Robert Pinsky once noted that William Carlos Williams was the first poet to write about America from behind the wheel of a moving car, his “twiggy stuff of bushes” part of the blur of the open road. In her new collection, Drive, Elaine Sexton enlarges on what Modernism observed. A visual artist, editor and essayist as well as a poet, she captures the verve of forward motion in arresting images and crisp lines. “Drive” can be an imperative verb and, as a noun, a synonym for passion; a gay woman comfortable in a seat often reserved for straight white men – and dangerous for those who aren’t — Sexton reveals its pleasure and sting.
Sexton bookends Drive with two poems, each titled “the most beautiful thing.” The first is a litany, a paratactical sequence of equal signs:
The most beautiful thing about my car is the
beach and the most beautiful thing about the
beach is watercolor, and the most beautiful
thing about water is the word …
Flux defines Sexton’s world and, just as each beautiful object reconfigures, the poem’s form shimmers between prose and verse in a series of right-justified lines (write the words in one long sentence, and they don’t sound the same). Sexton explores the world’s constant metamorphosis in poems about aging and mortality, family and lovers, and the power of art. Throughout the book, she examines the process with curiosity and brio.
In “This,” the process reveals itself in a series of syllogistic connections that don’t quite splice. Sexton addresses a lover: “In the way your poem / with a lake in it / is not about the lake, mine / with a dog and the broken / heart is not about a dog / or saving face.” The figure of an ibis is no more about “lovers and brothers and fathers” than “pyres by the tracks waiting for a match, all queerly remembered, queer as teaching ourselves not to drown.” This method of negation is a delicious way for Sexton to have her metaphorical cake and it eat too – especially when the poem circles back, reading itself, and the dog introduced in the first lines transforms to an image of loss: “Everything is about / gravity, the grave / pulling / for us. /Each day / it starts with a bark / calling our name.”
“Self-Portrait: Between the Car and the Sea” plays with liminal space, exterior and interior. “I think I’ll stay blonde / a while longer,” Sexton begins, sorting the in-between of an aging body that labors “climbing the last few steps” the way an “engine strains / in first gear.” Both remain mobile, if struggling. “How long will these parts last?” she wonders – for now, still able to “watch sea lice flit / from shell to sand to beach / eased by transition lenses.” There’s humor in the puns on “parts” and “transition,” and directness in short lines composed mostly of one and two syllable words, that foster intimacy between writer and reader. We’re happy to follow Sexton’s lucid voice from “Fuel” to “Ignition” to “Transport.”
Sometimes the journey can terrify. “Driving” narrates an incident when the narrator, stalled “where no one lives / and where satellites turn a deaf ear,” accepts a ride from a stranger “in one of those red states / shaped like a box” (that a box can become a coffin is something every woman knows). Although she finds there are “still strangers / who stop for a woman / in distress and think only / of her distress” Sexton acknowledges the limits of trust by quoting revered, reclusive Emily Dickinson’s lines, “If anyone strikes me/on the street / I can return the Blow,” and demanding, “what did she know?”
Drive’s final poem is an homage to trust in the “tiniest strips of archival tape” pinning “… text on papyrus, dry as dirt, attributed to Sappho.” “I have never seen adhesive so delicate, so trusted,” Sexton writes as she concludes, “The most beautiful thing about trust is what holds it in place.”
Sexton’s perceptions, one following another, sift contradictions and search for what endures. In “Self as Hypotaxis,” she writes:
I doubt I am alone
in singling out late June
by the sea,
as heaven on earth.
The earth warms,
and not in a threatening way.
Although she twice refers to a burning planet – “it hasn’t rained since spring,” she notes – Sexton admits that “the flags of my disposition / are happiest in summer,” glad to put intimations of change aside for the luxury of now. Just as Sexton trusts in tiny bits of tape, in the power of change, and the joy of motion, her readers will happily ride shotgun, taking pleasure in Drive’s radiant perspective on the rush of life.
[Published by Grid Books on April 12, 2022, 96 pages, $16.00 paperback]