looks beyond, through all the “if onlys” that lead to new technology, to the ever-increasing rate of change as the cloned lamb (now old hat) leads us back down into the dark world of doubt. Taking as its representative figure that of the monk Gregor Mendel, whose experimentation with pea plants led to an understanding of genetic heredity, First Hand delves into the twin impulses of science and religion. From matins to vespers, Mendel prays to a God he takes on faith; from morning to evening, he thwarts the natural propagation of the peas (some called it heresy) in order to see behind their mysteries. Bierds captures his voice and his meditative mind so that he emerges wholly human in his complex needs. Nothing—not the abbot tending his sheep, not the cat with its sleep-filled eyes, not the patternless petals spilling on the floor—escapes his notice. One good example is “Spillikins: Gregor Mendel at the Table.” Note the way the poem—in its mapping of the elaborate spill of the pick-up sticks, in its hesitant, hovering dashes—hints at the helical structure intimated by Mendel’s rudimentary experiments:
On the table, a nest of fretted sticks:
trefoil, knife blade, horse head, bell,
snake on a staff, bird on a branch,
miter, bucket-yoke, fork.
And at my elbow, black tea,
the mahogany sheen of contentment.
All afternoon, to train the hand,
I lifted the snake from the branch,
the yoke from the horse,
the bird from the yoke,
each carved bone such weighted weightlessness.
And then, through the window, it came—
for a moment, through the window—
that silence so still it is holy. That stillness
when the world’s swirl suddenly stops
and everything—wind and whinny and cough—
is gripped by respite’s harmony.
Then the grip loosened
and all down the hillsides the church bells spilled.
And under the bells, the birds,
and under the birds, the metallic chitter
of knife blades, forks,
and I rose
for the body’s sustenance.
World and representation shimmer in the hologram, each signifier caught on its way toward the stillness of sign until, with a flick of the wrist, the world emerges in the vibrant energy of sounds repeated (still/stillness, gripped/grip, hillsides/ bells/spilled/bells) and sound itself is sustenance.
The inquisitive voices chime across the centuries, their individual, lonely pursuits now fitting neatly together, tongue in groove. How one thing—or fact—informs another over time and space becomes a focus for Bierds’s attention. In “The Monarchs,” the “shifting, clicking tines” of the multifaceted chandelier heard by Bishop Berkeley become the frozen butterflies falling to the forest floor in modern Mexico. In “Ecstasy,” the eerie fact that the actress Hedy Lamarr invented a magnetic code for torpedo guidance systems is played against her filmy magnetism on the screen:
Look, she whispered,
there is nothing between us—until nothing
stopped her airy touch, and nothing
stirred, and nothing cast its rhythmic clicks
high in the darkness above them.
From 1942 to the current microchip is hardly a blip on mutation’s radar screen. “Sunderance” links the rotor blades Russian fishermen use to cut through ice with the helicopters that saved them from the floes (those “motes // afloat in God’s compound eye”) in a moment when “all that was mercy could be forged firsthand.” “Firsthand” becomes first hand—the originating force we swim our way back to. Science and religion seem inseparable. The dilemma is actually framed in “The Trinity Years”:
How, in light of Creation’s complexity, could devotion
stand free from inquiry, vast love from articulation?
The answer, it seems, lies in the potent imaginative space Bierds carves around her own inquiry. The various personae speak as though the poet had managed to find, in the articulated facts of their lives, the roots of their curiosity. “In how many ways might shape take shape?” is answered by the range of her subjects, the diverse ways she manages to push the poem to the brink of the ineffable, and then beyond. Not until page 54 (of a 71-page book) does Bierds enter these poems as a speaking persona in her own right. Contemplating the physicist Charles Vernon Boys, who in 1879 “touched to a spider’s quiet web a silver tuning fork” and watched the spider’s response, she becomes an additional respondent. Standing before a painting of a saint, she introduces an “I” who hears her own long A (“although the note I hear / is organ-cast, cathedral-bound”) and comments on herself as “Godless in this god-filled room,” attuned to the way “like instruments vibrate sympathetically.”
Bierds displays the like instrument of her own mind in the measured cadences of the penultimate poem, “Sonnet Crown for Two Voices.” These are not Albert Goldbarth’s “sonnety fourteen lines,” but a tightly sung descant between herself and Mendel, her century and his, as she comes full circle to the moment in the biochemistry lab where a “gloved guide” reveals to her the microscopic world. Speaking first for the self (as the first eight lines resound in their almost iambic beat, “The glow, how can I express it? My god, / it lifts from protein flecks, up and across / this crafted lens”), and then for Mendel (in the more closely iambic sestet), each sonnet balances the scales of what is known—the cyclone of 1870, the cyclone-spun chromatin of 2004—against an unknown future. Just as the cyclone gave Mendel a glimpse of symmetries yet to be discovered, Bierds looks deep into the nucleus and senses the ultimate mystery. As she gives Mendel’s enduring faith the final word, even the fact of death takes on a kind of incandescence:
Silence, then through the frost of shattered glass
an afterglow arose—or pressed—fully formed
but borderless. As I will be, the swirling world
subtracted from the I of me: wind, chalice,
heartbeat, hand . . . Weightless, measureless, but beautiful
the glow. How can I express it, my God?
The book, however, has a final word of its own. In its poetic “epilogue,” a collage of detail links Ortelius’ early maps of South America with Bruegel’s landscape of games, the first tulips brought from Constantinople to Antwerp with the rising tide of invaders, until its final image—the Nuremberg Peace Fair of 1650 where fifteen hundred boys on wooden horses rocked in the square, filling it with color “like tulips, some said. Like soldiers, said others”—reveals the subtle moiré patterns of history. As though everything were part of a conscious blueprint, the world reveals “the whole of itself.” Like Bernini’s marble bees, the poems of First Hand fly in the face of gravity. With an austere elegance worthy of a mathematician, Linda Bierds communicates her wonder at the natural design, repeatedly achieving “that sudden click of harmony” where the intellect and the lived fact find congruence.
And my very real desk, cleared now of these six books? The usual mess of paperclips, pens, and index cards, coffee mug and calendar. Nothing remarkable. So I look up. On the windowsill, a glass paperweight: a swirl of pink blossom in a deep blue helix, sun caught on its dome until the rays splay their iridescence over my computer screen. Outside, apple blossoms in the early morning light, white against white. Later, the sky will turn blue over snowcapped mountains—and on the walls, the family photographs, gene pool expanding until I recede, a child in patent leather pumps on the day of my Aunt Margaret’s wedding. My mother smiles down enigmatically. My three grandsons watch from behind their mysteries. She would have loved them, my boys’ boys. I state it as fact—the fact of this room—and it is.