It’s hard to say just where we are in American poetry these days. But it is clear that poets, like those gathered here, have plausible theories. A world of violence appears to be mapped in each of the books gathered here. And that violence may have to do with vengeance acted out as a classical evening of scores. In order to keep nature at bay, barriers, like those that establish harbors, must be erected. And in those harbors, and beyond them, a sense of home is crucial, or else how can a place that is safely our own be established? Of course the maps of these safe harbors and homes have to be imagined and accessible. The way there, the evolving paths of our creation, wandering, zigzagging, including both quicksand and oasis, extinction and renewal, gives the human race its story. To recognize these origins is to live in a state of constant surprise, both wonder and despair. And understanding our place not only on earth, but cosmically leads us to seek patterns and to make them. As with myth, we have to make up stories to explain the very phenomena that surround us and of which we are a mysterious part. These ontological generalizations arise as poetry and continue to be made up and explored in poems. Putting together any group of contemporary poems, like those I have collected here, affords the opportunity to find patterns of origin and evolution among them. Lacking a standardized form or traditional role for poetry, it is possible that form and purpose must be rediscovered with each poem if it is going to be worth reading. Note that I have implied this as a possibility. I am not about to prescribe how a poem should be written but only to describe what we have in our moment. In our moment we live in a violent world that is given to vengeance, if we are to believe our poets.
Paula Bohince’s A Violence,[1] her fourth collection, often gives us instead of narrative or argument a series of associated images, a carnival of language. “Escape to Fiji” offers exotic imagery that leads the poet to exclaim, “Flowers, include me ecstatic in your orgasm.” Ecstasy literally allows one to stand outside of her circumstances, to escape them. But Bohince is also interested in identifying the origin of those circumstances. She finds her way back in the first poem, “Accordion Music,” to an original Slovenian couple, an Adam and Eve, both having waded into a lake, with “our lives / inside of her and inside of him.” Much American poetry has dealt with our origins in Europe, and there is a kind of nostalgia in reviving the old country. But Bohince reminds us that it was the strangeness of the New World, the familiar become unfamiliar, that set our ancestors on their explorations, even as they named new places after old.
Each thing known in creation is an opportunity for invention, as it returns us to our origins. The pictures of missing children on milk cartons bring back the past when “you studied . . . their crooked haircuts / and freckles, the optimism of their last / school picture, that they were and were not you.” Ultimately, but not originally, these images are a sort of pastoral, “the green / of childhood,” as she says in the collection’s last poem, “The Green.” Recognizing the ancient connection between the color and its meanings, she admits, “I’ve held on to // childishness longer than most . . .” There is a difference between childhood and childishness, and A Violence reminds us of that repeatedly, as much like a lullaby as a prison sentence. Trauma preserves the violence that undermines childhood, so that undermining seems almost a necessity. The title poem suggests that “too much spring” can be a violence. But I also hear my mother saying that too much of anything is a bad idea. Bohince’s aim in this book is to free our minds of cant.
Moira Egan’s The Furies[2] evokes incarnations of vengeance and conscience to remind us in particular of classical forms of judgment, like those brought to mind by Dante’s Divina Commedia. Many readers have agreed that the most gripping aspects of Dante’s genius exist in the first of the three books, the Inferno, since the stories of sin and the punishment for it reflect the greatest inventiveness. Egan’s emphasis is the feminist response to masculine sin. Her opening section deals with group therapy for female characters from the Odyssey. In the section that gathers these characters, Penelope explains how she held her household together in her husband’s absence; a Siren speaks on behalf of her lethal song as a kind of listening; Circe puts men on a spit for behaving like swine; Scylla protests as a scorned lover; her sister Charybdis describes her bulimia; and the princess Nausikaa speaks of finding Odysseus; and his agèd wet nurse, still living, turns her living charge from revenge on her since “the story isn’t ever black or white.”
That these characters are part of a great sisterhood is emphasized in the second part, Sororal, with the testament of Arachne, “tangled in this tiny web,” who advises, “Don’t fuck with the goddess.” More important though is “Elegy for the Man Who Shut Me Up,” which ends, “You tried to shut us / down. I’m here to tell you now, / No such luck, buddy.” Though the story of Procne and Philomela is not clearly enunciated, the attempt of male rapists to silence their victims fails in the very witness which, think of it, has allowed the myths to live and be repeated. “The Dear, The Dark” declares “the way the light emerges out of shadow.” These are ancient tales of rapes and murders that attempted to impose the imperfection of silence on their victims. But in “Flawed,” we are reminded “perfect is the enemy of good.” With or without violence, poetry will out, but with violence more often than not.
I like Bruce Lawder’s poems in his new book[3] mostly because they do not pretend to be anything other than short lyric expressions of strong feeling. Even when the words sound familiar, as if lifted from other poems, they take us in surprising directions. Christ’s commandments to consider the lilies of the field and to look at the birds of the air and how they are cared for may underline the message of every nature poem ever written. But Lawder’s “Chough Talk” showers us with a bracing realization of the ambiguity and danger of anthropomorphizing the nonhuman world, as we do when we make an example of it, as a parable does.
Up into the mountains
the choughs go, over
the summits, over the snow.
Love your neighbors, they caw,
like yourself. The meek
shall inherit the earth.
Ask, ask, ask
and it shall be
given, seek, seek, seek
and it shall be found,
caw the choughs as they go
over the tree-line, over the snow.
We might hear these birds as mocking us as they leave us behind. But their speech is still that of the Savior who employed them metaphorically to speak the truth. Lawder creates a rich paradox between the human and the nonhuman, when the former attempts to see the latter in its own human terms. Part of the resonance derives from belief, but even a lyric as modest and profound as this suspends disbelief. As soon as we accept the personification of those birds, we are part of the faith they embody.
By the time I had finished reading Priscilla Long’s Cartographies of Home,[4] I had grown to love it. I had encountered an ingeniously apt image of childhood as a “slow river” that “slides snake-bellied / down its mud-bed / to sleep in unknown seas.” There the child dreams “of growing up to parse the world.” It could be and in fact is because these images and dreams remind me of my own. Robert Penn Warren in one of his late poems speaks of his desire to name the world. Realizing that one is part of a larger world is crucial to growing up, even though it may include how in “Keepsakes” children watched their brother “beat / our smaller sister / every day, day after day after day.” As a child I knew other children like this, their lives adjacent to mine, like cautionary ghosts, which may or may not actually be ghosts. It was as scary to witness as to be part of the violence they lived with. “House of Anger” even with its sound track of Bach makes a convincing case for the second nature of the violence one may have grown up with, just as one may have known serenity. A child might think it’s natural until he or she learns otherwise, not always traumatically either, but at someone else’s house.
It is Long’s title which got me thinking about these collections as maps or plots, grids, outlines for maps. The title reminds us that every home may be mapped differently but for the same reasons. The deprivations of a life as in “The Banjo Lesson” provides a “dream of a home” where “there’s always bread on the table.” A life of deprivation, in which the durability of memory might be compared to the lastingness of plastic trash, is still a life. A beloved brother, who knew physics and had a taste for good whiskey and opera productions in New York, still may end up in jail to die “alone in a hospital.” How much can we do to keep our brothers and sisters? We can divide their belongings among us. “Brother/3,” perhaps the best of the poems, ends:
What were his last thoughts?
He’s buried beside the wife he used
to beat. No one wants his childhood
photos. I wear his Rolex. Time wears down.
This rain-soaked night I dream my brother,
friend to me. He arrives but never speaks.
No one wants his childhood photos or his childhood. But anyone surviving a childhood like this can learn there’s a good life where people have “long talks into the night / debating wine and poetry.” And arriving there intact, “Old age requires a decent fountain pen, / make that a Montblanc.” Our poet asks that we seek her in “poems / without words” when she’s gone. Yet quoting Julio Cortázar, she pleads, “Don’t / let me fade away / like some stupid song . . .” I don’t know what stupid song she may have in mind, but it is certainly not one of the testaments of love and grief mapped out in these pages.
Biology, especially evolutionary biology, goes well with poetry, that is, if the poet is a biologist like Brandon Kilbourne in his Cave Canem Prize book Natural History.[5] His accomplishment may be to show that like the towering giraffe in a zoo, the enslavement of Africans is just as much the creation of zoologists, European explorers, and disinterested scientists. It was part of the scientific process, in which living things on an unknown continent could be treated as specimens, useful as natural resources. In this case slavery is one more exhibit in the white world’s museums, in “a glassed-in jungle’s cemetery silence.” So it may have been conceived, but sociologically it is “the curious institution,” and we know it to be unnatural history masked as natural history. Famously the human cargo from Africa was treated inhumanely. Other poets, notably Robert Hayden in “Middle Passage,” have described this crime in its horrible dimensions, but Kilbourne, I think, is the first to give it the scientific gloss applied by its European perpetrators. In Kilbourne’s every description, then, of rhinoceros, wolverine, giraffe, we can see the correspondent lineaments of the human beings similarly treated. “The Last Sea Cow’s Testimony” gives an account of Steller’s sea cow appearing for the first time to European eyes:
As dawn gilded the bay after a night
of squall-stoked swells, we beheld them like
a haggard omen visited upon us by the tide . . .
But actually the “we” here are the sea cows themselves, whose natural world will be utterly changed by the human presence. Wrenchingly they admit never to have witnessed
anything like their habitual
barbarity—I remember watching cows dragged
and beached on shore, their bodies methodically
butchered to the bone, my mate’s skin torn off
as she writhed her tail, the twin spurts erupting
from her opened back with each dying gasp . . .
Savagery is not simply a matter of point of view. Though I have heard warfare described as controlled ferocity, scientists can’t be considered to be making war on their objects of study. And yet biology and poetry are both able to tell the difference between peaceful study and brutal assault. The problem Kilbourne reminds us of is when we lose our humanity in the treatment of our fellow creatures. Kilbourne calls this “Carrion Knowledge.” The root of civilizations, pyramids, the “handiwork / of concrete and ink, pasture and war,” he argues, is “a dead fish.” Along with the survival of the fittest is the fossil record. Poetry and biology are both the study of life as it is lived. I think poets have always understood this, but they have not always seen that the evolutionist Charles Darwin is a crucial addition to the Muses.
The startling things Ada Limón keeps discovering in her new book Startlement[6] are the meanings of her personal relationships. Twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, as announced on the cover, Limón offers a down-to-earth, refreshingly unpretentious look at these relationships, family life, landscapes, love, disappointment, and grief. Admitting in “State Bird” that love has made her accept the less than acceptable place she lives, she says, “whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird, / the loud, obvious blur of song people point to / when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.” That in any relationship there is or may be an inequality, she recognizes in “First Lunch with Relative Stranger Mister You” as “I’ve brought a lot to the table. // You’ve brought an orange.” She is a grown-up, as we might understate, who has learned how much of successful living, especially with someone else, involves compromise and faith. She says as much in “Sharks in the Rivers,” with “I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, / I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.” There are passing references to a congenital disability, but nothing that looks to me like self-pity. In fact, a sense of the true survivor’s boasting comes through in “How to Triumph Like a Girl”:
I like the lady horses best,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
“Don’t you want to believe it?” she asks. Well, actually, reading this startlingly good and accomplished poet, I already do.
My introduction to Limón’s poetry was “The Raincoat.” In the poem she recalls the years of physical therapy her parents provided for her spinal deformity, therapy that she still maintains as an adult. Driving home from a session, she sees a mother shed her raincoat in a rainstorm in order to give it to her daughter. The epiphany is not unlike others she recounts.
My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
That poem made me want to read more of this poet, and I am happy to have found Startlement.
It occurs to me that in a lifetime of reading poems, I have had the experience more than once of a single poem leading me to the poet’s larger work. I can’t remember where I first read the following poem by Daniel Mark Epstein. Its title is “Helen.”
“Tell us a love story,”
Pleaded the class in chorus.
“Our lessons are all done,
Now don’t lecture or bore us,”
They prattled, except for one,
Helen, whose gaze looked lost
In the maze of willow branches,
The girl the boys liked most
For the faraway blue of her eyes
And brown hair straight as rain.
“Tell us a love story, please,”
They begged the teacher again.
He frowned and longed for the bell,
Saying “All the love stories I know
End in heartache, or death—”
Then Helen, from the back row
Called at last from her daydream
In the voice of an innocent lover,
“Tell us a love story anyway
And stop before it is over.”
The eroticism of a lover’s “don’t stop” in the act of lovemaking is nicely echoed in Helen’s “stop before it is over.” I once read that Marianne Moore rather than writing discursively about the books of poetry she was reviewing would prefer just to point, to reproduce the poems and passages she admired. Finding “Helen” in Daniel Mark Epstein’s collected poems, constellations,[7] has been a pleasure since it has led me into a unique bonus of hearing some of my favorite older poets echoed in his work. The echoes are not derivative but indicate mastery learned through years of attentive reading. The echoes of Edna St. Vincent Millay are especially attractive, since Epstein is one of Millay’s best biographers. I can wholeheartedly recommend What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, his 2001 rapture on the great poet, as I can his own collected poems. His poems are unfailingly lyrical in their traditional verse forms, whether providing character studies like E. A. Robinson or grappling with history in blank verse à la Robert Lowell. The issue of mastery is resolved in poems that belong to Epstein alone. An old story is told in a new way, for example in “Jacob at Peniel.”
Once I had no pillow but a stone
When I fled my brother’s jealous wrath.
Yet I slept the night, so far from Canaan.
I bought his birthright for a cup of broth
When hunger dulled his wits. Owning that,
I slipped into my brother’s robes and voice
And stole into the tent of my blind father
Who blessed me to be lord of the firstborn.
Yet I slept the night, for neither fear
Nor guilt could vex my sleep when I was young.
I would be happy to hear Daniel Mark Epstein retell any number of old stories and make them young again.
[1] A VIOLENCE: Poems, by Paula Bohince. Princeton University Press. $17.95p.
[2] THE FURIES, by Moira Egan. Louisiana State University Press. $20.95p.
[3] BREAKWATER ROCK, by Bruce Lawder. Homestead Lighthouse Press. $19.00.
[4] CARTOGRAPHIES OF HOME, by Priscilla Long. MoonPath Press. $19.99p.
[5] NATURAL HISTORY, by Brandon Kilbourne. Graywolf Press. $17.00p.
[6] STARTLEMENT: New and Selected Poems, by Ada Limón. Milkweed Editions. $28.00.
[7] CONSTELLATIONS, by Daniel Mark Epstein. Louisiana State University Press. $44.95.
