Review of Brushstrokes and glances

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Brushstrokes and glances. Djelloul Marbrook.

Cumberland, ME: Deerbrook Editions, 2010. 88 pages,

ISBN: 978-0982810019

 

By Michael T. Young

 

It would be easy to laud this collection for its lively engagement of art, its history and beauty.  But to do only that, as the note from the publisher, the forward and the blurbs all do, would be to miss a large part of what it’s about.  Brushstrokes and glances is not only about art, but about how through art we see ourselves, how it stands as an indictment of much of modern society and how it might redeem us, if we opened our eyes and paid attention.

 

Like good poetry, the poetry in Marbrook’s second collection, is dynamic, engaging us on multiple levels at once.  It weaves his love for art with his love for his mother who was an artist, it threads the implicit ideas of permanence with the persistent reality of our individual and collective transience, and, to me, most importantly, it sounds the vacuity of modern society against the meaningfulness of paintings and other artworks.  This seems the most important because our culture needs but does not often celebrate or produce poetry that simultaneously engages sociopolitical realities and maintains high aesthetic standards.  

 

There are two sections in Brushstrokes and glances and the first could stand as one of the more elegant sociopolitical criticisms of recent years.  That’s not all it does, of course, but it is undeniably there and strikingly good poetry.  Such poems as “A Government like Caravaggio,” “Goya in iPodia,” “Basquiat,” and “Manhattan reef,” force use to look at the failures of our society while at the same time being pleasing poetic accomplishments.  

 

Some of the poems seem to say that the failures of government and those governed rest on the inability to challenge norms.  Governments plod along with the status quo and the governed shrug it off with the complicit assumption that it could always be worse.  “A Government like Caravaggio” concludes,

 

if it had his irreverence

for dogma and popes

it would help somebody.

 

This same assertion is more positively put in the poem “Painted Out” in the second section where it says, “the kingdom of heaven/rests on heresies we dare.”  

 

Our cultural failures reinforce this problem.  “Our diseases serve the system” (“Basquiat”).  We are encouraged to look at nothing deeply, but rather surf and skim so we are blind to anything that isn’t obvious.  Yet, that means we are blind to reality for in our world, as “Manhattan reef” declares, “More always rises than meets the eye.”  Or as the speaker of “Basquiat” exclaims, “one thing I always knew, always,/is that things aren’t what they seem.”  In the context of art, this means deeper meaning and commentary on our humanity, in politics and society it means layers of lies and betrayal.  The poem “The Color Black” asks, “what is it we don’t want to see/in a Ray-Ban world of anti-glare?”  And “I saw Mona Lisa once,” concludes, “image runs a gauntlet of lies/until one or the other dies.”  

 

Taking the time for a second look, slowing down to consider, observing closely is what both art and civilization require.  The collection is suffused with images playing behind the eyes and the need for a second look.  “Pierre Bonnard’s Late Interiors” asks, 

 

May we come in?

Only on second thought

perhaps. 

 

“I saw Mona Lisa once,” opens with “Everyone is worth a second glance.”  It is most elegantly stated in “Goya in iPodia,”

 

Someday, Francisco, we’ll follow you

into the dicey realm of doubletake

where nothing is as it seems and we know less

than we think we do and in that less

find the simple elegance of a second look.

 

Following Francisco is what the second section of the book is all about.  The collection’s title poem concludes

 

It isn’t much of a testament,

but it does suggest we never know

exactly who we’re looking at

or, just as important, what.

 

It is the wisdom of never presuming to fully know anyone or anything, which is different than living in the ignorance the collection decries.  But if art in general asks us to step back and look at our humanity or lack of it, the second section of this book steps back from culture and society to see the larger context of time and nature.  “Accordion of worlds,” which also titles the section, is a kind of Ozymandias poem that declares all civilizations come to an end, where a Roman statue of Athena is observed in an Arab garden

 

and you have some idea

how foolish we are

to exalt ourselves

in the nebulae

of light and dark.

 

Or, more simply, as “In a time of spin” puts it, “Civilizations come and go.  For all we know/so do worlds.”  So the apocalypse, usually in the form of flooded museums, and the danse macabre thread the collection with their threat, or perhaps, more accurately, with their imminence.  This way, the collection tries to arrest us in the time we have, suggesting that we take the time to see as fully as we can both what is before us and ourselves for “Not even zero helps to count/the ways there are to see us.” 

 

If, at times, the music falters or feels like an afterthought, it is redeemed by what seems the stated aesthetic of the poet in several places.  

 

. . . I don’t sing well,

but things have a way of tipping me off

to their true identities.

(“Basquiat”)

 

The diction here shows that Marbrook was for years a journalist and his need for clarity and truth align him poetically more with an ontological poet like George Oppen than a musical poet like Richard Wilbur.  What resonates is not the beauty of a phrase but its clarity, it’s aptness to tell us what we know but don’t have the ability or courage to articulate.  So when he says, “the danger of UV/is not as great as seeing well,” we know the environmental dangers of ozone depletion are a consequence of our own failure to seize the day, and know it clearly from the abruptness of the comparison.  

 

Comparison is a variety of contrast or perspective, one of the great elements of drawing which this collection employs to create emotional clarity and depth.  Marbrook’s relationship with his mother, a painter, provides contrast to the larger context of culture and society.  In that microcosm, the heart comes into play and gives rise to lines that are masterful for their poignant simplicity, such as “Art my mother never saw saddens me” and “No one can comfort a broken child,” and even at the edge where mind and heart meet, “intimacy’s more private than we think.”  In fact, in one of the more intimate poems of the collection, “My Mother’s Paintings,” there lies that which unlocks the collection’s suggested cures to our societal illness.  Speaking of his mother’s painting he says,

 

I am, God help me, the husband of this work

and must take better care of it

than I took of the hopes that haunt it;

now let them glisten in museums. 

 

The poet claims his past with all its faults, for only through that act can the hopes be realized.  This may speak, in the context of sociopolitical poems, of our culture doing the same.  In the longer arc of the collection, it speaks to admitting even the animal side of our spiritual struggles.  As the final poem, “The Fountains,” says,

 

Into the sun we go diminished,

having left behind a self

that chose four legs.

 

In every painting a twitching snout

parsing our most elusive scent

where we do not doubt.

 

I dream of beasts and otherlings

cavorting around bidets;

I envy them.

 

I’m reminded of Blake’s spectres, those entities that emerge from the repressed aspects of the psyche.  Here, those things in our nature we don’t face when we enter the museum, remain behind to prowl its halls after we leave.  The epigraph to the collection provides insight, a quote from Chapman’s magnificent “Shadow of Night.”  In the quote, night is “blacke in face and glitterst in thy hearte.”  These beasts are the glittering heart, what we must reclaim if we are to reclaim our humanity and perhaps stop our glide toward self-destruction.  This collection is another such glittering heart, offering to us a mirror wherein we may reclaim, if we dwell long enough, part of that image that is the best version of ourselves. 

Review of A Glossary of Chickens




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A Glossary of Chickens.
Gary J. Whitehead. 

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, March 11, 2013. 72 pages, ISBN: 978-0691157467

 

The first thing to strike one about Whitehead’s poetry is the simple beauty of its language.  He clearly knows language as a tool to create art, to create beautiful objects.  Beyond the meaning of what is said, there is a profound pleasure in reading something like,

. . . . . . . . . . flecks of pepper atop the soap dish soup

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (“Drosophila Melanogaster”)

or, with a more delicate touch, something like

 

. . . . . . . . . . Autumn, with its globes, the gold and silver saved,

. . . . . . . . . . hanging here and there like something to reach for,

. . . . . . . . . . has become this time to walk through

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (“Warren”)

These are the kinds of linguistic graces that feed the more rarified elements in the sensibility, the depths that only a handful of prose writers ever reach, and even when they do, do so only as they approach the province of poetry.  

 

The second thing to strike a reader of Whitehead’s poetry is the simple pleasure of following his mind through its connections, both serious and humorous.  For instance, his latest collection (his third), A Glossary of Chickens, opens its first section with a poem called, “The Wimp.”  But this “chicken” is such, as the poem says, because “I lack wherewithal.”  And so, one of the primary thematic threads is established and probed, which is the question of purpose or intention and how it threads or thwarts true living.  This motif is introduced along with others in the opening proem of the collection, “Oyster.”  

 

The negative image of the oyster as “all abductor-muscled,” filtering the world, the “as-yet/with now instead/of then,” leads into questions of the past and present crisscrossing as they do with the attempt to understand life.  But the poem ends with advice to this tightly closed animal,

 

. . . . . . . . . . Better to be rent apart,

. . . . . . . . . . all jiggly and liberated,

. . . . . . . . . . than to fret an irk until it’s pearled.

 

And here we have the seed of thematic contention: how what appeared to be a needed vessel – like a shell – can come into conflict with inspired living.  Such vessels can be in many shapes, they could be people we once cherished or plans as simple as naming things that mislead us into thinking “that by naming we can understand,” or certain desires that are part of “the unrealizable certainty/of the way things should be.”  What often shocks us out of these ruts is death, or the threat of death, the various kinds of loss.  All the shapes of that threat wake us to living as it is meant to be, or to the simple pleasure of being alive.

 

. . . . . . . . . . Why overprioritize long-term plans

 

. . . . . . . . . . at the expense of our present enjoyment?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (“Drosophila Melanogaster”)

But it is not a simple insight to live by, about as easy as making a flower bloom by yelling at it to do so.  The root problem is “we are pinioned by whatever we are.”  The tragedy that often shocks us back into inspired living becomes nothing but a season to the quotidian, as the salt pile of “Lot’s Wife,” by the end of that poem, and after people have moved on from the tragedy of the city’s destruction, becomes nothing more than “salt with which//to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.”  

 

From beginning to end, the collection is a transformation of the idea of death, from a tragedy that we try to elude or which makes us cherish life, to a shedding in the form of all loss necessary to life as it moves forward.  The why of living gives way to the what as life is embraced in the moment.  Or, as it says in “Death Watches,” “Not why, then, but when to bite/and what like.”  This transformation is also reinforced by succeeding poems.  Thus, in the final section, the poem “Death Watches” is followed by “In the Butterfly Conservatory.”  Apart from the butterfly being a timeworn image of transformation and renewal, the poem concludes

 

. . . . . . . . . . There must be room for joy,

. . . . . . . . . . a door to the other side.

This transformation is mirrored in the full arc of the final section, which opens with a poem called “Slaveship” and ends with a poem called “Ararat” where Noah contemplates the remains of the ark years after it served its purpose.  The slaveship becomes that discarded ark that carried the needed cargo for the world to survive.  Now that its purpose is served, it is not needed.  Any plan that has served its purpose, if we continue to follow it, becomes a prison, a trap, a slaveship.  It would be as if Noah had kept his family and the animals on the ship after the waters receded.  Wisdom and this collection teach us to abandon the plans that have served their purpose, the various stratagems that enslave us, just as the poem “Ararat” concludes with the observation

 

. . . . . . . . . . Above the green plateau there is always grief,

. . . . . . . . . . which, inspired, becomes the breath of life.

 

Throughout, this collection is a pleasure to read.  Only one puzzle piece did not fit: its section breaks.  The coherence of the collection is so clear and the progression from one poem to the next so strong, even when crossing from section to section, the section breaks seemed rather forced to frame the thematic development unnecessarily.  Thankfully these section breaks don’t do any harm to the collection.  

 

A Glossary of Chickens is one of the more beautiful and subtle collections I’ve read in some time.  In fact I haven’t even touched on the nuanced distinction the collection makes between memory and the past or explored the significance of how the collection’s third poem is about Lot’s Wife and the concluding poem about Noah and the seeming bridge between them is Melville. But I will leave these for readers to search out themselves since there are simply too many connections to explore in a brief review.

 

Though it is never said, A Glossary of Chickens suggests that life is truly lived when it is lived like good jazz rather than as an agenda.  In fact, we need to break free of agendas, free of the plans that have served their purpose, in order to truly live.  This may be the reason for the underlying sea imagery throughout the collection.  Perhaps that connection to the sea suggests the importance of flowing, of letting go and moving on, like a river, like water.  The collection is a quiet carpe diem, not shouting it, as so many literary works do, as if seizing the day were only possible to the loudmouthed and frantic.  Instead, it seems to say that enjoying our daily bread with full awareness is the profoundest form of seizing the day.

Gold & Other Fish, A Review

Gold & Other Fish. Hilary Sideris.
Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, Nov. 2011. 22 pages, ISBN: 1-59924-896-4 / ISBN 978-1-59924-896-7

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Gold & Other Fish is Hilary Sideris’s third poetry collection and her second collection with Finishing Line Press. The 20 poems in it are all named for fish and though each poem distills the essence of these fish with a beautifully compressed lyricism, they are not mere portraits. It is not just a collection of nature poems. Humans enter the picture from the beginning and return throughout as hunter, cook, eater and this leads us beyond mere observation into deeper questions.

The opening poem, Fluke, concludes, “To reel her in,/I’ll need a hunk of killifish/wriggling on my hook.” The third poem, Bass, closes by saying of the fish,

he blackens in my cast-

iron pan, lobster eater on
the rocky bottom, my large
mouth’s deep dish.

There is a pull in these poems between the marine world and the human. Our relationship to predation is put under a clarifying aquatic lens. We don’t like to think of how life feeds on life, and we shield ourselves from it by myths and platitudes that soften it for us. But this also means we project onto the natural world an inappropriate moral judgment. The poems in Gold & Other Fish question both of these points. Perhaps there is a beauty or even divinity to the way fish survive, a divinity in feeding on flesh. I might even say it documents a kind of communion. In Monk, Sideris asks,

can we know the grace

it takes to cradle prey
between clenched jaws
until it stops jerking,

who seek the denser
texture of a scavenger
whose spine ends in a lure?

Our moral judgments and our secret desires mix to blind us to the simple grace of what it means to be a predator, to the actual beauty of it. Our moral high ground is here inverted and we are the dupes of our own needs, lured to feed on a scavenging fish.

Within these poems that marine grace is not merely an argument but an aesthetic. Sideris has a beautiful ear. The sound textures of these poems are brilliant, delving into subtle phonetic expressions beyond just internal rhymes, assonance and consonance. Consider what happens in

with hide & seek, a brackish
world not hard to fathom
dark devoid of history
[“Grouper”]

Here it is not simply the assonance of “hard” and “dark.” There is a phonetic connection running from “hide” through “history,” a beautiful transformation that arcs and joins it all together from “seek” and “brackish,” through “world” and “hard” to reach finally through “dark” and “devoid.” This kind of brilliant phrasing runs through the whole collection, mirroring the flash of a fish leaping from the water for a moment to plunge back into the depths.

The final poem, Tuna, leaves us with the real focus: what we, at a distance admire for its beauty, is at its core an act of survival.

. . . Not for pleasure
but to shake off parasites,

he arcs into our air,
admired from afar
if not for long.

It is sometimes difficult for scientists to determine the specific function of beauty, but whatever it might be, they know that beauty serves a purpose: it helps a species in some way to survive. Gold & Other Fish shows us that even our connection to predation is in some way connected to beauty and grace.

Most collections have some small flaw, some small deviation from the goal, but not this one. It’s the kind of collection that is a pleasure from first to last, delivering aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment. What Sideris says of the Sturgeon, these poems do, they forage “at the interface” and bring brilliant gems to the surface.

Thoughts on Refusing Heaven, Poems by Jack Gilbert

Although not a perfect collection, this collection is worth a permanent place on everyone’s bookshelf. Winner of both the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is deserving of these awards for the sheer life-affirming quality of the poems. These are a wondrous celebration of life not only in spite of its brevity and flaws but precisely because of its brevity and flaws. What, in the mind of others are failures, within this collection, are transformed into the substance of happiness and beauty. Memory becomes the storehouse of a future life and lazy days doing nothing, the substance of the most joyful times.

Gilbert has assimilated much of Eastern thinking more intimately, more personally, than many other poets. They are not mere stylistic tactics or adopted stances, but insights reaped by living through them, seeing how life affirms the mysticism of Taoism and Buddhism. Thus they are coherently westernized. This is so because Gilbert doesn’t always open with simply accepting their terms. Some of the poems are the struggle toward realization told from the point of view of a western mind.

However, on the whole, his poems are not parabolic, moving from point to point to a final destination, and they are not circular in reaching a resolution or redemption. They are more like a tetherball circling closer and closer to a central point. The iterations the poems cycle through may, at times, lack the peremptory quality that is typically valued in poetry, but they make up for it with their exuberance and joy, in finally transforming the daily and pedestrian into gold, in observing the overlaps of places and identity through time, in noticing the interpenetration of histories within a single life. So his poems may resist memorization because they lack inevitability, but his poems are, in spite of it, memorable.

Not a poet of great music, but a wonderful poet of insight, of the turn of thought that startles or delights. This is the music of reflection, not the right note but the well-articulated idea. If he were a painter, he would be Magritte. Because of this remove, that he is an idea poet and not a musical poet, he is fond of simile. His use of simile does not always please, but it does often provoke. And this is the point. If his similes produce a pause in reading, this does not stall the poem since it causes a consideration of the insight that constitutes the poem. That is, Gilbert does not employ simile as a mere lyrical comparison but as a way to inspire us to think and notice. But thinking means considering, pausing, lingering, which a poem called “Burning (Andante non troppo)” is all about. This is a collection worth lingering over, worth allowing yourself to enjoy. It may actually help you to enjoy life more. Few collections can claim such a triumph.

Skating with Heather Grace -- Poems by Thomas Lynch

Skating with Heather Grace
Poems by Thomas Lynch

This book has been on my shelf for a number of years. It was a collection I occasionally pulled down in passing, read a poem or two, and then returned to its ledge among the other titles in my library. Recently I took it down and carried it with me for several days, reading it from cover to cover a few times. It is something I should have done long ago.

Published in Knopf’s Poetry Series in 1986, this is Thomas Lynch’s first book. As such, the biographical information doesn’t say anything about his poetic career but highlights the fact that he makes his living as an undertaker. Although heavy-handed in pointing this out, it clearly informs every poem.

Robert Frost’s cool philosophical understanding of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion is here heightened to a pitch to hold off despair in the face of death and loss. Lynch has an almost desperate desire for cohesion.

sing the same song over and over
because the sound it makes keeps me intact.
(“Noon on Saturday”)

This is the ars poetica of these poems. But it’s not an existential cry, as Matthew Arnold saying, “I am fragments.” It is not his psyche he fears will disintegrate, but his actual body.

I’m frightened witless at the prospect of
some bomb or cancer out there with my name on it.
(“Damage”)

What underlies these poems is an acute feral vulnerability, a profound awareness of how tenuous our hold on life really is.

you and your song rise in the leafy air
chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.
(“A Clearing in the Woods”)

All of this plays into his adroit manipulation of rhyme, assonance and repetition. There may be the occasional and slight drift away from thematic elements in favor of a phonetic choice, but never enough to spoil the tone and eventual progress into these meditations that are rooted in earth and blood. Considering the tack taken in his poem “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love,” the identities that comprise its rhyme scheme work in conjunction with the idea that the rapture will bring a second life to those taken, a kind of repetition that the poem subtly rebuffs with the final identity being broken where “leaves” is not repeated but transformed into “left,” the final word. It plays on the double-entendre of “left” allowing those who are not taken up in the rapture to find their own salvation in moments of transcendence, which, in the end, like everything else, are finite.

All of these poems are full of the longing for the ethereal, a life beyond the earthbound and what birds, and gulls in particular, in the collection come to symbolize:

out where the gulls glide on the edge of weather
songs in praise of rootlessness and wayfare
(“Learning Gravity”)

And in another poem there is the desire to

join them in the air beyond the land
and make my life with them diving between islands.
(“A Dream of Death in the First-Person”)

But this cannot be. We are all bound by

laws
whereby things rise and fall, arrive and take
their leave according to their gravity.
(“Learning Gravity”)

Those birds and what they represent and everything beyond them are finally

a new life form light-years removed from me.
(“I Felt Myself Turning”)

Or as Lynch puts it in the penultimate poem of the collection

we, none of us survives
our awful will to live or will to die.
(“Damage”)

It’s said that every elegy is really written about the writer’s own fear of death. This may be the case, but for Lynch, an undertaker by trade, he sees death as random and omnipresent, an ever looming threat against everyone. When, in the poem “Damages,” he invokes the collective pronoun, it’s not to summon an authority he doesn’t have, the way a bad poet might. Instead, it’s to truly touch on something affecting us all. It’s why what is so attractive in these poems is their deep compassion. They are heartbreakingly compassionate. And in this context, other elements, the moments within life, those transcendent but doomed moments, are prized in their fragile brilliance, such as where he tries to remember the naked body of a friend he once slept with years ago, or he watches his young daughter skate and realizes he will gradually need to let her go as she gets older. These are the moments of meaning, of history, of personal significance that are given such deep poignancy against the relentless and inevitable triumph of the meaningless. It saddens them but increases the attention given to them.

Skating with Heather Grace is one of those collections where the poet faces our common abyss and it is a more honest collection than you will typically find because it is not angry but worried, concerned in the way one is when you know such terrible things happen daily, when you see that everyone around you is standing at the edge of the same inescapable end. Here, the resigned faith that “life goes on,” is a poetic principle, it is an amor fati that demands we sing and sing loudly. To paraphrase Roethke, who is invoked in the longest poem, it is the kind of shaking that keeps us steady. It is the precarious balance between two polarized dreams. It is where we live and where these poems take place. This is not only a collection worth reading, it a collection worth rereading.

Tomorrow’s Living Room -- A Review

Tomorrow’s Living Room
Poems by Jason Whitmarsh


This is Jason Whitmarsh’s first book. It is winner of the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award. And it is a deserving collection. One that may at first mislead you with its wit and simplicity. His deft casualness makes it possible to breeze through these poems without thinking of the odd statements being made. Indeed, in his citation, Billy Collins, who chose the book for the award, points out the “pleasurable disorientation” of the language, its “mixture of directness and imaginative surprise.” And the back of the dust jacket describes them as “alternately wry and dark.” These are all accurate observations of the surface textures, but to some extent, miss the point, miss why these poems are such a surprising tonal blend.

The opening poem is called “Forecasts” and is a grouping of four quatrains, all involving some sort of evasion, distance or submerged emotion controlling the actual moment. For instance, the second quatrain goes,

The rock fell from a great and far-off height
and plummeted silently through the roof
into bed, where it replaced your heart.
That’s what I think. It’s why you’re so aloof.

This distance, heightened by the internal monologue, foretells the rest of the collection. Indeed, that insistent, “That’s what I think” is at the core of Whitmarsh’s linguistic landscape. The poems are often pivoting on people so involved in what they think, they fail to make any real connection with others. Another poem, early in the book, is “One Art.” It is a satire of the famous Bishop villanelle, brilliantly using the exact same rhymes in the sequence of Bishop’s original. But in this version, the speaker is talking about wishing to be Bruce Lee when he was young so he could hit his “way out of disaster.” The poem concludes,

It’s evident
why I wanted to be a kung fu master,
as though desire alone could prevent disaster.

This desire is at the heart of the original Bishop poem, a speaker who is aching to convince themselves of something they don’t truly believe. This resonates to the key struck by the rest of Whitmarsh’s collection, which, on the whole, addresses the disasters that come from entertaining our fantasies too much, the emotional traumas of too much indulgent daydreaming. It’s why the tone is such a peculiar blend of humor and loneliness.

The title of another poem is “He Said These Things, Not Even I Could Forgive Him.” The first line of this poem goes

I’m kind of reluctant to mention the superhero powers
I’ve acquired since last we talked.

This is an opening line that leaves one expecting to laugh the rest of the way through. But the poem ends with the speaker saying,

In my dream
I grabbed an electric fence and when I woke I said
how strange to be in pain in a dream and you said
I was lucky it wasn’t worse, those fences are dangerous.

Oddly, it seems, dream and reality are beginning to blend by the conclusion of the poem. The person spoken to is almost accepting the terms of the “superhero” who is speaking. However, we can’t forget the title. The person spoken to resents the speaker. Why? Perhaps for no other reason than that the superhero is talking about what should remain unspoken.

If Whitmarsh’s poems are about the dramas that result when our unspoken fantasy lives break in and distance us from our real lives, these unspoken fantasies are also the source of what drives us to need each other or what makes us interesting or even who we are. One poem says it’s

Better, maybe, to let the guilt metastasize
than to cancel by good intent
any chance to surprise.

A couplet says,

Everything weak in us survives. It’s meant to.
If not, not a day would go by where I’d want you.

This couplet is from a poem titled “Three Curses.” The implication is that this is a curse, that our weakness is what drives us to want others, to desire. It is also what creates our fantasies and the distances between us. Or as Whitmarsh says in another poem, “One begins ever after and ends upon a time.”

It is a wonderful debut collection, inventive in its forms, from villanelles, triolets, and ghazels to prose poems and all handled with a casual fluency. He writes with compressed intensity; only a handful of his poems are longer than half a page. But all glitter like well-cut gems.

Charles O. Hartman: New & Selected Poems

On
Charles O. Hartman
New & Selected Poems
Review by Michael T. Young

I happily discovered this poet through Facebook. The Ahsahta Press sent a publication notice for his New & Selected Poems along with one sample poem. The sample poem was short, but stimulating, a poem that, as a poet myself, I thought after reading it, “I wish I had written that.” Consequently, I ordered his New & Selected Poems and am truly glad to have encountered this poet’s intelligence.

He is a jazzy sensibility. This is clear in the variety of his forms. He seems to endlessly experiment. His poems range from metrical to free verse to prose poems. You can see stylistic undercurrents from such diverse sources as William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Patchen and Francis Ponge, which is not to say these are direct models, but simply atavistic ancestors. You hear them faintly, in the distance, since Hartman makes the forms his own, extending them, working them into his personal vision and exploration of meaning. In each form he shows himself capable of transforming his material into the search for the limits of what might be said. However, testing these boundaries always carries risks that few ever escape all the time.

Sometimes his poems lose their emotional tie, lose the sense of a definite speaker and become simply linguistic artifacts. These perhaps result from struggling too hard to reach his end. But at his best, when he allows his instinct to carry him a little of the way, these ties hold and thread together his deep curiosity, his intelligent wanderings and make for sometimes unexpectedly moving poems. Such startling examples are “Over a Cup of Tea,” “Joinery,” “The Theory of Sunday,” and “Landscape with Marmots: Quasimodo Unstraps His Hump.” Such extremes in his work come from his daring, his willingness to take risks, exploring the boundaries of meaning as other poets such as James Tate, John Ashbery or Marvin Bell. For Hartman, this exploration is bound up with the vague landscapes of memory and the fragile constructions of the self, both of which are not solid, but fluid, a movement rather than an object. As he says in “The Long View,” “Who we are is where we have been going.” Memory and identity are verbs, not nouns and time in this context is part of a puzzle that is perpetually constructed by the attentive intelligence. “Time is pieces to adjust” he says in “The Lens.” Because of this fluidity the self that suffers the flux has a singularly important lesson to learn: compassion. As much as Hartman’s poems are full of risk and experimentation, they are also full of forgiveness. Rather than suffering making us stronger, it has instead the potential to make us more understanding, more accepting.

We for whom the hardest lesson is that no virtue
inheres in being uncomfortable or unhappy
may suffer on a day like this
the vertigo of a stair missed in the dark.

Easier to offer thanks for the afternoon
once we know we could not deserve it,
as when the hunter with the groundhog in his sights
decides gracefully never to have existed.
(“Landscape with Marmots: Quasimodo Unstraps His Hump”)

It is the willingness to go on in the common effort beyond our endless error.

Having made
errors of all kinds, we have learned one another

approximately. We feel our way between two mysteries
into a third. Night rises, and with a common motion we gather in
each other, all we can hold.
(“Over a Cup of Tea”)

This is an intelligence striving to accept its own limits and extend that as grace, a mind creating a kind of faith by the power of its imagination. We do what we can with the limits of our minds and hearts. We struggle toward each other and always failing, accept and hold what we can of the approximations we make of each other’s presence. So, if Hartman’s poems sometimes get lost in their own discourse, it is only because they are like these approximations, which are ultimately believable and beautiful in their efforts and rhythms, delightfully intelligent in their experimentation and exploration.


New & Selected Poems was published by Ashatha Press in 2008.
http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/hartman2/hartman2.htm

The Cindery In-betweens of Charles Tomlinson

My essay on George Oppen, the inaugural posting in my blog, opened with a poem Oppen wrote to the British poet, Charles Tomlinson. The following essay is a consideration of the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, a wonderful poet in his own right.

One thing I should alert my readers to is that I am, so far, unable to make the poems properly post with their indentations. I apologize for this and hope to shortly rectify this problem.

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The Cindery In-betweens of Charles Tomlinson
By Michael T. Young


A poet is a type of geographer charting verbal countries in rhythms and metaphors. Some note the unobserved details of previously visited terrain while others discover altogether new islands. What the British poet, Charles Tomlinson, does is bring this metaphor of mine closer to an identity. That is, his verbal explorations are most often of literal geographic locations and their metaphysical depths. Tomlinson is deeply attuned to the landscapes he has visited in his lifelong travels, whether it’s Venice, Rome, Oaxaca or New York.

Although Charles Tomlinson has a name less recognizable than Philip Larkin or possibly even Thomas Gunn, he is their contemporary and as much a masterful poet. He was born in Stoke-on Trent in 1927 and educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge. A professor of English at Bristol University for thirty-six years, Tomlinson is also a successful visual artist, with some of his works published in 1976 under the title In Black and White: The Graphics of Charles Tomlinson.

In Tomlinson’s poetry his visual facility keeps pace with his poetic ear. This combination of eye and ear makes for lushly and subtly textured lines such as

. . . water, seeping up to fill their pits,
Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine
Between tips and steeples, streets and waste

or

A trout, facing upstream, hangs
Balanced against the current he is riding:
Tail and fin countervail the force
Which keeps compelling him into acquiescence

These are delectable syllables, tasteful on the tongue and easy to relish. In fact, it might be enough to simply bask in the pleasure of his sound if that were all his poetry offered. But it isn’t. In early and late poems alike he returns to locations to meditate upon them and Tomlinson is a profound thinker. Buildings, events, moments in his travels are carefully and caringly traced through collections ranging from The Necklace in 1955 to Skywriting in 2003.

In the telling poem, “At Stoke,” about his childhood landscape, he writes,

I have lived in a single landscape. Every tone
And turn have had for their ground
These beginnings in grey-black: a land
Too handled to be primary—all the same,
The first in feeling. I thought it once
Too desolate, diminished and too tame
To be the foundation for anything. It straggles
A haggard valley and lets through
Discouraged greennesses, lights from a pond or two.
By ash-tips, or where the streets give out
In cindery in-betweens, the hills
Swell up and free of it to where, behind
The whole vapoury, patched battlefield,
The cows stand steaming in an acrid wind.
This place, the first to seize on my heart and eye,
Has been their hornbook and their history.

Indeed, the characteristics of this landscape intimate the interests and traits of his poetry, its color, its lights, a poetic life spent exploring all the “cindery in-betweens.” I tend to imagine Stoke with the “lights from a pond or two” serving as single points of certainty, of definition in a gray landscape, and I think this may be true for Tomlinson himself. One sees it in the care he takes with the structure of his poetry, the abundance of internal music, the rhyme, and the ease with which he moves through his meters. One sees it in the occasions of his poetry when “Light stilled the mind, then showed it what to do.”

Like his contemporaries such as Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and Philip Larkin, Tomlinson responded stylistically, and even thematically, to those excesses found in a poet like Dylan Thomas. His poetry is not grandiose and passionate but thoughtful and controlled. This is not to say that Tomlinson’s poetry is cold and indifferent. Rather, his poetry shows the complexities of a mind and heart equally bound up in its responses to the world. These elements—heart, mind and world—so mingle and mutually make each other, none govern absolutely. But together they engender a form and structure in Tomlinson’s work that is not only poetic technique but insight into universal principles. In “Swimming Chenango Lake” the light playing on the water “is a geometry and not/A fantasia of distorting forms.” It is this same impetus that inspires a poem like “Against Extremity” or “Roma: Monte del Gallo” where the nature of two cypresses sit in “deep/Arboreal indifference to unsleeping Rome.” To Tomlinson, structure, form, and artifice are healing powers and the way to “wish back Eden.” But it would be wrong to think there is no conflict or struggle. We are, in fact, the dispossessed, living in a world expelled from Eden.

The fact that we need the healing powers of art implies our sickness and struggle. But what that art discloses is that the balances we strike simultaneously are points of great conflict and convergence. Here, equal and opposite forces become one another as often as they balance. In fact, the definition of balance may be not where equal and opposite forces cancel each other out but where they seamlessly become one another. Thus scavenging birds in “The Faring,”

. . . intent
On nothing more than the ploughland’s nourishment,
Brought the immeasurable in

Conversely, the poem “In Arden” discloses a manifest world echoing the transcendent and moves to that unseen rhythm as

. . . Arden’s springs
Convey echoic waters — voices
Of the place that rises through this place
Overflowing, as it brims its surfaces
In runes and hidden rhymes, in chords and keys
Where Adam, Eden, Arden run together
And time itself must beat to the cadence of this river.

With a poet like Tomlinson, it is not easy to plumb the depth of a poem, for multiple currents run through them, mingling, merging and separating in a constant dance of light and shade. It might seem like evasiveness if it weren’t for the fact that life hangs perpetually at the edge of revelation. Forces simultaneously disclose and cover the depths, like the gull in The Way of a World that “Swayed toiling against the two/Gravities that root and uproot the trees.” Or more overtly in Snow Signs, where, although the snow covers the landscape, rather than hiding the world, it leads to a revelation of contours that were otherwise unnoticed,

It is written here in sign and exclamation,
Touched-in contour and chalk-followed fold,
Lines and circles finding their completion
In figures less certain, figures that yet take hold
On features that would stay hidden but for them:

These are other forms of the cindery in-betweens, places where we stand before “the competing geometries of shore and sky,” or watch a jet trail

. . . beneath
this no-man’s territory to see
How far that fringe of vapour can prolong
Its fading signature against space

This territory has been Tomlinson’s poetic homeland from the beginning. His exploration of it for more than fifty years has made him one of its most accurate geographers, one of its most revealing historians, and one if its most sensitive poets. It is a rich country full of details and subtleties to which this visitor’s brief journal entry can only hint.