To plumb the unique depth-charges of Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s latest book, Dolefully, A Rampart Stands, one must take the soundings of its signature syntax, in which every clause and phrase possesses what Gary Lutz — in in an essay entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” — calls “the force and feel of a climax” and evinces “a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude.” Whether via an unexpected archaic turn of phrase or a shout-out to a nursery rhyme or cliché flipped on its head, Ackerson-Kiely moves unflinchingly into imperiled realms of our moment: addiction, ennui, anomie, gender toxicity, poverty, domestic and environmental violence, epidemic loneliness, depression, political corruption, greed, and extremism of all kinds.
The intensity of the sentences and phrases — sometimes inverted, by turns dramatic, archaic, elliptical, and colloquial — sentences in which what is inanimate often has more agency than what’s animate, and in which the reader is implicated and culpable (“You don’t need me to tell you what happens next”) — refuses to let us go. Her sentences demand — require — the reader’s attention at every turn, making us complicit even as we are aware of how all too quickly we want turn from what’s insidious, complicated, uncomfortable, as in the claustral ars domestica of “Inheritance”:
Deep-sixed for wont of something —
firm feelings, for example — or stacked china
pushed toward the back
of the cabinet. Not to be used, nor eaten
from. There are a dozen ways to give
to one’s neighbor: The fence, cup of sugar,
removal of snow and what it portends.
You may have the air I sucked;
the gossip I told things to.
O hey there gorgeous, scaling the bannister
of the mortgage I shall inherit, meekly
in some failing town: There is no winning
except to remember I am so lonesome—
the lenders call, they call and I answer,
and so they at least are fed, are full
as the feral thing making early residence
there — giddy, rifling the dank closets
before anyone else can get in.
One never feels quite safe inside any of these poems, and the dis-ease can be socio-political as well as domestic. The book’s title, with its allusion to America’s national anthem, the “Star-Spangled Banner” (“O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming”), comes from a long, masterful poem, “Made to Lie Down in Green Pastures,” which in turn takes its title from Psalm 23. The psalmist, of course, proclaims an unquestioning trust in what Ackerson-Kiely calls a “sponsor” — “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; / He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. / He restoreth my soul …” In Ackerson-Kiely’s poem, the shepherd/“sponsor” is someone she calls “the President,” and the poem is a working through of the desperate, short-sighted, nostalgically over-simplified and misplaced trust that would allow a certain sheep-like citizen to blindly follow such a leader:
… I was asked
by my President to lie down.
I love my country, the magnitude of its longing
precluded by a tendency to give up, throw down
walk away from the pasture to the edge
of a nascent wood — silver
and encroaching — so youthful is that
which moves forward ho! I love my country,
the blank middle brain of it, fulvous
and waving at anyone who happens by.
The salt lake lick the mountainous tumult
hewn to shale dagger and feldspar
knit to some idea of rising up. In spite
of erosion, my President begged:
lie down in the green pasture and I did
not question, I love my country, I did …
Sexual scandal, hirings and firings, serial denial and deception, clear-cutting, mountain-top mining, the wall obsession and fear of alien immigrants (“Sometimes my country is a dark vale / over which my President looms, / portentous, struggling at the border”) —the whole shady, Trumpian cosmos is here. As the poem proceeds, and the speaker allows that she has had to “risk everything to lie” in this Sponsor-dictated “going going gone” bed, the narrative of the nation and of the domestic roil become inseparable.
The President asked, please wait your turn.
But who can be patient, Mister President,
for the quiet waters?
So I circled the defensive wall,
the outworks and the earthworks —
dolefully a rampart stands, but how does she lie?
Even as the speaker finds a way to disassociate from the group-think, she marvels at the ever reproducing herd of followers: “Is there nothing so extraordinary as / the tirade of successors willing to lie?” By this time, of course, “lie” has come to signify not only blind passivity but manifold, overt, aggressive acts of deception.
As if this single poem weren’t reason enough to engage with this remarkable collection (and it is), the book also contains at its beating telltale heart a series of crime-noir prose poems, in which a detective in an unnamed northeastern small town works the murder case of a young woman, “C.,” whose case becomes eerily conflated with his feelings about his ex-girlfriend, who has left him and is engaged to someone else. In a town “bludgeoned by a dense unawareness,” the narrator considers himself to be someone “just there to notice, to have a feeling for.” The lines among perpetrator, victim, girlfriend, and detective — and between burial and wedding — become increasingly blurred, exposing an environment rife with sexual anger, jealousy, frustration, and anxiety. It’s like getting a glimpse into the secret diaries of darker versions of Detective Harry Bosch or Detective Frank Mackey, if either were able to wield a sentence (in all its senses) like Paige Ackerson-Kiely.
We tend not to think of sentences when we think about poetry, that language of mostly broken lines. But we all know that the opposite of poetry isn’t prose, and as William Gass writes in Fiction and the Figures of Life, “the sentence confers reality upon certain relations, but it also controls our estimation, apprehension, and response to them. Every sentence, in short, takes metaphysical dictation, and it is the sum of these dictations, involving the whole range of the work in which the sentences appear, which accounts for its philosophical quality, and the form of life in the thing that has been made.” What a timely and original form of “metaphysical dictation” is on offer here.
[Published on February 5, 2019 by Penguin Books, 96 pages, $18.00 paperback]