I KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE to be on the “other” side of writing, the one where I can do my smug Rhett Butler imitation and mean it when I say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But that’s when I’m writing for myself first and foremost, not when I’m writing a review.
Here’s the rub: we reviewers write, always, with an audience in mind, twisting ourselves into knots to make sure a point can be understood, to determine whether a transition is necessary, whether we’ve included enough of the work to give a fair representation, whether, whether, whether. . . . We conjure you, reader—a horde of you, a solitary omnivore—because if you didn’t exist, we would be narcissistically wallowing in an exercise in futility. We already know what we think about a book, even if we don’t yet have words for it. Why would we go to the excruciating trouble to write a review for ourselves?
Is anyone out there to take us in? To take us on? To argue, accuse, anguish, admonish, affirm, or agree? Once poetry reviews have been printed, they seem to float off into the void, along with the books discussed in them. Our silent dialogue with others remains, for the most part, mute. Much of the time, I simply have to assume you are out there, somewhere, wanting to know what I think—not so much because you’ll rush right out to buy the book but because you’ll be sharpening your own ideas on the whetstone of my assessment. Because you, too, feel the need for some meaningful dialogue about an art that is otherwise next to invisible—even when April rolls around (If you’re reading this, you’ll almost certainly know what that means.)
I’ve been comparatively lucky. Twice a year for eighteen years, I’ve found myself up to my knees in books of poetry, sorting and sifting, shuffling and shifting, finding a pattern, an order in which I can allow my thoughts to progress. That is, I’ve really been somewhat desperately trying to fit my thoughts to the preordained template (flexible as it may be) of the omnibus review. Which books lend themselves to a more general discussion? Which books speak to each other in interesting ways? Which poets allow me to reinforce a point, or discover a trend, or develop an idea? In short, which books “work” with this form of review?
There are some distinct advantages to reviewing several books in a long essay. For one thing, there is space enough, and time. For another, once I’ve discovered (or contrived) my “umbrella,” once I’ve found the thread that will carry me through a discussion of four, or five, or six books, I’ve also provided myself with a presiding metaphor or an encompassing turn of mind—a touchstone that will help to keep me centered. The reader, in turn, can follow the thrust of my argument, knowing what to chalk up to my opinion or observation, what comes more definitely from the writer in question. This is, perhaps, the major strength of the essay-review: readers have the opportunity to follow a reviewer’s mind as it delves into the work of several writers, and thus are given time to react and to respond by bringing their own knowledge to the page. They can assess my assessments, can decide more or less for themselves where their own tastes lie on some poetic continuum, can stake out their own position on that line.
A secondary strength of the omnibus review is the way it almost forces the reviewer to think about larger issues and, coincidentally, to make somewhat risky pronouncements about the art itself. I am forced out onto my shaky individual limb to see just how much lofty weight it will bear.
But the omnibus is also a hungry beast. It can eat away at the reviewer until she doles out opinions merely to serve its cause. The omnibus forces us to limit its fare if we are to keep its appetite in check. We write what the creature can stomach, and this sometimes means we leave out books or particular parts of books that don’t fit its needs. We often omit the untidy, the oddball, the unmistakably different—which have to fight so hard for room under the umbrella that we’d rather leave them standing in the rain.
Worse, the omnibus can swallow books of poetry whole. They get lost in its vast intestines. Whatever once was unique or unusual can get smoothed over, tamped down, trampled even, by the forced proximity, by the necessity to address one book’s essence in terms more suited to another’s.
I was never more aware of that ravenous animal than when I began reading for this review. Several of the books that gave me real pleasure did not have much in the way of connective tissue among them. I found books I liked and ones I actively disliked—by poets with whose work I was familiar and poets whose work I don’t remember ever seeing before. Okay: something old, something new, something borrowed . . . you can see where this was leading. Maybe I could manage “borrowed,” but what would I do with “blue,” short of feeling depressed by the books I found troubling?
I tried again. Girl Scout camp, with our young voices rising around the campfire: “Make new friends / but keep the old. / One is silver, / the other gold.” Instantly, the inherent nagging questions arose: Does this imply that gold is better than silver, or more lasting? What if there’s been a falling-out, into irreconcilable differences? Well, you can see that this notion was also leading me into a misery of my own making.
I could look for thematic connections. Or similar (or differing) techniques. I could try to worry some theoretical point, argue the postmodernism or romanticism or whatever-ism of the ways the poets fit themselves untidily into the tradition. I could spend all my time trying to feed the beast . . . but maybe I would find it easier, for once, to starve him. Easier to grant myself license and leave the books to their own devices.
At first, I wondered why I had never encountered Michael O’Brien’s work before, since the biographical note inside Sleeping and Waking shows it to be his thirteenth collection. However, no acknowledgment of magazine publication appears in the book, so I feel less guilty for having let him go unnoticed. At any rate, here he comes—this poet two years my senior—with a beautiful book, its cover evoking a dream state with a cloudlike swirl of muted colors from a painting entitled Slievemore, Curling Fog. Couple that with the author’s name and you might guess Ireland (and there are some poems about Ireland), but this poet is New York City all the way, even if he was born upstate near the Vermont border. He’s clearly grown so used to the city—its sounds and sights—that the rural here takes on a precision achievable only when something is not taken for granted.
Sleeping and Waking opens with a prose poem that obliquely describes the poet’s working method. In it, there’s
a man sitting in his room writing everything down that comes into his head. Images and sentences. A kind of parade. That ends at the cemetery. . . . The commands surprising in the spring air, as much a part of the rifles as their bolts. . . . Members of the band leaning on their elbows in the grass, among their instruments. And then changing it. What he’s written down. The man in the room. So that what happens is the changes.
The rest of the book is made up of short poems—images and sentences—inspired by and reminiscent of haiku. They create the feel of an artist’s notebook: a catchall of observations painted with the quick brush strokes of a Japanese calligrapher. Individual poems build by means of juxtaposed sections, each generating its own fleeting sense. The poems accrue, one brush stroke added to another, until there’s a suggestion of a whole. Their compression allows the insight (and therefore the sense of the poem as an entity) to take place quietly within the reader. The book itself accrues in much the same way so that what seems, on the surface, to be a series of quick impressions addresses important questions after all: our relationship to other people, our relationship to the earth, what we make of our individual lives. The sketches may be pastoral, but the sense of isolation (and connection) is the product of an urban landscape where “you stop on the sidewalk and the / river of people divides around you, flows on, and you / move and are one with it.”
The city—its characters and its character—informs these poems, bubbles and boils under their surfaces, tossing up its variations at every corner: “radio voices from the apartment below”; “little wake in the elevator”; “Pshaw! says the huge truck, braking”; “sudden crazy song & dance of the man on 23rd”; “helpless, half-suppressed / smile of the / girl in the / Bleecker Street subway”; “cellphone’s blue TV glare”; “bike messengers / flickering like glowworms.” In contrast, the countryside serves as a canvas waiting for O’Brien’s eye to activate it, as in “Upstate”:
Stirred by the
least wind the
wintry, carrot-
colored willow.
*
A pickup
full of snow,
a crow’s rau-
cous laugh, the
rapids comb-
ing its hair.
We see the willow branches quiver, as though to emphasize the stillness. Fluid orange against white, though snow is only implied in the hush of wintry ws. In the next section, it’s there, filling the pickup the way the crow’s call fills the air, drowning out the sound of the rapids until they are not heard, but seen. Each element is given equal weight, words themselves are broken into sound, a tumble of rs rippling through the long os, until we are pulled physically into the poem’s center, shivering a little and stamping our feet for circulation. O’Brien does not merely pay homage to the Zen poets; by simply observing in order to elucidate, through letting what is stand for what is, he calls the physical world to our attention, or our attention to the physical world—it’s hard to tell which.
I must admit I’ve never been a big fan of the poem that simply observes. I like a bit of mind brought to bear on the moment. But there’s a kind of wit to what O’Brien sees, or at least to the way he sees it. His quick juxtapositions, as in the “rosary / drone of a rapper,” activate the poem so that its “moment” of connection or epiphany is either shared by poet and reader simultaneously, or at times happens only inside the reader. His adjectives are at once corroborative and generative, but the real life resides in the verbs. There are many nuggets of precision—too many to quote—but here’s a sample sequence of brief imagistic strokes from the middle of “Another Autumn”:
a day gradually effacing itself, perfecting its absence
larval suns, asleep, the handspan of nothing between ribs
& pelvis
flaking newsprint, rust’s slow fire, a photo yellowing like
seersucker
stipple of rain on pond, talking to itself, the day’s vacant places
coins of the leaves spangle the lawn, a jet tears off a piece of
the sky
Image and metaphor are not the only weapons in O’Brien’s poetic arsenal; he uses sound so deftly that we almost overlook it. In its entirety, “Hush” demonstrates his subtle internal and end rhymes, a complex of silence and sound that adds a subliminal effect to the way the poem works its magic:
black cat darting
into roadside grass,
a passing
car’s shadow
*
tiny spider in the
teaspoon, no, the
huge chandelier
reflected there
The sounds rotate until car darts, cat passes, and the tiny and the huge shape-shift in the spoon. One thing becomes another, and shadow and roadside occupy the same space. The tiny and the huge invert in the shallow silver bowl, much as the final two letters of spoon reverse: the tongue stopped briefly between one n and the next, then voicing the “no” that suspends the action. The poem holds its breath as the commas orchestrate its hush and change its course, repealing what we’ve already seen until we see again, more clearly.
Although Michael O’Brien establishes his desire to examine the blurred edges of consciousness—the sleeping and waking of his book’s title—to my mind his more deliberately surreal poems are the least interesting. I prefer the startling moments of recognition when he has found just the right word or sound to give my ordinary waking days the exhilaration of acute perception.
Here’s a vital new voice on the poetic scene—Meghan O’Rourke. Her voice has been heard in its critical mode in the New York Times Book Review, but in Halflife she emerges from that chrysalis like the moth of her opening poem, trying to “rise to something quite surprising in the distance.” Her surprise is the eye-opening inventiveness of combinatorial ingenuity. At times, O’Rourke’s next-to-invisible transitions—acting almost like random sense-generators—infuse the poems with the urgency of lived emotion. At others, urgency is generated by the syntax. “Sleep,” for example, portrays the insomniac’s frenzied state, culminating in verbal meltdown:
In the bedroom the moon is a dented spoon,
cold, getting colder, so hurry sleep,
come creep into bed, let’s get it over with;
lay me down and close my eyes
and tell me whip, tell me winnow,
tell me sweet tell me skittish
tell me No tell me no such thing
tell me straw into gold tell me crept into fire
tell me lost all my money tell me hoarded, verboten,
but promise tomorrow I will be profligate,
stepping into the sun like a trophy.
What distinguishes this from the current “cutting edge” wordplay is the way it wakes the reader to the poem’s underlying exigencies. O’Rourke generates lots of energy in this fashion, and the poems of Halflife have the passion I associate with first books, along with the restraint that comes from poetic maturity. Their alacrity seems simultaneously to launch and anchor the poems.
“Half-life” is experienced here in a number of guises: persona poems borrow the identities of others, at times adopting the circumstances and sensibilities of historical figures, at times allowing the poet to imagine herself as she might appear to others. These partial lives, dividing and then dividing again, give off bursts of radioactivity as they disappear into the realms of the imagined. One section even delves into the biological phenomenon of the “vanishing twin syndrome,” allowing the living child to speak with the sister reabsorbed in the womb.
Perhaps the most memorable of these half-lives appears in the third section of “Still Life Amongst Partial Outlines,” in which the poet, while reading an old newspaper, discovers another Meghan O’Rourke—a twelve-year-old girl who, somewhere in Vermont, was repeatedly raped and tortured: “a story that could not be forgotten or owned, / like looking in a mirror and discovering someone else’s face.” In the eighth section of this sequence, the poet imagines a similar scene from the boys’ perspective as they encounter the girl “on the back path from the fields” along Route 4. At that moment, as the title of the entire sequence reminds us, there is “still life”—until a quick cut to the impersonal voice of the narrator serves as transition:
One takes out a knife and one takes out a rope.
It is a tired old truth, that death comes to each
the same, to each alone—
a solitary, singular act,
like laying out a tablecloth to eat in solitude—
and all this a few miles from where we pass
All of a sudden the speaker is again implicated as her own experience overlaps the “story” there “by the culvert / and the river splitting into creeks / like a hand spread over the land.”
The eight-part sequence entitled “Two Sisters” alternates the voices of twinned sensibilities intimately conscious of each other, nearly interchangeable, so that each has somehow been born into a state of awareness she longs to share with the other. Who is to say, the poems ask, that there is a distinct border between the living and the dead?
In the collection’s title poem, the blue TV light in the window seems destined never to go out even as the bodies in the hospitals wink off, so that light itself becomes the focus—the “sodium streets” and the “trees loaded with radium, / colors like guns, // red pock-pock red and the sea yellow up, / yellow down—/ the blue hour, the waiting.” Over and over, O’Rourke conjures light, as though she might refine it, as though the poems have a spectrum of their own and emotion is ascribed by color. “The light of the mind is red,” one poem begins, and “all that is green must turn to red,” says another.
One of the interesting features of Halflife is the recurrence of image or occasion, so that the same scene is experienced in more than one way and under more than one circumstance. The similarities force the reader to recognize the overlap as part of a larger tapestry. A good example is the final, encapsulating “Knives of Light,” in which O’Rourke looks out and back to look in:
I.
In his studio, on a canvas stretched and primed,
Bonnard kept bits of silver paper
to catch light: so he could work
in the poorest-lit hotel or friend’s home.
Mes brillants, he called the bits.
He rose, moved to the window, looked out
into the yellow crescent of lamplight, surprised
by what he’d made. Outside, the leaves turned from leaves.
II.
In the variable light of my room
I stand and in the wind the curtains stir.
And in the room I see.
The mind is a stony landscape, which replaces
need with rock, fact with fact,
but does not flourish beyond itself:
is how it always was, bare, wide, cracked,
capable of knowing small, neat things.
Halflife may be built on small, neat things, but its overall effect is that of Bonnard’s paintings: light shed on those things in order to create a whole new world. This is a stellar first collection—filled with the vim and vigor of an active mind. Meghan O’Rourke’s verbs are sometimes a bit hyperactive (“flags breeze over tarmac”) and her wordplay can occasionally be overly clever (“the wood beneath the green, embarking skin”), but on the whole, the world she creates crackles with a radioactivity of its own.
I’ve often liked Robert Hass’s work and have reviewed it favorably in the past, but Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005, a National Book Award winner, has the tired feel of something the poet has written just to keep up with himself. The poems seem manufactured, ground out with an attempt to prove that poetry matters, and I find them a bit precious. The life described—the one that takes place on streets in France or Italy, the one where the speaker slices nectarines for Moroccan salad, the one where his parents are judged to be crudely materialistic—somehow leaves me cold.
I feel colder still about any need to “listen” to Hass’s politics, as though the world should be waiting with bated breath to hear how he thinks we should handle or should have handled foreign affairs. But shouldn’t poets have opinions? Yes, of course. Still, the poets Hass quotes—Whitman and Miłosz—cared so deeply that even their laments held visions for their country. Hass acts as though the criticism itself were the vision. It’s not.
The poems in Time and Materials rarely enlist my participation, but instead remain solely the property of the writer. In doing so, they preach and posture. For example, “I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri” recounts, via Dostoyevsky and John Ashbery, an immigrant family’s long, convoluted history of war, but nowhere does it question its own assumed equivalencies. Short of William Stafford’s unadulterated pacifism, all wars are not the same. Hass, via Ashbery, smugly elects to keep his protagonist safely in the poem because “you could get killed out there,” and I wonder which real soldier he thinks he’s saving as he plays this game of words. And “Bush’s War” contains this polemical (and prosy) statement:
The rest of us have to act like we believe
The dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the raw white of the exposed bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of the injured us.
Yet this poem does not mention the bones recently exposed in al Qaeda’s mass graves and torture chambers, or—given that its setting is springtime in by now well-postwar Germany—consider that the gift of freedom does sometimes involve the loss of innocent lives. When “‘Bush’s War’“ belongs to someone else (as it or some other war almost certainly will), there will still be complex problems to solve, and we will need thoughtful, informed statesmen—not poets—to solve them.
Nevertheless, there are clearly some interesting poems in Time and Materials, including several short lyrics that struggle with “the problem of describing,” and several that seem to have solved the problem with their lyrical sheen. In addition, Hass achieves an interesting dynamic when he renders dialogue, often between lovers. For the most part, though, the poems do not so much contain passion as recount it. There’s a clinical edge as Hass undresses his subjects, so to speak. They talk—and act—in a kind of world-weary, overly intellectualized fashion, as though by breaking their relationships into component parts they might piece together some meaning in their lives. To give Hass credit, he knows this: he orchestrates his characters’ malaise. But somehow he gets caught up in his own inventions so that the speakers most closely resembling the poet himself step over the line and join his jaded chorus. Too many of these poems sermonize with a kind of self-important rumination: “What is to be done with our species? Because / We know we’re going to die, to be submitted / To that tingling dance of atoms once again, / It’s easy for us to feel that our lives are a dream—” Too many drift into lineated prose while resisting the prose poem they aspire to, as in this stanza from “Consciousness”:
Dean had read a book that said that consciousness was like a
knock-knock joke, some notion of an answering call having
brought it into being which was, finally, itself anticipating
an answer from itself, echo of an echo of an echo.
Many other poems here, including “Breach and Orison,” try for a self-conscious playfulness that, at its best, allows the reader to watch connections unfold:
The answer was
the sound of water, what
what, what, the sprinkler
said, the question
of resilvering the mirror
or smashing it
once and for all the
tea in China-
town getting out of this film
noir intact or—damaged
as may be—with tact
was not self-evident
(they fired the rewrite man).
At its worst, however, Hass’s play results in the pointless reiteration of what has already been done, and undone, as in these lines from “Time and Materials”:
The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress of everything that exists
And their disposition on the page.
The object of his poe is tepro a theft
Well, you get the idea. It goes on, and we never will know whether, in the last line quoted here, there was or wasn’t a typo.
Am I too harsh in focusing on the negative here? I do so because Hass appears to have succumbed to the pressures any former poet laureate must feel to remain . . . well, a functioning, public poet. And this brings me to another question: Is it possible we were better off when our poets consulted rather than “laureated,” when they were less black-tie and more blue-collar, so to speak? But that would be the subject of another treatise, so I’ll bow out here by saying that Robert Hass, with his confident assertiveness, might do well to drive the two-lane back road between Austin and San Antonio. Route 165 winds through hilly ranch country and, at the bottom of every dip, a white pole at the side of the road, a flood gauge, marks the water level—one, two, three, four, five feet—so that drivers won’t head into what looks like merely a shallow puddle.
One needs some courage to call a book Failure, but Philip Schultz willingly takes the gamble with his fifth full-length collection, the third in quick succession after a relatively long hiatus. This work examines failure in order to come to terms not only with the past but also with the future. In other words, it puts failure in its place, and that place (situated somewhere between past and future) turns out to be remarkably instructive. The father in these poems—he died penniless, a failure—seems finally to be, if not quite understood, at least appreciated, as in the title poem that recounts his funeral:
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
In Schultz’s hands, this father is unforgettable in his unrelenting capacity for work, for skepticism, and for, somehow, failing to thrive. The rabbi at the funeral fails to show compassion or to understand “that not / believing in or belonging to / anything demanded a kind / of faith and buoyancy.” The man’s brother fails to honor his spirit; the son “left town / but failed to get away,” and the poems are the result of that further failure. Ardently rebellious, angrily driven, larger than life, the father figure haunts this collection even though many of the poems veer away from Schultz’s characteristic autobiographical examination of his past. Failure itself now haunts the poems, as Schultz tries to make sense of a life in present tense—a life that contains wife and sons, dreams and dogs, a future lit with guarded optimism. On the serious side, he probes his wife’s younger brother’s overdose as, from love’s vast distance, he watches the lineaments of her grief. On the lighter side, Isaak Babel appears in a dream, fresh from his failure to escape Stalin. As the author interrogates him, Babel reveals a distinctive, pessimistic Jewish humor—“‘In a pogrom everyone’s a failure. / Our enemies are where our truth is hidden.’”—and then goes on, pickled in irony, to talk about their “big lopsided family” of “relative clauses / who agree on nothing.”
Places and people who have failed to stick around come back to the pages of this book, stepping into the poems at will, making themselves at home again: David Ignatow, Leonard Michaels, Yehuda Amichai, a beloved dog, the San Francisco of the past, the old neighborhood in Greenwich Village, the Schwartz boys of memory—all congregate between these covers, preferring the poet’s (and our) company to their own.
The first half of Failure is orchestrated with such care that one poem flows seamlessly into the next, deepening and expanding the ideas as they speak directly to each other. The stakes build, from “Dance Performance,” with its central knowledge that the poet (as father) must step aside for his (as yet) young sons; to “The Traffic,” with its oddly humorous sense that we who make it are expendable in our purposelessness; to “The Truth,” with its candid mirror. “The Truth” deserves and demands its own space:
You can hide it like a signature
or birthmark but it’s always there
in the greasy light of your dreams,
the knots your body makes at night,
the sad innuendos of your eyes,
whispering insidious asides in every
room you cannot remain inside. It’s
there in the unquiet ideas that drag and
plead one lonely argument at a time,
and those who own a little are contrite
and fearful of those who own too much,
but owning none takes up your life.
It cannot be replaced with a house or car,
a husband or wife, but can be ignored,
denied, and betrayed, until the last day,
when you pass yourself on the street
and recognize the agreeable life you
were afraid to lead, and turn away.
From that point we are taken to “The One Truth,” which recapitulates his father’s life, and then relentlessly on to “Failure,” with its funereal revelations. These steps are logical and devastatingly honest, and the reader senses there is nowhere else to go. The study is complete.
Or is it? The second half of the book is a monumental fifty-five-page poem, in four parts and fifty-eight sections, entitled “The Wandering Wingless.” Spoken in the voice of a mildly psychotic dog walker who wanders the streets of New York, the poem reproduces the material of the first half from another perspective. This speaker’s life bears some small resemblance to the life recounted in the earlier poems, and the speaker’s father bears an even greater resemblance to the father we’ve come to know, but everything is skewed, taking on an aura of madness. The whole story is backlit by 9/11, the day the speaker was given electroshock treatment at St. Vincent’s hospital in the Village, then sent back out on the streets because of the sudden expected need for extra beds. The emergency is citywide; the public psyche, irreparably altered by threat and destruction, fuses with that of the speaker. As he wanders the streets, remembering his first dog, remembering what drove him far from family, recounting the social structure of the dog run where he daily takes his charges, and recalling the one day the city filled with smoke and ash and blighted, wingless souls, he drifts in memory and among the issues of class, race, and faith. Ultimately, he asks: “Was this what failure was—endless fear?”
“The Wandering Wingless” is not quite the major poem its parameters would imply, but that’s mostly because the fictive protagonist, while he stands in for us (and we might, any of us, become him), fails somehow to include us. Maybe he’s too well wrought, too much himself; maybe he’s too much a cipher for the country’s ills. Still, the lonely, stripped voice of the second half of Failure informs the earlier poems so that one can almost imagine shutting the book and allowing both halves to bleed into each other. The poet’s life—his family, his city, his past—could easily have been any of those lost lives, peering out from the cracked mirror of his perceptions. The reader comes to understand that the seemingly straightforward poems of the first half arise from/are part of a shattered vision, and that the great good humor and optimism expressed in the first several pages are hard won—a vision of success that can only be realized through a failure of equal proportion. Philip Schultz has shown us what we have to lose, and he has given us the compassionate language by which to save it.
Old Heart. Old friend, I think, as I slide easily into Stanley Plumly’s rhythms, the familiar clothes of his voice—and his stance. The past resurrected. His past. My past. My past reading of his past. How he fuses time, calls up the past-in-the-present at every turn, each bird song simultaneously trilled in a then and a now, each moment held and weighed while the lens of history illuminates it from within.
Plumly’s very method is combinatorial: one event sheds light on another until, finally, they are fused past separation. The parable of the Prodigal Son is read against (and through and within) the story of King Lear. Ted Hughes’s accomplishment is weighed (and measured) alongside those of Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell, whose selection of Plumly’s first book for the Delmore Schwartz prize seemed (in some uneasy back part of the brain) to consign Plumly himself to a similar early death. That’s remembered because a renewed sense of mortality dominates this book, from its title onward. Everything mortal fades to something else, and Plumly’s own “silent” heart attack merges with his father’s louder one. Poetry itself is read against its long past with a preservative fervor.
The old poets haunt these pages, sometimes quoted, sometimes simply as informing spirits; in “Debt,” Pound, Stevens, and Eliot become the “three or four dour men” standing around as a young father struggles to save his farm, his son peering through the window as they circle the land, measuring, measuring; and Keats is there, hovering in the peripheral vision of all the poems, his life held up over and over so that he is the impetus behind what might be the most eloquent piece of literary criticism I’ve ever read—“Nostalgia.” In forty lines (five eight-line stanzas), Plumly moves from identifying a tiger swallowtail circling near a dead wren to Pound’s dictum, “The natural object is always the adequate symbol,” and then on to contemplate how the “natural object” works within a poem. Along the way, he recounts the criticism of Robert Scholes and recapitulates the dismantling of the New Critics, and then goes on to mention what’s “worse”—“post-structural, post- / lyrical, post-Derrida and -Barthes, post-Paul / de Man, the Nazi, post-reading of the text”—in order to remember Cleanth Brooks, half-blind, reading with a magnifying glass. Plumly is sure in his knowledge that Brooks “would certainly / have seen the bird grounded on one wing / before the butterfly; truth, then beauty,” and Plumly’s musical orchestration of the names that would deconstruct his own poetic world puts them neatly in their place. We may be nostalgic to remember when poetry—the best words in the best order—mattered, but by artful use of hyphen and line break, Plumly makes it matter all over again.
Old Heart pays homage to the old poets in a number of other ways. The book is filled with variations on the sonnet. Almost as a contrast, “Meander” stretches its long lines, turning them like a river, actively demonstrating metaphor as it moves to where poem and body are one: “my heart, my spine, my cloud, the X-rays coldly spiritual, the / invisible made visible.” Many of the poems are pastoral, including one called “Pastoral,” which goes against the grain of expectation. In order to really see, in order to find the adequate symbol, in order to look at the whole (as one does with a painting by first seeing a detail, as one sights “a bird within its song”), Plumly defines his own poetics:
sometimes, for kinds of beauty, you forgive
the beautiful, the photographic fragment,
the small and separate moment,
even a summer’s sunset in a field,
your rough hand running the tops of thistle
and wild wheat, domed clusters,
and complexities of leaves,
the umbels, whorls, bracts, and involucres.
There’s a physical presence in his knowledge, a rough hand that has, in fact, run over the grasses of his childhood. And “Childhood” is experienced as one of those umbels: as a palpable, physical entity that nothing can stop or keep out. It’s as ubiquitous as the snow “drifting from one side of the road to the other,” worked by the wind, or passing “like the light over your face” at the window, or filling the white oaks that will, in summer, hold the birds that will eventually disappear. The whole of a lifetime is encapsulated in the child’s knowledge of seasons, culminating in a mature man’s declaration of being—perhaps the very opposite of an ars poetica, more a statement of fact. Or an epitaph.
The body
piecemeal wastes away, the something soul
slips from the mouth, muse and sacred memory
shuts its eyes. I died, I climbed a tree, I sang.
The seamless flow of focus allows Plumly to slip from one time to another, one realm of consciousness to another. But this alone would not make Old Heart stand out as different from his other books, and, indeed, in many ways it is an extension of a lifelong proclamation of what it is to occupy a singular body, to sing an individual praise. But in some ways this volume has a tougher edge. It wants to say as well as evoke, yet it wants that “saying” in the form of poetry, not polemics. “Against Narrative,” for example, recounts Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps to show us how to read meanings through image, against time, within history, by means of what goes unsaid, undone.
Hitchcockian, then, is Plumly’s treatment of 9/11. “‘The Morning America Changed’“ recounts the poet’s actual experience of the event: the Italian Alps, the lake deep and blue, the white boats shining at midafternoon, a day so perfect that even the voice breaking into it sounds like rain in the distance, and then—in only two lines—“on the tiny screen inside / pillars of fire pouring darkly into clouds.” From its title forward, the poem announces the event as belonging to others, seen from a distance, and yet that very distance leads to an understanding about the deep nature of tragedy. Plumly’s very exclusion from the event, and his subsequent refusal to appropriate, to let it be anything but the “natural object” itself, is the point—and I find this poem far more moving than any of the myriad others I’ve read on this subject.
“ ‘The Morning America Changed’ “ is followed by my favorite poem in the collection, “Long Companions.” Spoken in the first-person plural, it recounts the historical framework of those born in 1939—a litany of wars that has defined their generation. The “we” begins to build a collective experience and sensibility, and yet the plural remains peculiarly private; “our” uncles are the poet’s uncles. The communal narrative is personal in such a way that “Love our friends / anew, watch them disappear, one by one” has the feel of specific loss, a mortality brought close to home. Then the poem, even as it opens out companionably to include the general, narrows to the one defining moment before it prophesies an acknowledged future:
Watch the face of the deep darken
and roll in. Watch the tallest window
buildings break and fall. The heart bobs
and breaks. There is fire in the mirror,
a ghost peripheral profile at the eye.
Time passes, light pours, in themselves
a happiness.
The politics here is set against the backdrop of history, and that history is itself seen as only a fragment of a longer line of cause and effect, effect and cause. Mortality is the common denominator throughout this book, and the very fact of death seems to clarify its subjects: Lyndon Johnson; Kafka; Lear; Jan Palach (who committed suicide by self-immolation in protest of the Communist occupation of Czechoslovakia); the poet’s father, whose hard death is enacted again and again; his mother, who wastes down to a whistle of will. “We” are caught in mortality’s egalitarian eye, and we see everything through its lens, stepping at will into the past, stepping out into time the way the Prague of “Elevens” easily “transforms backwards” in snow, the way the lake remembers the glacier that formed it, the way the man in London is the child in Ohio, the way the whole life is lit on the screen as the heart beats and beats under medicine’s scrutiny and the temple of the body is filled with the remembered response to looking up, in the Duomo, when “the terror of / a bird took all the heart out of the air.”
Did I fail to mention the birds? They are everywhere—from the hectoring crow and the quarrelsome jays to the nearly invisible songbirds that perch in the branches throughout these poems. Birds appear as spirits (the tissue-thin poems of a dead friend found between the pages of his books) and as metaphor (the sky a “starved black wing”). They chatter and clamor to be heard, or they are quieted, as in “Audubon Aviary,” to “stillborn animation.” To see something alive “is to almost miss the moment / and have to bring it back / diminished as a memory.” Yet Plumly tries for far more than diminishment as he activates memory—not to reconstruct, but to provide texture and intuition. In saying of Audubon that his “silences, / his dark articulate stillnesses / are what we have against what / we’ll remember,” Stanley Plumly sets for himself his own poetic aspiration. In the end, Old Heart serves as a cardinal point on the compass of my reading; it contains the lifeblood of song as it defends the crucial endeavor to give each (re)collected moment its living, breathing name.