Relapsing dream,
nest of flowering gold
and my hands at its center.
Blood leaving the face,
old eyes blind from starstaring.
Those aren’t yellow aspens
on the mountain but fireflies
held at call,
waiting for the song
to resume.
(a ‘translation’ / erasure / repair of a Lorca poem…)
And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally—
it is only
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded— . . .
something like that, the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
(Franz Wright, of course…)
The Coldest Winter on Earth by David Dodd Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lee’s work is unerringly visceral, singularly invested on a deep personal level, and always offering a stark, unflinching display for both the speaker-self as well as the reader-observer. Place and memory are often of the most delineated actors in Lee’s books but perhaps never as much so as in this newest collection. Lee seems unafraid of embracing not only the yearning and regret cultivated by the past but the rich, nostalgic confusion that occurs when it’s mirrored and overlapped by the present. Life whirls around Lee’s standing-still speaker as places and people empty out and refill — this is really all that time is as it cruelly steps on. While textually many of these poems appear spare this is another of the brilliant gestures Lee knows so well, and just as a smell can trigger an entire season full of memories Lee’s poems explode and engulf, shrink down to pinpoints with the weight of dark matter. His lines are full of characteristic leaps of association that can comfort or drunkenly go dizzy. There’s always a deft, natural touch to the mechanical bits, the syntax and vocabulary, but Lee’s unique flavor is in a matured, raw patina of breathlessness, anger, lust; artistry without guise, a performance that’s never just putting you on. These poems are as comfortable throwing you against the wall as letting you quietly sink to the bottom of a pond.
There’s good reason why David Dodd Lee remains a staple in the small group of poets I find I can reliably return to when hitting depressingly long dry spells between books that feel like knockouts. One of my flaws as a reader is my susceptibility to taking such spells in dramatic stride, despairing for no good reason that either there just aren’t any books coming out that will genuinely unsettle me or that for some reason poetry has lost some of its destructive and surprising powers to me. Fortunately enough, these things are never true and Lee is a poet that invariably clarifies to me through absurd bouts of self-obfuscation what I personally value in a collection, or put another way, what gets inside of my head and refuses to leave. This kind of reliability is increasingly remarkable to me when over long careers many poets only oscillate in and out of this startlingly complex kind of efficacy.
For lack of a better term, Lee’s ‘staying power’ when included on any shelf has been almost unparalleled in my experience as a reader of poetry over the years. ‘Coldest Winter on Earth’ not only manages not to be an exception to this rule but an admirably achieved high note.
*poof*
Making some small edits & sending this one out, so taking it down from here. Also thanks as always to Vince for his helpful and generous comment.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Dear stranger, dear anger, dear fantasies of justice, please ferry us to
the lake where the stories are clear.”
-from the poem ‘Fist and After, El Cinzano’
Dostoevsky has provided the enduring idea that it is by observing a society’s prisons that one can most richly decide on that society’s progress; many admirable riffs on the moral notion of ‘What you do unto the least…’ appear in some form or another in most cultures.
The most striking effect of Idra Novey’s newest collection is the collage of voices and emotions she collects so austerely, creating what feels like a very considered mode that reflects the prisons she’s contemplating — ‘critiquing’ seems too simplistic a term. The vocabulary of impressions is detached, observational (one might say the speaker here is in an oscillating place of micro-detail as well as macro-culture surveillance). But, also like prisons, very human, personal, charged with memory, and often subdued to an unsettling extent, aware as we are privy to being of just how much emotional blast and ruin must go on beneath surface appearances.
These small but immensely uncomfortable poems overlay reality with Novey’s inward-facing (face against the wall, citizen) imagination; like Bentham’s Panopticon, she seems to always be looking even when not wanting to, trying to. They manage to work at deconstructing the illusions around how we treat one another (and even think about how we treat one another), the circuitous perimeters we all use.
The unadorned tone throughout the book works against the trappings that can sometimes plague more overt social and political critique; the honest core of this to my mind is Novey’s sense of something like guilt or shame, rooted in a complicity any thoughtful citizen must encounter, hopefully often. Along this line the book is always rooted in the speaker’s own memory and emotion; there are brilliant bits of journalistic artifact and even an occasional dip into something like parable, but these to me seem like working extensions rather than the center.
The words ‘spare’ and ‘stark’ repeat often in conversations about this book, and they are apt, but enough emphasis cannot be given to the quiet but vibrant resonance of these poems. Novey has a touch for imagery that feels gracefully violent — like the polished steel curves of a weapon, her tonal gestures feel so fluid and natural they rarely betray the abrupt effects they will often cause — I’m tempted to describe this frequent encounter in the book, ironically, as disarming.
Novey opens the book with a short series titled ‘The Little Prison’, an inspired taking from Vasko Popa’s ‘The Little Box’, in which she jarringly writes:
“Wind a ribbon around the little prison
And pretend you made a gift
Give it to your neighbors
Or your cousins
Clasp your hands
With excitement”
I cannot help but end with Popa’s ending, from ‘Last News About the Little Box’, which feels remarkably appropriate here:
“But not one of the little boxes
Inside the little box in love with herself
Is the last one
Let’s see you find the world now”
‘Exit, Civilian’ is available now from The University of Georgia Press.
The Afterlife is a Dry County by Charmi Keranen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“I believe–// In extinction”, Keranen declares in the poem ‘The Great American Interchange’, a poem that like so many in this stunning chapbook manages to articulate scenes of complex juxtaposition that would be hilarious and evocative even if incorrectly taken to be mere happenstance. Simulacra, simple blotting-outs, and sincere questions about what is genuine and sacred run through many moments of Keranen’s work but the nihilism of the succinct line above is never really on the menu. Keranen effuses wry bits of it, however, like a choice spice drawn from a kind of wise, even warm cynicism.
Keranen’s speaker seems always ready to take the world sincerely but, again, what does it mean to be sincere? In the poem ‘Late Cretaceous’, we see the search: “100,000 years out from the homeland// We’re still dreaming// Of a mother tongue or a passport// Something personal// To touch against our skin”. Time scales in and out without much quibbling machination, Keranen’s speaker seemingly always at peace with how little relative time separates our world of plastic surgery and mundane train-ride conversations with our own struggle away from the savanna.
Keranen’s speaker sees and enacts blasphemy–a stolen bike chained to a crucifix, selling her mother’s bones in town for nothing–while also bearing witness to quiet, small moments of arresting intimacy that stand out with chillingly elegant language: ‘Touch the white of his back, the coldest/ parade.”
Spare, surgically-steeled poems move alongside more voice-driven, narrative pieces with an accomplished, comfortable momentum. There’s definite flair throughout these poems for texture and stand-alone images that invites a kind of coy symbolism while also brushing it away. We seem privy to a speaker as ready to forget the totems and callings to God that are familiar as she is to find new ones in the architecture of the unconscious–the five clutched pennies of a man uttering forlorn, broken Italian, a shaker full of hail found in a torn-open wall. Keranen has invited us into the erratic, ornate folklore of a mysterious yet familiar landscape.
Everyone should meander over to the blog of the always insanely talented and immediate David Dodd Lee. He has a new book out, and has graced us all with a sample poem that took the back of my head off (and wouldn’t return it).
Visit him here: http://seventeenfingeredpoetrybird.blogspot.com/
“I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?”
…..
“But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.”
Bright Brave Phenomena by Amanda Nadelberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
From the poem ‘Like a Tiny, Tiny Bird That Used to Make Us Happy’:
“The
bride and groom were shivering, it
actually started to snow. The shadow
of the mind stood up, changed tables,
like a plane I was coming and going.
Furniture happening places it shouldn’t,
blank bodies on the wrong half of the
world, we don’t know what to do.”
Amanda Nadelberg has accomplished so much polish alongside a kind of paradoxical cohesive chaos in this book that it makes me struggle to remember the last full-length collection I’ve read that seemed to hold together so well, particularly when playing (this is an understatement; toying? Nadelberg is running a linguistic fun house / carousel / quiet star-gazing party, here) along with its own physics and weather patterns.
Weather and nature seem so important throughout the book, and the often intense movement from line to line and poem to poem kept reminding me of a tornado, made of debris and always collecting more while always throwing off a house or tractor-trailer for the sake of the explosion–and always the twirling momentum intact, growing stronger, even when lazily meandering with approachable language. Nadelberg likes to let things float astray with brilliant collaging of imagery and tone while keeping things anchored with an almost jarring, lucid lyric-I mode that surfaces with an enjoyably unpredictable frequency and mood. Always a bit sly, whimsical, vulnerable and affirmed/affirming.
In an interview with Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Nadelberg mentions the use of weather as a kind of universal referent, and indeed it becomes another anchoring force throughout. This is yet another truly satisfying aspect of the book, as she bounces around accessible language and imagery yet always in a way that remains mysterious, as disjointed in presence and meaning as the classic ‘speaker’ that is far from an everyperson. This had the effect on me, like the linguistic shapeshifting and semantic riddling, of feeling like I was always in on the play and the joke, but only part-way, the perfect climate for a book that revolves around broken patterns (weather, words, histories, memories). The sadness isn’t always joyous but it nearly always felt affirming, a word that seems to come to my mind often (and, it seems, often in the minds of other reviewers / blurbs). Even the ‘I’ of these poems is fluid and ungraspable, often inhabiting other beings and spaces without a stumbling register of that change.
From the poem ‘Recommendation or Decision’:
“One of the nights
the sky fell over, came home, put his
keys in the jar. I am the Ostrich in the
foyer, I think about death a lot in general.”
What I perhaps loved and appreciated the most is Nadelberg’s talent for counterbalancing, for playing the thin line of whimsy and play against against genuine impressions of sadness, vulnerability, sadness flooded through with nostalgia and memory, quieter, more unsettled darker poems that to me re-emphasize the feelings of affirmation and hope; these aren’t distractions or defense mechanisms or put-ons, they’re machinations of brightness and progress, of surviving and doing so without ignoring all that might hold one back or in more toxic places.
From the poem ‘Poem from Claire’s Knee’:
“Come at me
with flowers and I will
run away. I manage a
factory of self-preservation.
It’s like I’ve found you
again in the factory.”
This slippery ‘you’ could easily be the poet herself, could be the frequent other ‘you’ that pops up often in the book, could be anything really, amid so much unhinged morphing–but I feel like I know, though I can’t put my finger on it, or it doesn’t quite matter, always the real trick when the reader is given a space to play a bit ourselves, sometimes even a seemingly straight-forward word can be a bit of a Rorschach.
To me this is the larger effect the book had on me, at least–everything that seems mundane and ‘accessible’ (always such a problematic term) becomes gorgeously strange, unsettling and affirming usually at the same time. More simply described, Nadelberg works amazingly well on the level of the line, word-to-word, letting fault lines form and the underlying plates slip and break almost constantly but without ever letting the entire thing crumble. Her poems here are coyly wrought, intensely emotional with thoroughly intellectual veins, witty and often enormously funny. A hallmark of what talent has meant to me for a while now is a kind of consistency–a book may have three or four truly mind-blowing poems, but do I read the other 70 or whatever to find them, the filler and scaffolding for the supernovas? Nadelberg offers one after another, every poem has earned its page and place in this collection, it’s a constellation of stars exploding, no bit of line here has gone slack.
‘Bright Brave Phenomena’ is published by Coffee House Press.
