Welcome to the final installment of “Poets Recommend,” The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature since 2008. Currently undergoing redesign, The Seawall will evolve into a magazine with regularly posted reviews of poetry and other genres. This season, nine poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles. Scroll down to read. The commentary includes:
Lisa Russ Spaar
on Soft Volcano by Libby Burton (Saturnalia Books)
Philip Metres
on Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions)
Camille T. Dungy
on Registers of Illuminated Villages by Tarfia Faizullah (Graywolf Press)
Patrick Pritchett
on Memory Cards: Simone Weil Series by Susan M. Schultz (Equipage Press)
Joyce Peseroff
on The Amoeba Game by Tara Skurtu (Eyewear Publishing)
Tyler Mills
on Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press)
Victoria Chang
on Trophic Cascade by Camille Dungy (Wesleyan University Press) and I Know Your Kind by William Brewer (Milkweed Editions)
David Blair
on Where Now: New and Selected Poems by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon)
David Roderick
on Appalachians Run Amok by Adrian Blevins (Two Sylvias Press)
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Lisa Russ Spaar
Soft Volcano by Libby Burton (Saturnalia Books)
The arrestingly erotic title and yonic cover image of Libby Burton’s scarily whip-smart and beguiling first book of poems, chosen by Ross Gay as winner of this year’s Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, begs the reader to consider the particular hold volcanoes have over poets. Anne Carson calls them “dead easy to paint,” and a passage from Wallace Stevens’s precariously elegiac “A Postcard from the Volcano” serves as an epigraph for Burton’s inaugural collection. In particular, it’s impossible not to consider Burton’s poetic tableaux — which are, by turns, eerily domestic and feral, tough and vulnerable — in relation to Emily Dickinson’s “Volcano – Life” (Dickinson uses the word “volcano” in at least six poems, and evokes their terrible power in many other poems and letters through references to Vesuvius, Etna, and Pompeii). In “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” Adrienne Rich writes of her “volcanic propensities” that “it is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment — that explodes in poetry.”
What is under pressure in Soft Volcano is the subjective life of its female speakers — girls, adolescents, sisters, mothers, daughters, lovers — in all of their personal, familial, sexual, cultural, mythic, and historical dimensions and guises. Though unflinching about everything from parental aging (“I am older / on account of Sunday morning and [my father’s] hairless legs. // Time puts a little scorch on the body, / the marks of which are dark masts sailing on the ocean / of the long, slow unfolding of a small terrible” from “Post-immaculate”) to the postures of dating (“I could pursue a degree in the erotics of his knee peeking hungrily from frays. / Tee-shirt soft as ice cream. / As soon as I learned it, I forget his egregious middle name” from “Getting to Know You”), the pressure is tender — tender in the sense of hurting or bruising (or of being hurt or bruised), but also as in a capacity for surrendering: to self-forgiveness, to the powers we house, to the life we’re shown.
Volcanic unease and pent force are undeniable in Burton’s poems, but that fact does not keep their speakers from a generous articulation of culpability and susceptibility, as in the title poem:
SOFT VOLCANO
Thickly modern, that old sun rises like a cat certain of its own verisimilitude.
We have done little harms to each other,
and we shared soup when the moment was right.
Remember the nights we animalled until full dawn,
got vicious and chomped the starlight,
the gashed darkness spread like sick around this place.
I still stop dead for the marvelous mouth of you,
even if our skins droop and waver,
cleft and lift at inopportune times.
Now the scent of baby heads, of mother mouths and dishes.
Good morning, little headache of this life I inadvertently chose.
I wish to make a ravishing of you.
Let’s stomp around without apology, surrender again today.
The way Burton achieves, in any one poem, what feels like a gestalt of female su/objectivity is, at least in part, through an uncanny and agile roving among tenses, hierarchies, tones, and rhetorical modes (imperative, interrogative, exclamatory) with dark wit (“Read the classics / and do not forget / to brush your teeth / because the details will become unbearable” in “Hagiography”) and a gift for image-making that marries somatic surrealism with abstraction in a cunningly synesthetic way: “Under the covers, discover a pile of hurts, / socks, and the shakes // But for now, darkness is a shirt” and “the pistol of your lips is not something I fear. // Though my broke throat yells guttural: // this is the most penultimate I have appeared in years” from “Catastrophe,” for example, or “The heads of bourbon roses float in a crystal bowl / inside a city, where you are both mayor / and black silk-stocking caught in a tree” in “Irrefutable Evidence.”
Another example: “If it is raining the swans gather beneath the bridge, dirty loaves in dark water. / Winter is raging in the garden, while this new world tastes of something menstrual / and cool,“ from “Sisters.” And Burton’s also got a knack, like Stevens, for titling: “Sheriff Teeth,” “The Sheets and Sun Are Soft and Good But This Isn’t Food Enough,” “Dreaming the Places My Father’s Tongue Has Been in Summer,” “Everybody’s Knife Bible,” and “Your Mother: Franz Kafka. My Father: A Hole Ripped in the Night.”
I don’t know of any poet writing the phantasmagoria of one woman’s reality in quite this way. The extremely conditional, vexed and “narrow hope” evinced in lines like these from “Elizabeth” …
. . . I believe beauty is in the long want, the hot chase,
in under-lit parking lots, small disappointments
stacked up like coins. Beauty is in that old ingenious song of the heart.
Little fang of light over Paterson: I am pinning a lot on you,
What sustains with the particular tincture of inner thigh, in flex and hair.
I am certain someday the craved world will be the one I am living in.
… offer a fresh reinvention of the lyric poem — sentient, uneasy, volatile, aroused — and seek a kind of beautiful grotesque in which the reader is invited, through Burton’s vision, to believe, as well.
[Published March 15, 2018. 80 pages. $16.00]
Lisa Russ Spaar’s most recent poetry collection is Orexia (Persea, 2017), reviewed here On The Seawall.
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Philip Metres
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions)
In his recent essay, “Say It: I’m Arab and Beautiful,” Fady Joudah begins with an excoriation of the racism of American literary culture:
“Dear editor: Do you ever consider what it’s like for an Arab American to wake up within his or her own American life and feel assaulted almost daily, for decades? Do you ever think how painful it is for so many like me to know that I live in a country — my country — which sees me only when I’m dead or dying, through the Arab body that is directly and indirectly decimated as consequence of our American wars? … Necropolitics wouldn’t be your default mode. You would seek to publish and review, unapologetically, unflinchingly, and lovingly the works of Arabs as beauty, not as product of wars and death. This is the task ahead: The Arab is beautiful. Repeat it to yourself.”
Joudah’s piece vibrates with the pain of the Arab American community, which somatizes the daily racism of the United States both here and abroad, either as demonization or as liberal pity of the Arab as victim. However, the essay is more than a cri de Coeur; it’s an attempt to open a new chapter in our collective thinking about the Arab, to rewire our response to the Arab. While some have noted that Joudah’s language echoes, without attribution, two key phrases from black liberation (“black is beautiful” and “say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud”), it also connects to an idea threaded through Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, whom Joudah has translated: “We Palestinians suffer from an incurable disease called ‘hope’… Hope that our poets will see the beauty of the colour red in roses, rather than in blood. Hope that this land will recover its original name: ‘land of hope and peace.’”
I quote Joudah’s piece because, in a precise way, it anticipates the work of his fourth collection of poems, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, which holds its attention on the beautiful rather than on the benighted political contexts that bedevil Arab life. Though we cannot, in the end, segregate the political context from our reading of Joudah’s poetry (or indeed, of any poet’s), we can foreground the magic of the language. Take, for example, some stanzas of the lovely and sensuous first poem, “The Magic of Apricot”:
The magic of apricot
when the scent is flesh and descent is one bite
and you’re a Moor speaking Chinese
In what is an ode, notice, first, the lovely use of assonance in the opening lines. The refrain, “the magic of apricot,” actually opens the mouth with that short “a” sound, as if we’re about to bite the fruit. The next line, with its “scent” and “flesh” and “descent” all chime together, and the line following, “you’re” and “Moor” and “speaking Chinese.” It’s a beautiful mouthful, as well as a secret history of the apricot, with its origins in the East and moving westward, two threads in Joudah’s weave.
Or, later, showing a third thread that runs through Joudah’s work, his scientific mind, likely the influence of his work in medicine: “What Lazarus looks like in the brain / or what the brain looks like on Lazarus.” Indeed, an apricot does look rather brainlike, when its skin runnels into folds when dried or near the pit. I have no idea how Lazarus is connected, except it makes us wonder about resurrection from the dead, which circles back later, when Joudah writes: “The magic of apricot may well keep us alive / a little while longer than necessary.” What a lovely way to stake a claim for beauty’s abundance; how unnecessary it is, and yet, how life giving. I have no idea why the poem ends as it does — “we paid for the memory.” At times, Joudah lets music and language take him to places that mere paraphrase won’t allow; almost always, I’m willing to go with him to those places, even when perhaps he doesn’t know where he’s going. Isn’t that part of the liberationist futurism of poetry — not being stuck in the same old traumatic narratives?
But I’d be remiss if I domesticated this book by talking about it as a mere American chant of beauty. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I heard in “the magic of apricots” the ghost of the Arabic word for apricot (“mishmish”). Magic, mishmash. Joudah once remarked that he hoped, in his translations, to write in Arabish. The spirit of Arabic is in the language of these poems, but it would take a longer essay to tease out exactly how. I hear, for example, the zajal tradition in his collaborative poem sequence with Golan Hajji, at the center of the book, in which two poets declaim in back-and-forth improvisations.
Joudah’s title, with its playful pun, nonetheless suggests the urgency of recording memory by the marginalized, who constantly face their erasure from the present and past. It makes us wonder what precisely is being disappeared. On the one hand, there is the eternal “wreck of time” theme, but on the other, there is the predicament of Palestine, and the ongoing colonial erasure of Palestinians. Poems such as “Palestine, Texas,” “Tea and Sage,” “38, 7, 31, 4,” — all, not coincidentally, prose poems — directly broach the question of Palestine.
And yet, the book is so much more than that; it’s a book of curiosity, of probing, of experimentation, where a virtuosic poet finds himself in love with the sound of words, with the sensuous music our mouths can make.
[Published March 13, 2018. 104 pages, $16.00 paperback]
Philip Metres is the author of a number of books, including Sand Opera (poems, 2015), and the forthcoming The Sound of Listening: Poetry of Refuge and Resistance (essays, 2018).
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Camille T. Dungy
Registers of Illuminated Villages by Tarfia Faizullah (Graywolf Press)
Registers of Illuminated Villages has remapped my heart. I love this book. Its far-ranging empathies. Its attention to the whole wide world. When asked what book I’d recommend to Seawall readers, Tarfia Faizullah’s new collection immediately sprung to mind.
Here’s one thing about the collection that intrigues and inspires me: I thought it was going to be about places Americans often consider “far away,” and though the poems take us as far as Eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and Bangladesh, they also hit us right at home. It is in the poems about the accident that killed the poet/speaker’s seven-year-old sister that I truly begin to understand Faizullah’s magic. These poems, scattered throughout the book, keep me intimately connected to unending grief. In poems like “IV and Make-Up Homework,” “Before the Accident, and After,” “You Ask Why Write about it Again,” and “A Fable of the Firstborn,” we are introduced and reintroduced to the details of Faizullah’s tragic loss. “Great Material” begins:
There were the blue-tied garbage bags
bulging with her dresses. Then, the buzz
of junebugs on nights I sat on the roof alone
and asked where my sister was until I felt stupid
and stopped. What do you say to the dead? …
The poem goes on to describe the sister’s friends who continued to make space for her at their play table:
As though she
might stop by for a few bites of air
from empty plates with spoons empty
of her short seven years on this planet ….
it unbottles me, how precisely they lamented
her …
These are the sorts of detailed lamentations that illuminate the many griefs this book contains.
Thanks to the reference to junebugs in “Great Material,” about ten poems later in “Because There’s Still a Sky, Junebugs,” I live for a while with the misapprehension — or incomplete apprehension — that the poem will be centered on the poet’s personal situation. But here, as elsewhere in this collection, Faizullah widens my world view, reminding me of the collective intimacy of each human loss. About halfway through this poem, Faizullah shifts attention away from her own body to remind us that: “… Tonight, a drone / in Yemen detonates and rends the sky …” Toggling between a far-off disaster and the commonplace realities of her father’s garden here in America, Faizullah conflates the experiences of people around the world. The poem ends thus:
I look up,
because there is still a sky, the junebug
that whirs across it, because
there is still a head-scarfed girl
who sucks the sugar
from a ginger candy
before she explodes—I look up,
and the sky still flints with so many stars. Above me.
Above you.
The devastating suddenness of that explosion, which takes with it another young, sweet-loving life — such explosions are happening in the midst of the poet’s life, and in the midst of our lives as well. In Faizullah’s poems, such global eradications are continually rendered as devastated intimacies. Registers of Illuminated Villages refuses to allow its readers any distance. We are all passengers in the vehicle that will visit disaster upon us. And we would ignore this at our own peril.
At the center of this collection is a series called “Soliloquies from the Village of Orphans and Widows.” I admire Faizullah’s ability to inhabit the voices of the people of this Bangladeshi village. Her use of epigraphs throughout the collection provide, for the unfamiliar reader, the contexts out of which her poems arise. Therefore, the voices are able to do their own grief work without the need to retell textbook formatted details of their trauma. Instead, we get illuminated details:
… I was the shadow
his own shadow
made dusking
water as he bent
to blade the reed.
or
Our pet bunny
Chaandu was thistle white,
moonberry black. When he died,
ahaare, the tornadoes my sister
ugly-cried: the last loss.
Typing these lines, I am reminded again how Faizullah uses every tool at a poet’s disposal. Yes, her narratives are compelling and engaging. But also, consider her word choice, look at those line breaks, examine the orientation of the words on the page. She makes sure we are able to vividly experience the individual impact of each unit of thought. More importantly, she makes sure we are able to experience the illuminating beauty of the many lives for which these poems serve as a register.
There is so much to admire in Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages. I recommend you find the book soon and discover “The Hidden Record of Astonishment” on your own.
[Published March 6, 2018. 96 pages, $16.00 paperback]
Camille T. Dungy’s most recent books are the poetry collection Trophic Cascade and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, both finalists for the 2018 Colorado Book Award. She is a professor at Colorado State University.
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Patrick Pritchett
Memory Cards: Simone Weil Series by Susan M. Schultz (Equipage Press)
Memory Cards: Simone Weil Series is the latest installment in Susan M. Schultz’s ongoing and ambitious project to reinvigorate the spiritual poem for our time. Each of the books in the Memory Cards series is built around an exemplary religious figure such as Dōgen, the celebrated Zen Buddhist monk, or the 17th Century religious poet Thomas Traherne. Unlike Stephanie Strickland’s poetic account of Weil’s life, The Red Virgin, Schultz is not interested in explicating the history or thought of her exemplar. Rather, she uses Weil as a jumping off point in her investigations of how the French mystic and activist might lift the brutality of everyday experience into the realm of compassion.
Schultz also has no interest in the kind of worshipful quietism that was the hallmark of Denise Levertov’s late work or which supervises, say, Jane Hirshfield’s egoistical piety. While employing a paratactical, metonymic style not unlike that of John Ashbery or Ron Silliman, her sense of spiritual commitment, to a religion without religion, in the phrase of Derrida, is far closer to someone like Fanny Howe, who understands that asceticism and mysticism always entail the risk of pathology because they lead the soul to the outermost boundaries of the extreme, where the self begins to dissolve.
Schultz’s method is simple and bracing. Each of these prose poems bears a diaristic date of composition and each begins with a line from Weil’s most famous book, Gravity and Grace. Gravity is Weil’s term for matter, which she holds in contempt, rather like the Cathars. Many critics of her work, like Kenneth Rexroth and Susan Sontag, found such extremism morally repugnant. But T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, held her in very high, if typically cautious, regard, noting that “a potential saint can be a very difficult person.” Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our times.” Along with Strickland, Weil has inspired such poets as Fanny Howe and Anne Carson, both of whom, like Schultz, are drawn to her dangerous, quixotic form of spiritual engagement, one that can brings it practitioners to the very brink. “The self,” Weil thought, “is only a shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light.” Grace, then, becomes in her gnostic a-theophany, that which obliterates the self, rendering it porous to the ultimate Other, as well as a means for rescuing the abandoned.
The quotes which inaugurate each poem work as prompts, but seldom in a direct, linear fashion. Schultz uses Weil’s apothegms as a fulcrum; a way to leverage some passing moment, as with the sight of a woman singing in L.A’s notorious MacArthur Park. “The lyric is troubled when it speaks for more than one,” Schultz knowingly remarks, “but that’s what we are on this sidewalk,” recalling Adorno’s assertion that lyric is always born of felt social antagonisms masked as subjective expression.
Simone Weil Series teems with such gems. “I am the man in the elevator, the anemone at Shark’s Cove, the dancing tool in a cartoon,” calls to mind the bardic braggadocio and de-personalized sublimation of the ancient Welsh poet Taliesen. Schultz’s great gift is to turn the aphorism to rich, endlessly suggestive, lyrical account. The prose form of these poems lends itself to direct address, but they never fall into the merely expository. Instead prose serves as a method for acute compression; a distilled grammar for enunciating the predicament of living amid the plight of others, refreshingly free of any cant or cheap moralism (the kind that mars so much of Jorie Graham’s pleading work). Schultz gently probes what it means to act ethically in a world rife with cruelty, all the while continually testing the boundaries of what lyric might accomplish. “I sit beside the rain. I cannot revise it ever.”
As Sontag noted, in a grudgingly neo-Freudian vein, Weil could only become a figure of veneration in “an age that only believes in the reality of sickness,” Yet she found something to admire in Weil all the same: “in the respect we pay to such lives we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world.” It’s no stretch to say that Weil was who Camus had in mind when he wrote the most famous line in The Plague. “Can one be a saint without God?” This is the question Susan M. Schultz explores with such tensile feeling in her deeply moving book. As she writes: “to attend is to love, but not to want.”
[Published September 15, 2017. 56 pages, $16.95/£6.00 paperback]
Patrick Pritchett’s most recent book of poems is Orphic Noise. He has taught at Harvard, Amherst College, and Westfield State University.
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Joyce Peseroff
The Amoeba Game by Tara Skurtu (Eyewear Publishing)
Full disclosure: I first met Tara Skurtu when her poem won an honorable mention in UMass Boston’s 2008 Academy of American Poets Prize contest. None of us on the creative writing poetry faculty knew her — surprising, since we liked to think we could identify every student passionate about the art — and my colleague immediately rushed her to join his advanced poetry workshop. Skurtu later traveled to Romania on several grants, including two Fulbrights, after graduating from BU’s MFA program. The result is The Amoeba Game, a book textured with Boston grit and hometown Florida sand, then tempered, like a blade, in Romanian fire. With her gift for imagery and ear for the cadence of words as they reveal a speaker’s state of mind, Skurtu’s poems engage the reader on many levels at once.
“Indian River at Dusk” introduces Skurtu’s territory as she lands a fish, “black and white and breathing/in my hand.” Distractedly losing Dad’s car keys, she both confesses and doesn’t: “I walked him to the spot/and pointed. I made up a lie…” To the girl, words are vital; “God was a word person” is both a witty take on the Gospel’s first verse and insight into a clever child’s way of understanding it. The poem opens into the present, with a truer confession: while trying to “write about this … For over a year I made myself / guiltless, couldn’t preserve the thing I caught / or get the syntax right.” The poem becomes meta-poem, the past the present, the familiar whirlpooled into “… currents. I can’t keep anyone safe.” The poem may begin as “The Fish” but ends closer to “In the Waiting Room.”
I find the heart of the book in Skurtu’s long sequence, “Derivatives.” It’s a poem of love and discovery, shaped by her move to Bucharest and a growing relationship with a Romanian writer and translator. She braids the freshness of life in Romania with love’s small, meaningful details; in the market she’s calmed by
Crenellated pyramids of cabbage,
spring green and veined, each head
stabilizing at least several other heads
like a network of humming, healthy
minds, and the waxy squeak of one
pulled apart from the rest.
These dazzling images are juxtaposed with moments of tenderness, as when the Lermontov pin her lover never takes off “…leapt / from your lapel and landed face down” after an embrace in a hotel lobby. “… His copper nose // wobbled like a top between/my suitcase and us. You said, // He did it because of the emotion //. We made sure he wasn’t damaged …” The poem zings between Pushkin and pop, languages foreign and domestic, a Union Square in Bucharest and the one in Somerville where “… I loe you” is “Fingered into the sidewalk” on “the other side // of the world.” Skurtu’s “fingered” points to both transgression and caress, and “loe” is simultaneously charming, ironic, and realistic in its acknowledgemnt of love’s imperfections. Any translation, “Derivatives” suggests, is by nature incomplete, and requires vision as far-ranging, world-encompassing, and forgiving as love.
Skurtu, as a love poet, doesn’t limit herself to the erotic. In poems charged with affection for her quirky family and Florida childhood, she limns the complexities and griefs of love along with its grace. The poem Skurtu submitted for the Academy prize in 2008, “Visiting Amber at Lowell Correctional” introduces a sister who, when Skurtu dreams about her as a child, “fills buckets with garden snakes,” and “catches strawberry-necked lizards.” Then …
With one hand she holds a wriggling lizard,
with the other she hinges its jaws open
then closed onto the lobe of her ear.
In “Coming and Going,” Skurtu writes, “The first five years of your adulthood never happened./…DOC officers/locked you and ninety-nine others in a ‘waiting area’/while they doused family photos with bleach…” She adds, “When you were in, you wanted me to turn your stories//into poems. When you got out, you told me to stop.” The poem enacts both speech and silence, twin representatives of a sister’s compassion.
The collection’s title poem describes a game Skurtu played as a Brownie, where “one girl at a time would become/an amoeba and lead the rest.” The group moves “like a thousand blind legs/treading through molasses.”
… Swaying our shoulders
left to right, we’d giggle through mouths
we weren’t supposed to have, pretending
we had no eyes and didn’t know where
we came from or where we were going.
Not a bad way to write a poem, or move through life, “undulating” with others as a single “I” becomes a chorus of “we…/we…/we,” stepping together, “wayward into dusk.”
[Published November 10, 2017. 84 pahes, $14.49 paperback]
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Tyler Mills
Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press)
Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl glitters with a palette of colors that explode into petals, peacock feathers, pubic hair, piss, the reflection in the eyes of animals in Dutch and Flemish still life paintings, Hi-C, plums, and Rothko. Imagine rocker Patti Smith meets Dürer meets beat poetry meets jazz. These poems shred the curtain between the sacred and the profane, and this book is one-of-a-kind. Spell-binding in its engagement with music and visual texture, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is a masterpiece of poetic forms that innovate their origins —sestinas, un-rhymed sonnets, Ginsbergian American sentences (a form that opens up the haiku into a single sentence of 17 syllabus) — to kick down the door of convention and bring in tea roses, gasoline, and a new way of seeing. But beyond all of these virtuosic explosions of color, this collection ingeniously makes an argument about art, death, and what a collection of poems can in fact do as a form in itself.
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl explores a hunger for art, for the materials of art, and juxtaposes the idea of the nature morte, or still life, with a body in death. For the speaker of these poems, this recurs as the figure of the father. “Still Life with Turkey” begins with a description of a turkey carcass “strung up by one pronged foot” (a still life arranged to be visually interesting) and then moves to a meditation on the speaker’s last chance to see the body of her father. In this poem, the turkey “is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my // father was there in his black casket and could not / elude our gaze.” The poem deftly moves then from the speaker’s memory of a conversation at the funeral of the father, and her resulting refusal to see his body, back to the turkey with this revelation: “Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying / a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so // this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head.”
Seuss’s work encompasses a poetics of looking coupled with a poetics of action where memory erupts in the spaces between the composition — whether the frame of a self-portrait, the arrangement of an artist’s “tobacco jar, his brushes, and two pegs / on which hang his gummy palette and a rag” in a still life within a still life, or the argument presented in the poem-as-outline “Eden: An Outline” — and the life within it. These poems invite us to see and think about who placed the plum on the table in the painting and what makes sacred the Holiday Inn Express and Bob’s Country Club, the Walmart parking lot and a mailbox with a Mylar balloon tied to it. The poems of Seuss’s fourth collection showcase this poetics of looking through a kind of descriptive electrostatic voltage that shivers with truths about history, patriarchy, and class that necessitate looking-as-action.
A poem like “Still Life with Self-Portrait” achieves this kind of looking by exploring a painting by Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, a seventeenth-century Flemish painter known for the technique that tricks the eye into viewing a 2D representation as a 3D object (trompe l’oeil. This poem meditates on his optical illusions and what the painting does with them as a way to think about the sleight of hand that can happen in relationships: “He has offered you his backside and called it / his frontside, has offered you nothing / and called it something” (20-22). Mimicry, illusion, and how tantalizing — and dangerous —trompe l’oeil can be become themes that the poem’s ending exposes in a dexterous move that brings together the artist’s self-portrait and the speaker’s memory:
I think he looks annoyed.
Or he’s creating the illusion of disinterest.
I’ve known that kind of man. Or he’s thinking
“This isn’t my real face I’ve painted. She will
never really know me.” A man said something
like that to m once: “You don’t know anything
about me,” a man I’d lived with a long time,
My whole life I’ve wanted to touch men
like Cornelius Norbertus Gigsbrechts,
but they will not let themselves be touched. (48-55)
In addition to what I have been calling “looking-as-action,” as well as the prismatic colors of flowers and glittering, loved, fallible items of Americana that appear in these poems, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl showcases a stunning array of forms. One of my favorite poems in the book (and it is hard to choose!) is “Young Hare.” The poem’s subject is Albrecht Dürer’s painting “Young Hare.” Get this: “Young Hare” is a sestina that, instead of presenting a pattern of different end words that repeat at the ends of the sestets (and then in the envoi at the end), gives us one single word: “hare.” Not only that; the poem consists of two sentences, one of which weaves throughout a full 38 lines before ending. The final line presents the second sentence. The poem could have been all one sentence, but it is as though Seuss is saying, “Yeah, I could do that, and you know I could, but I won’t,” which makes the syntax all the more masterful. What begins as the speaker’s close observation of the hare becomes a contemplation on the relationship between artist, subject, and viewer, as we can see in the last two sestets of the poem:
how I want to follow the darkness of the hare
and stroke the dark within its ears, to feel the hare
ears with my fingers, and the white tuft, the hare
anomaly you painted on its side, and the fleshy hare
cheeks, how I want to squeeze them, and the hare
reticence, how I want to explore it, and the downturned hare
eye, it will not acknowledge or appease, the black-brown hare
eye in which you painted the reflection of a window in the hare
pupil, maybe your studio window, in the hare’s
eye, why does that window feel so intimate in the hare’s
unreadable eye, why do I press my face to the window to see the hare
as you see it, raising your chin to look and then back to the hare (25-36)
The reflection in the window of the hare’s “unreadable” eye, painted by the artist, reveals not only the artist but also the speaker’s desire to see as the artist did.
Ultimately, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl artfully comments on the way a collection of poems can be a form in itself. This book, about death through the still life artistic form, at heart elegizes a father the speaker watched die after returning from war having been exposed to toxins. Framing the collection is a poem called “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise” with “fugitive cows known for escaping their borders” where the speaker “is “told some girls / slide their fingers over the frame and feel the air outside of it.”The poem that follows, “Girl in a Picture Frame,” meditates on a young woman “[f]orever on the threshold / of climbing over the edge and displaying something / grand.” And then, after the entire book of exquisite poems about art, America, and the body — which breaks up into sections that correspond with photographic reproductions of fragments of Rembrandt’s painting “Still Life with Peacocks” — the book’s final poem appears to close the frame. Yet, the poem itself, “I Climbed Out of a Painting Called Paradise,” refuses to do this, as the speaker manages to escape the painting. These opening and closing paradise poems provide an image of heaven, Edenic, challenging, and tempting, and expose its limits. The final lines of the collection read, “I wanted / my mother, and this is why I left Paradise.”
Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl invites the reader into a new way of thinking about the relationship between art and observer, infused with memory and an expansive sense of the American landscape, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
[Published May 1, 2018. 120pages, $16.00 paperback]
Tyler Mills is the author of Hawk Parable, winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize (forthcoming i2019) and Tongue Lyre, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press 2013). She is editor-in-chief of The Account and an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University.
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Victoria Chang
Trophic Cascade by Camille Dungy (Wesleyan) and I Know Your Kind by William Brewer (Milkweed Editions)
It is difficult to find poems/poetry/books of poems that address motherhood in a way that doesn’t feel clichéd or reductive. I loved Camille Dungy’s book, Trophic Cascade, not because it grapples with motherhood, but because of the way Dungy expands the privacy of motherhood to something much larger. It seems as if the speaker’s view of the world post-motherhood has broadened — in essence, everything is refracted through motherhood, which as a mother myself, feels exquisitely accurate. In Trophic Cascade, the book stirs motherhood in a pot, along with ecological concerns and racial concerns, as if to say that none of these are mutually exclusive.
Dungy skillfully captures the tensions of parenting. For example, in the poem, “Mother daughter hour,” the speaker is reading a book on the couch (her own book “about death”) while the child tries to read too (a beginner picture book). This short poem accurately captures the constant battle between a parent’s needs and the child’s needs:
I am going to have to put down my book so I can teach her better,
but first I read her one last sentence
because I am struck by all its vowel sounds.
Trophic Cascade isn’t just about birth/living, but it’s also about the tension and the co-habitation between the living and the dying, between birth and death, joy and grief.
Throughout the book, there are humorous “Frequently Asked Questions” such as “Is she talking yet?” or “Is it true that once you’re a parent it’s hard to maintain a social life of your own?” or “Does she sleep through the night?” The poems often respond in a form of poetic argument. The response to “Are you going to have another child” is simply “No.” The poem, “Frequently Asked Questions: #6” asks: “Now that you have a child, has your writing practice changed?” This poem, like the other FAQ poems have a sarcastic tone:
Digging rock from hardscaped beds, I think,
is a bit like not writing poetry — like thinking
about writing poetry but digging rock from my backyard
instead.
Many of the poems in Trophic Cascade, like this one, exhibit lyrical urgency, sometimes through repetition, but in this case, the whole poem continues after “instead” without another period until the end of the poem. There are em-dashes and commas that keep building and building, but no periods. This lack of punctuation has a piling up effect which mimics the poem’s subject matter.
Ultimately, I admired the maturity of the speaker’s voice. There’s a lived life here, wisdom, and a consideration of the world around the speaker, both natural and human (which is also of the natural world). To read these poems, one must stay with the poems and follow the considerate eye of the speaker. Dungy expresses her unease with the world not through frenetic pinball language, but through the thoughtful considerations of connectedness—there’s a through-line in these compelling poems.
William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind was one of my favorite book of poems that I read last year. Going forward, I will enthusiastically read anything by this talented poet. I didn’t like the book merely because of the timely subject matter (American’s opioid epidemic). But rather, I admired how Brewer uses language, especially figurative language that is often stunningly surreal.
In his poem, “Withdrawal Dream with Feather and Knife,” pain is a “white boulder” with a woodpecker:
I woke one winter morning to find all my pain
as a lone white boulder in the yard
with a brilliant woodpecker, its head
enflamed with red feathers, chiseling
fruitlessly at the bone-colored surface.
The poem doesn’t contain any woodpecker though. This woodpecker stands for something else. The woodpecker’s head is “enflamed with red feathers” and the head is “chiseling/fruitlessly at the bone-colored surface.” Every single word in these first five lines of this poem means something, stands for something bigger than what it is in terms of its basic meaning. The word “brilliant” is important; the fact that it is the bird’s “head” is significant; the fact that the head is “enflamed” is important; the fact that the feathers are “red” is important; the fact that the head is “chiseling” is important; the enjambment at chiseling is important because it is followed by “fruitlessly”; and the fact that the boulder is “bone-colored” in contrast to the redness of the bird is also important. These first five lines are an example of how figurative language expands the poem’s magic without being too exact or precise in terms of their meaning. These images, while precise within themselves, evoke an aura or tone that isn’t precise. Figurative language when done well can have this kind of effect—a fuzzy exactness that ultimately expands the poem.
I could point to many more examples, but it might be best to end with Brewer’s own words in this poem which so beautifully portray the paradoxes of addiction:
But the day,
although I know not how exactly,
reorganized itself, each grain of snow,
gears in a blurred engine, fell up
to the sky, through me, through
the way things could have been,
and I understood that—much in the way
we misname some snow as blizzard
when it’s only snowing with such purpose
that we’re estranged from its wonder—
that whatever I have ruined
I have done so according to plan.
Trophic Cascade – published March 7, 2017. 92 pages, $24.95 hardcover.
I Know Your Kind — published September 5, 2017. 96 pages, $16.00 paperback.
Victoria Chang’s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. She is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at Antioch’s MFA Program in Los Angeles.
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David Blair
Where Now: New and Selected Poems by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon)
A friend of mine is the tactical “blue Scooby” of an English department: no fuss, few meetings. To belly up and photocopy some poems for a class at the last minute, he needs some books around. Laura Kasischke’s Where Now: New and Selected Poems is the kind of great book you can keep around to come back to and open up at random for years.
The sections from her earlier books all have stand-out pieces, but Kasischke gets better and better as she goes along. Even though she is a poet whose hardwired fresh images and details and situations tell us a lot about marriage, love, death, the bad news, aging, sex, alcohol, friendship between girls, class, being a mother, feeling religious and timeless at times, and family, and even though her poems are rooted in time and place with a hyper-real specificity, there is something unencumbered about her work. The poems feel both composed and improvisatory. Some are like big paintings you can see in their entirety, but also that you can stop off at any particular place in and enjoy in detail. It’s not for nothing “For the Return of the Bee” ends with not just the point-of-view of something like a benevolent God seen only in hopes, but also with a sense of the most commonsensical machinery of an average satellite. When “What I Learned in Ninth Grade” winds up in enough anthologies, high school might start improving for some kids. As Bruce Springsteen says, “Ooh, growing up.”
These are peopled poems. There is something sad and unjust and necessary about artistic distance. The injustice is that a poem can have only one actual speaker, and if a poem is an elegy, that speaker is the one who lasted long enough to write the poem. The beautiful poem “Sensual Pleasures” remembers the limited, affectionate intimacy of a high school boyfriend at his funeral from the perspective of pleasures that were developed and satisfied in morbid life elsewhere. When she compares her traditionally uncommunicative father dying with his truths unsaid to the burning of the libraries of Alexandria in “My Father’s Stoicism,” the poem feels arrived at with radiant feeling. A poem with great drab humor about lusting parents at bake sales and other unlikely places, “The Common Cold,” has similar qualities of almost concealed extravagance and openness. “Alcoholism” is a poem about what was at times a happy arrangement. Kasischke’s poems have imaginative and ethical generosity.
Bleak moments, refusals of easy consolation and moments of wayward attraction to destructiveness swerve in more or less the same unforced spirit as moments of adult-feeling transitory acceptance, all with palpable undercurrents of delight: “The way music, our savior, is the marriage of math and antisocial behavior. // And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July” (“O elegant giant”). When she writes about a bowling alley with a bar, “Andy’s Lane & Lounge,” you feel that she really enjoyed her drink there, and found it disturbing. Two of the better known, but anomalous earlier poems have central references — to Happy Meals and the sad purple dinosaur Barney — that staple those poems to a somewhat glossier pop cultural moment than the one we are entering now in the more ragged and less definite time of her more recent work that still feels like a history of the times in Michigan.
Always a believable person in her poems, Kasischke is manifold enough to present herself channeling the prince of wounded artistic vanity, Charles Baudelaire and his one o’clock in the morning bitter prayer in “The Cause of All My Suffering”: ” … I pray// to God to give me / the ability to write // better poems than the poems of those / whom I despise. . .” What a relief to hear this. Everybody has been acting so good. Over the course of nine books, it looks like a prayer that turned out really well for American poetry.
The easiest claim in the world to substantiate would be to say that Laura Kasischke is a great love poet. In her earlier poem “Fatima,” when she compares herself and her friends being awed at their friend who has slipped off to make love with a shirtless carny character in a vest to the girls who saw Our Lady of Fatima, that is love. To know your own clarity after all could be the motto of these free poems that know more than just about anybody else’s right now.
[Published July 4, 2017. 363 pages, $30.00 hardcover[
David Blair is the author of two recent books of poetry, Arsonville (New Issues Poetry & Prose) and Friends with Dogs (Sheep Meadow Press).
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David Roderick
Appalachians Run Amok by Adrian Blevins (Two Sylvias Press)
Nobody will be surprised to learn, after reading Adrian Blevins’s new title, that her Appalachian roots are the source of her inspiration. She grew up in the mountainous region along the Virginia border among artistic, hippy, hillbilly-types. The kind of free-range abandon she enjoyed in her childhood feels embodied in her voice decades later. Many poems begin like “First Elegy for the Appalachians,” with a sentence that demands more than one full breath: “I’d describe my forefathers the hillbillies and my Bible-thumping great Grannies / if the whole countryside in and around the mountains of Crumpler, North Carolina // weren’t so sort of dead as in out-of-the-way and consequently almost empty-headed / like a spoon.” Blevins’s lines nearly always fire on the fuel of youthful excitement. They burn with sass, humor, and manic speech.
In fact, it’s hard to think of a mouthier poet than Blevins. Even though her Southern attitude is present in every line, it fortunately isn’t deployed at the expense of intelligence and a tender spirit. Later in “First Elegy for the Appalachians,” Blevins mourns a childhood she can only return to imaginatively. “Where are the water moccasins,” she writes, “and the water spiders // and the one old bridle from the 19th century horse rotted at the bottom / with only the brass mouth bit left lustrous among the rocks?” A few lines later she asks, “Forgive me for being nostalgic, but where are the old timers / with their hats and rockers and ballads of privation in Wales and Ireland?” This sort of longing, that accrues at a breakneck pace, enacts the swift vanishing of a whole culture.
Blevins gets a lot of mileage out of shifting between praising and mocking her Appalachian heritage. In her first two books, The Brass Girl Brouhaha and Live from the Homesick Jamboree, the burden of that heritage seemed almost exclusively carried by her persona. She posed as a tragicomic figure half-entrapped by her Southern past and half-liberated from it. To my surprise and delight, several poems in Appalachians Run Amok address the impact of her bloodline playing out in the lives of her adolescent and adult children — even though they were raised in “Yankee” Maine. “Kid Icarus,” a poem about her son’s death-defying fall from a roof, begins, “I come from a family of rowdies who don’t know their asses / some days from a hole in the ground and in this assessment // I include myself and my offspring so yes my son was drinking beer / late one night on his roof like the kids in that college town like to do // so they can mimic the stars is what I think and talk and dance / for all I know and sing.” In another poem, the speaker’s role is hijacked by an even sassier teenage daughter, to hilarious effect.
Blevins’s voice is original in American poetry — she sounds like no one else. The propulsive energy of her sprawling lines has an almost addictive effect on the reader. Heavy use of the word “and” (or the ampersand) keeps her sentences humming along. Such a longwinded style makes the poems very difficult to paraphrase. Some, like “Brimstone,” begin midstream:
And sex got spoiled a little too by the lady Baptists
fluttering up Main Street like a gang of fat ghouls
when they knocked on the door & almost wept
& almost said Oh honey out loud but shut their mouths
just in time to say it on second thought with just their eyes
in still witness against the wretched misfortune of poor me
wanting to concentrate on castaways like Gilligan
& poor me having to be the wildling child of wanton rowdies
with their drink parties & naked picture books & antiques
& paintings & ivy & other lefty vegetation not to even mention
to study witchcraft with Jeannie & Samantha on TV
with the ladies wanting me to please just study Jesus instead
as in his central predilection for eternal damnation
unless I’d repent right here, right now.
Appalachians indeed run amok in this book, but no figure runs more amok than Blevins herself. Her tonal contours, verbal asides, and commitment to extension and accretion illustrate that talking can also be singing. She’s American poetry’s motor-mouth front-woman, one of the few poets I can think of who plays her whole language with the skill of a master musician.
[Published January 31, 2018. 106 pages, $16.00 paperback]
David Roderick is the author of Blue Colonial and The Americans. He is the Program Director of Left Margin LIT, a center for literary arts in Berkeley, California.