Return to Archive Index

Number 289 January February March New & Noted RICHARD SILBERG Singular Bodies by Ruth L. Schwartz Anhinga Press, Tallahassee Florida, 2001 Overtime by Joseph Miller Eastern Washington University Press Spokane, Washingonton, 2001 r s 1 Voyages in English by Dara Wier Carnegie Mellon University Press Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 2001 Lovers In The Used World by Gillian Conoley Carnegie Mellon University Press Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2001 Life on Earth by Frederick Seidel Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York, 2001 r s 1 Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Singular Bodies, by Ruth L. Schwartz, Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida, 2001, 82 pages, $12.00 paper. Winner of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. He was so hungry, and the waves so delicate, even in their crashing, all the green driven by need to white. He'd moved the body too close to the surf. The ocean raced, the vulture hopped a little, spreading nervously his huge wings, his beak compulsive and uncertain in the flesh of it. Sometimes it is terrible to find your heart's desire. To want so much more than you can carry home--- the seabird's feet drawn back, as if it were still flying, and one wing raised up and white from the stilled waterfall of chest--- ( from "Turkey Vulture, Cove Beach") There are many birds in this book, symbols, embodiments of Ruth L. Schwartz's lyric impulse; she's a pure, soaring poet. But soaring's triumph, of course, praises the great rock of the Earth, the strength of its relentless gravity. Figurative transposition gives us Wallace Stevens's "Death is the mother of beauty." Schwartz sings life through against suffering and death, but her poetry is piercing, as here in this poem of the two birds, living and dead, eater and eaten, because, Stevenslike, she feels them both. The lonely beauty of "Hieroglyphics on a Branch of Peach," last poem in the book, turns on this duality of feeling: "Once, a woman made love to me / through the slippery dark. / Her brother was dying, her sisters were shooting / heroin in the bathroom as she moved her tongue / like sadness on my skin, and I felt / how all the sweet explosions--- / summer, orgasm, a ripe peach in the mouth--- / connect unfailingly to the barren fields. // What we have learned about love in this life / can never be removed from us. / Not one minute pried / from any of the days--- / and yet, there was a worm / which entered the live branch, // lived and ate and tunneled through / the wooden heart, and with its body wrote / new language / through the lost years." The central drama of Singular Bodies -- it's written in the book's center, the second of its three sections -- involves the sickness of her lover and a surgical transplant; Schwartz, literally, not poetically, gives the sick woman an organ of her own body, a kidney, to help make her well. Here, in the fourth section of "Flood Winter," we can feel both sides of the poet's equation again, the fierceness of her flight, and the depth of her acceptance: Because of all the days and nights I lived in the body's heaven, my hands keep touching everything in this new hell of the flesh --- the vomit-bucket, the shit-puddled sheets I move my lips over your forehead, the puffed, fluttering bellies of your closed eyes. Once, when you stroked my hair, that touch alone could strip me naked in the hot and golden field of your gaze. This land and that one are the same country. (page 38) Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Overtime, by Joseph Millar, Eastern Washington University Press, Spokane, Washington, 2001, 64 pages, $14.95 paper. It's not the verticality of Joseph Millar's poetry that impresses me but its interwovenness. He writes details, textures of blue collar America, machines, jokes, failed marriages; he writes sags, detours, human imbrications: "Thunder Bob used to drive for Consolidated Freight / before the small bones began to press / against the nerves in his lower back / and his right foot went numb. / Now he slouches in blue suspenders, / forearms propped on a steel desk, doing my taxes. // In the den his wife watches the Simpson trial / and he wants to get me done, squinting down / at last year's forms, muttering, a Chesterfield / burning away between his fingers. You need / more write-offs, he says, peering sideways / through the smoke. Since you can't afford a house, / why not have another kid, eh? / Rain blowing in off the bay rattles the windows / and the branches of the pin oaks moan. He knows / my wife moved out last year. The kids I've got / are waiting, eating cold Chinese by the TV. // You watch, he tells me. Soon they'll start messing / with Social Security. I can hear the lawyers' voices / carping down the airwaves and I think sometimes / the rain will never end, a bleak mudcaked creature / prowling the landscape, entering our homes / while we sleep, its ragged breath like quicklime / misting our faces." ("Tax Man") I'd like to quote some of Millar's more bravura, wide-angle poems, about oil work in Alaska, commercial salmon fishing, his two multi-page poems to his father, but it would take too much space to capture their effect. Besides, the voice and persona of these poems is as important as their content. So I'll quote one slim poem entire, "Family Therapy," that, in what it gives the reader to see, reflects back on the seer, this somewhat crazed, sweet, receptive well of a poet: My brother's brown eyes narrow when I tell him about the money I stole to pay Christmas bills, the lies I told the IRS and the bursts of cruelty to my son, how close I came last week to picking up a drink. He slides the five-eighths boxwretch from its case and leans under the hood, tells me to pry up against the alternator. This belt's too loose, he says. An evening breeze rustles down the pavement as my niece comes out of the house, long hair draped beside her face, and leans against the fender. Go back inside, he tells her. Bring us a Coke. Then he turns on me. Fuck the government, he says. Do you want to starve? He swipes at the grease on his forehead and the big knuckle on his right hand bleeds down onto the wheel well. Back off some on that pry bar or we'll break this goddamn thing. The pale fists of the hydrangea bump against the fence and a light comes on in the kitchen, its glow sifting onto the driveway as his wife opens the screen. Everybody yells at their kids, he says quietly, tightening the bottom bolt. Get in and start it up. We need to go for a ride. Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Voyages in English, by Dara Wier, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2001, 80 pages, $12.95 paper. A Personal Essay: a personal wish to fall down The "falling down" part is fine but not the fallen down when all the broken feelings rush to tell about their days shoving one another around shooting one another looks. What a pity feelings have feelings, too. You can wince when love looks away. You can hear in a look. As when a voice registers a timbre into secret whispers. As when a tree falls inside a closet. There's a swarm to this poetry, a rush to silence. Wier's writing feels caressive and confusing, needs to be read through several times before its meanings, its surreal, synesthetic logic ("You can hear in a look") begin to stand clear. And the work, or at least this book, often holds an aftertaste of pain, of torment calmly peered through, as if she were lining up the sights on a gun to see "a formal feeling come[s]." "Each word has a soul and this ink / is that famous temple in which the soul / endures---no, swells out to fill each figure's thought / the temple delineates---no, bloats up like the / also famous proud sails so that each word / demands a surface, yes, smooth as silk over a soul, / as any holy body of water before it is struck / by a breeze or from below by a current come from / around the world or the moon or a catfish's tail. / Each stroke so purely still, moving nonetheless, / so it appears it is the whole word which moves / and each word solemnly goes on in its progress / toward the next word. Maybe not, one suspects / a handwriting such as this does not want to put two / and two together, maybe not two words together / unless it thinks it should see to it that each / word is discretely 'beautiful' in fact, / so beautiful one understands were it not for / her handwriting maintaining its poise the horror / would be too much to bear, the cruelty begins / to appear as the end of the session draws near." ("Her Handwriting") This book makes a stormy beauty. Often triggered by seeming minutiae, the writing rises up, whirls in a spasm that yields its beautiful relief: "There are names I can't bear to repeat. Cudgels for words, / wielded by demented monsters, these are the things sweet / dreams should drive away. Last night a bullet out of nowhere / went straight through my brow. It woke me up. The quick- / sand nightmares repeatedly offer turned into holy water. / All of the chambers and hallways I've haunted flooded / with the love of God. In your boat too small for the scale / of the water, come and find me in my unquenchable thirst." ("A Poem Rises Out of Experience and Expresses Irreproachable Sentiments in an Earnest Manner")   Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Lovers In The Used World, by Gillian Conoley, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2001, 64 pages, $12.95 paper. If Dara Wier's poems swarm between silences, Gillian Conoley's are blended through with silence, with the white space of the page. Here, for instance, is the opening of "The Splendor Fragments": Between X and noon, the blend of acids, sentiments, returning weather which makes the night transparent to think of--- like God's lonely imagination, and God's dark authority--- how for him Death is the loving one, perfect for beating life into form.   --- "This way, please," was all she told me, more her mouth holding onto the words than speaking, because no sound came out--- no melon patch on a summer's morn. (page 28) There are hints of continuity in the words themselves, between "…God's dark authority" and "how for him," say, between "…she told me" and "more her mouth," but much of the continuity, discourse or 'argument', we experience---if we do---comes through the consecutive positioning of fragments. So we could imagine the poem, its thought, diving into silence, swimming, surfacing, then diving again, fragment, fragment, fragment, in that mysterious movement, much of which happens in the stilled depths, gliding between. Somewhat unusual, though, for such 'postmodern', non-discursive poetry is the warm, gutsy, semi-vernacular feel I get in Conoley's 'voice': Not experiencing one's whole life as some aggravating interruption In the yes/no opposition with which Buddhists like to irritate and with that wry humor. Many people doing the same thing period. When one has no feeling for harmony. Pear blossom blue and purple wisteria breeze the politic nailing something in wind chime leaf taking time with its shadow ---windows scummy as though they'd gone through a day--- vetch vetch those flower sounds seductive too, (from "Is This Irritating Or Is This a Pleasure") Her work holds me in its shifting fascination. Everything, meaning, tone, genre, is up for grabs, keeps reconfiguring. Are the poems written through or a playful collage of fragments? Are they to be read in the sincere, heartful key of the American 'mainline' or the cool, intellectual key of postmodernism? None or all of the above? Only Gillian knows for sure: A photograph a beautiful woman A photograph of a beautiful woman Now that's it, hold it right there, would you just turn the head a little to the side White cypresses, telephones dangling out of my sorry images Certain unsteady figure in raincoat watching her counter figure cross the street carrying on completely normal life so she's feeling constructed but still has to walk around (from "Fuck the Millennium") Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Life on Earth, Frederick Seidel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001, 68 pages, $22.00 cloth. WE HAVE IGNITION Infinity was one of many In a writhing pot of spaghetti. One among many Intestines of time. The Trembling the size and color Of boiled lobster coral Was trying More violently than anything Could and still live. The Subatomic particles Were The truth.… Billed as the second book in a trilogy called The Cosmos Poems, Life on Earth is one of the more powerful and disturbing collections of poems I've read. Although almost nothing else is predictable here, all of the poems are in eight quatrains, sometimes rhymed, with a slim Mother Goose-y look on the page. But they read, as it were, against a backdrop of the curvature of the Earth where it shades off into the black, starry sky of outer space. They tremble on terrible transformations: "A man who wanted to look better / But not younger is red / Swells of raw. / Later they will remove the staples. // Ten weeks later / They are younger. / They pull over / Their head a sock of skin. // One day the girl sees in the mirror a girl / Laughing so hard her face falls off in her hands. / You can see the inside of the face. / The front of her head is an amputee's smooth stump." ("Eternity") Note the irony of those purposely flatfooted contradictions "not younger," "younger," and repetitions, "Later," "later," "sees," "see," the horrific incompletion of "Swells of raw." Horror is big here, a controlled, prophetic rage at our techno-pupating world: "Nights on the dunes / Of the Sahara are blood // That you can drink till dawn / Under the terror of / Stars to / Make you blind. // I am drinking gasoline / To stay awake / In the midst of so much / Murder. // My daughter squeaks and squeaks / Like a mouse screaming in a trap, / Dangling from the cat who makes her come / When he does it to her. // Her killer goes out into / The streets to join his brothers / In the revolution / Who don't have jobs." ("Letter to the Editors of Vogue") Am I skimming the 'good' parts? Of course, but there are many more. And I don't read them as sensational. I think this is serious poetry that looks hard and with scathing brilliance at exactly what its title claims for it: The story goes one day A messenger from light arrived. Of course they never know that they're a messenger. Don't know they carry a message. The submarine stayed just Below the surface with its engines off near the shore observing. One day the world took off its shoes and disappeared Inside the central mosque And never came back out. Outside the periscope the rain Had stopped, the fires on shore were Out. Outside the mosque The vast empty plaza was the city's outdoor market till The satellite observed the changing Colors of the planet And reported to the submarine that No one was alive. (from "Star Bright") Richard Silberg is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. Doubleness is his new poetry book from the California Poetry Series/The Roundhouse Press. He teaches "Writing and Appreciating Contemporary Poetry" at UC Berkeley Extension. Return to Top of Page • Archive Index