Neil Aitken: Moving Through the Landscape of Disorientation and Loss
Neil Aitken's The Lost Country of Sight may be a first collection, but it is a collection of very seasoned writing. Aitken's notion of poetic possibilities and his level of accomplishment are both very, very high.
The collection opens on the note of poetic dislocation and transiency. The poetic voice, launched between two horizons into its caravan of exile, is temporarily camped at rest:
You are counting the dark exit of crows
in the rear view mirror, or from the top of an overpass
looking back into the last flames of cloud.
Your car, steel to the world of flint, rests listless
with its windows wide, the stars slipping in
and settling down for the night....
Outside your open window, the dark repeats
like the wind in late fall, twisting the names
of familiar back roads into a long rope of sighs.
You could lower yourself down with such longing.
("In the Long Dream of Exile")
Pitch perfect beginning.
The opening of the book very quickly segues from car, overpass, and vista to bicycle and the gray of fog, rain, and mountain: the disorientation of the emigrant moving in the physical and linguistic landscape of one's origin. For Aitken, Taiwan is a place awash with the disorientation, familiarity, and longing. He writes of "the dark unsettling weight of home and regret":
I have knelt
every morning on the cement and tile floors and offered a prayer
full of fire and forgetting for someone come down to loosen my tongue,
to unlock that rusted door and let what beats within go free.
("The Art of Forgetting")
The ride is slow; the turns are graceful. The voice is musical, even erotic. All sensual enrichment and abstract longing is brought into the grace of the English language.
The poems move to America; to Western Canada and the United States. They move around a Buddhist father and Canada geese. There is a borrowed car and a kettle spouting steam. There are other birds (a red-tailed hawk), raccoons, remote farm towns, fields, and trees. Everything poetically floating at the edge of meaning.
The poems move to Los Angeles and take their point of entry into the landscape from the vantage of immigration: the buildings, the cars, the weather. It is landscape without any associate memory in which the monastic poet finds himself producing work:
You [the poet] glimpse the world
and wonder:
how this hollow place
in your stomach always turns
growing one blood word
at a time, like a child wanted
and yet unknown.
("To Jeremiah, Dreaming")
And again, in a poem entitled "Hermit":
a bottled wish
in a sea of grey with nowhere to go.
You stand next to the gas stove
listening to the steady click-click
of sparks in the empty space
trying to set the invisible
aflame. And when it catches fire at last,
you watch it rush outward as if mad,
driven by a hunger for air, for something
to say to the dark and metallic world.
Aitken begins to move deeper into his American sojourn; deeper into the poetics via Raphael Alberti, an exile, and José Martí, a nationalistic Cuban voice rising from a child of colonial parents. Poetically speaking, the life of the emigrant, the life of the exile, can be a study in existentialism.
By the end of the collection, the death of the poet's father, Loss, Absence, the feminine aspect of Yearning become poeticized abstractions. The diligence of the opening of the book with its high currency does not thematically "pay off" in the closing movement of the book. Unfortunately, the collection simply recycles the son's loss. The collection begins to feel like a play in which the cast has spent far more time on the first three acts than it has on the fourth and final one. The images of memory, the good father, absence, and the anonymity of yearning become tedious and too familiar. What could be artfully worked out as insistence, gate to complexities beyond the paralysis of grief, or the posture of poetic independence and more to come . . . becomes mere thematic repetition. The notion of Buddhist/Zen absence may for some begin to feel like mannered restraint. Absence and Gray still have more rounds to go with the metallic world. Though, the images of the poems are still breathtakingly bold and beautiful:
Something like the cup now flying in the wind, a white glow
in the dark which could be Truth or any star before it fades
behind clouds or is lost beyond the stand of sycamores where Love
is no doubt digging ditches row after row, building a cemetery
at the edge of the world.
I am certain of this, leaning against the rail on a hill
that oversees this town, where Memory might be last year's bicycle
painted red, the tires losing air with each turn. And the girl
on the corner in the borrowed dress is Sleep, the one
the last drunk will carry home in his arms before dawn.
("What I Know About Abstraction")
But, as I stated in the opening of this review, for a first collection, wow! Theme resolution aside, line by line, the level of poetic accomplishment in "The Lost Country of Sight" is high, high, high, and should be on syllabi and shelves everywhere. What will Aitken give us next?
Neil Aitken, The Lost Country of Sight
Anhinga Press; 978-1-934695-06-7, 2008, 72 pgs, $15.
Amy Lemmon: St. Nobody
With more and more poetry collections appearing, what readers might be finding less and less of is Urgency. By that, I mean collections of poems that have the feeling that they really needed to be written. Kathy Fagan,
(a poet I greatly admire) once wrote that all Irony is accommodation.
And perhaps it is presumptive to write of poetic motives. But what I can say is the Amy Lemmon has give us a book—"St. Nobody"— that I read poem by poem with an increasing sense that this is a book that I needed to read. Saint Nobody is an impressive debut volume.
The poems weave around a narrative. The voice is consistent. And in that consistency the poems begin to escalate in friendship, precision, and human empathy. Rather than Will, there is a fundamental Candor that carries the reader along in a real tour de force.
"Sex" sounds so base,
but I've used "love" too many times already here,
and it's just a euphemism for this bawdy function—
an arm here, a leg there, parts tangling, probing, flinching,
everything too slippery or too parched to work smoothly.
If I expect too much, my dear, forgive me, for after all
this fracas is the prickling force, the source.
("Fluidity")
There are the tares of life. There are the calm spots. There are bodies to be dealt with. There are romantic first starts and real heartbreak. There are always turns away from the sentimental. And clearly through it all, there is the writing of poetry.
I was also reminded of a couple of famous lines by another Mid-Westerner, the celebrated comedian Lily Tomlin. One of her characters serves up, "All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific." Somewhere else, Tomlin also wrote: "Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past."
By the end of the narrative, the opening of "Saint Nobody," the voice of the collection knows she has left behind the role of Lutheran Midwestern good girl and has become working wife, and mother of Bobby and Stella. Children are not stuffed animals, but systems with their own personal needs. The insights of mothers into daughters can be special . . . and are sometimes intensified by hard and marked circumstances:
After she was born
and all bets were off, I was shy in the waiting room,
leery of scaring the sweet expectant mothers
with Down's, their worst nightmare.
Taboo, the terror of defective
detected and undetected, women young and middle-aged
terrified of what their bodies could hold, what the midwives
could and could not tell us, so pee in the cup, pee in the cup,
we'll test it, you'll be fine.
("Sample")
Lemmon's poems are carefully made. Throughout the collections, there are moments of shifting variables — but no jittering improvisations. On the page, the poems are elegantly lined and clean. In some of the opening and closing poems of the collection there are deliberate, odd outages of counterpoint. Lemmon is first rate in her artful selecting and editing of narrative material.
The collection is divided into four sections. The first section explores domestic chaos and order (as in being responsible forgetting things right side up), mating, eggs, and place (as in sleeping in accustomed rooms).
The second sections explores a modest, budding youth and how she puts her "given (Republican) frame" (sewing, playing the piano, typing) behind her and moves out (to Boston) into a more liberal world speckled with cigarettes and beer, men she would like to meet (as in Want), and rock and roll (the years when one anxiously calculates as to when the night is young). There is also the stubborn denial of enduring domestic comforts.
The manifold of the third section is literary in nature: images of heroines and the cocooning—or cloistering — of romantic love. Intellectual and physical hunger intertwine. Some things simmer, others steam. There is a sestina in the section—it boils.
The fourth section escalates into even more beautiful poems — poems about the great abstraction of life's cycles: body, moon, semesters, seasons, revelous square dancing, desire, love, vanities, music. They are all there—and deftly fashioned into poetry. Even an exquisitely lined poem evoking the sad life-decay of John Keats. And in another poem, all sentiment pared away:
Even when
we pick at a toenail, we are worshipping,
paying homage to the dense regeneration
our epidermis proves. Skin dully grows,
replaces, sheds, replaces, each new layer
one second older than the last. And yet
these so-called cycles aren't quite round—they have
brick-sharp corners . . . . These corners poke
us from our spell until we chant it back.
We are in love with this persistent death.
Daring it to stop—or quicken—we revel,
entranced, in our fabulous decay.
("Vespers")
At the close, one is instantly thrown back to the opening:
Random aches . . . make me wish I had no body. . .
Lately the pain is sharpest where my wings would be. . .
I'm Nobomommy to Blake's Nobodaddy—
that raggedly god always spouting No—No—No—
sporting the holy fool's cap and bells.
("Saint Nobody")
Holy fool's cap. Jane Wagner (Lily Tomlin's partner) once wrote: "Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying—but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?
From the opening to the closing this is well crafted and pitch perfect. Saint Nobody is a book for everybody.
Amy Lemmon, Saint Nobody
Red Hen Press; 13 978-1-59709-142-8, 2009, 99 pgs. $18.95
Barbara Ras: Transmuting the Transitive into Poetry
Barbara Ras's first book, Bite Every Sorrow, won the Walt Whitman Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. One Hidden Self is her second collection. In it, her grasp of the world is clear: human language awash with concrete images of physical and temporal things and abstractions correlating human grace, folly, loss, and anticipations. From beginning to end the book is a rhapsodic overflowing of intelligence and music.
The poet's capacious observations are filled with rewarding images and emotions. It is difficult to improve on a brief anonymous note on the cover of the book, "Using long lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary."
Maybe today... you'll buy the tickets to Zanzibar,
somewhere with slow fans and ceremonious walking,
where the post office behind the soccer field will smell of cinnamon
and on the way to the coast you'll visit a village
and the king there will remind you "without evil there is no
good."
("Rhapsody Today")
In another sample:
And let me read you this line from Herbert who wrote,
"The wind understands that to really suffer, one has to be faithful,"
so that we can sit together again and go on and on about grief
until it becomes as bearable and orderly
as a row of pigeons taking up every inch of a roof ridge
all looking the same way in the rain.
("No One Argued About What to Call the Birds")
Ras's poems are the revelations of interior, metaphysical moments. The vernacular of Ras's soliloquies stays artfully fundamental—never sliding into stern posturing or attention-grabbing heroics. Her range does not venture into the vulgar and competitive; but rather, remains in the rhapsodic and cooperative. Ras may move around in the poetic notion of hauntedness—as in "what is left," but she is not precious. She is not after icons. She is after transport, meaning, and motive. Rather than being after an icon, Ras is after what makes the icon glow.
...let go of your pain
a while longer, lose the feeling of being a stranger to your life.
The moon is almost full, and the Old Year is almost ashes.
Throw more wood on the fire and let its glow play
warmly into the wee hours. You don't have to be the last to know,
however late, that while suffering ends, fear lasts forever. Look,
The real work of fire is to eat and to sing.
(" El Año Viejo")
Each poem has its own organic theme and thrust. The voice of the poet shop lifts a future, adulates a new year fire, or considers how the moon is like a tiny dentist's mirror or bubbles in champagne. In one, she howls with dogs. In another, she compares the sheerness of a doe's gaze to a layered taffeta dress cast off for a nighttime horseback ride on the beach. And in "Dream Kisses," a poem about desire (some part of that "hidden stuff" in the title) the poem winds to its conclusion—through the eyes of an anonymous fellow traveler:
and beware of the man in the brown sweater
on Flight 252 who handed you a pillow, his eyes
as black as the wells where Mayans tossed their sacrificial bodies.
Remember there's more than enough darkness to go around,
and that inside concrete, rebar does its silent work out of sight,
and in this it is like dream kisses
keeping our walls from falling,
night after lonely night.
The hidden may serve without ever being fully revealed. Hidden is not the same as absent. Profundity is ever present, not absent. In the center of every creature's pair of eyes is the well of mystery.
In many of the poems, whimsy is employed as a counter-balance to metaphysical intensity:
The average tongue has eight thousand taste buds, packed in
like an armada of ducks waiting to be flushed from a lake.
("Dream Kisses")
...where is Chagall's happy donkey when you need him...
("Where I Go When I'm Out of My Mind")
...on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car
a clown take off his nose at the end of the day...
("History")
One Hidden Stuff is a generous and consistent study of what it means to remain. It does not tie up loose ends. It penetrates and balances:
After the storm white and black clouds hung
in the sky like dogs and cats drinking
out of the same blue bowl.
Barbara Ras, One Hidden Stuff
Red Hen Press; 13 978-1-59709-142-8, 2009, 99 pgs. $18.95
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
November, 2009
Poems
Scott Hightower
Scott Hightower's third collection, ''Part of the Bargain,'' received the 2004 Hayden Carruth Award. His translations from Spanish have garnered him a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. He is a contributing editor to ''The Journal.'' His reviews frequently appear in "Coldfront Magazine" and ''Boxcar Poetry Review.'' A native of central Texas, he lives in New York City and Madrid, Spain. He teaches at NYU, and has taught at Drew, F.I.T., Fordham, and Poets House.