Work and Days by Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor opens her latest collection Work and Days with an assertion that “To miss even this springtime/ would be an error.” The poems in the book chronicle a year of working on a farm in Western Massachusetts, during the 2010-2011 growing season, shortly after the narrator’s miscarriage. The farm is partly an escape and partly a reconnection with a simple present – with cucumbers, frogs, and stones. Meanwhile, in the background, hover global warming, far-off wars, and social injustice.

(Read the rest in Tinderbox Poetry Journal).

Winter's Journey by Stephen Dobyns

Ever since the election, poets who never wrote political poems before suddenly want to write them. Some – and I hope this is the case – may be questioning the irony that has long reigned over certain sectors of American poetry.

Stephen Dobyns wrote Winter’s Journey (Copper Canyon, 2010) at a similar moment, deep in George W. Bush’s second term in office, with the war in Iraq entering its fourth year. In such a moment, Dobyns questions the particular poetry project that seemed to preside at the time: the lyric. His gripes with the lyric punctuate Winter’s Journey and inform the book’s structure. But they are also his gripes with the time – with a country so removed from the carnage it causes that those living here could continue to write poems, as he puts it, “about fucking” while others die from our bombs.

Instead, Doybns fills the book with twelve long meditative poems that resist the swift emotional epiphany of the lyric and instead are essayistic in nature. They are bookended by two lyrics, suggesting that Dobyns has not completely turned away from that form. He writes, in “Napatree Point”:

. . . I know I can’t
just rant in a poem, although it’s hard to stop myself,
but given the problem I hate going back to writing
about flowers and sex.

What Dobyns wants to know is how to write about atrocities that one feels horrified by, and yet removed from. Interestingly, he takes as his model European and Japanese writers, rather than American ones like, for example, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, or Carlyn Forché – all of whom have written lyrics that grew out of oppression, witness, and resistance. It’s worth noting, too, that out of that same war came the work of Brian Turner, who filled a book with lyrics about being a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The problem is not really the form, but Dobyns’s social location – which he shares with many middle and upper class Americans who can simply stop reading the newspaper if they don’t want bad news, as does a woman in the poem “Chainsaws.” And maybe the world does need to grapple with how a privileged person can ethically respond to violence. But maybe, also, it’s the poet’s job to get close enough to that violence or injustice to find the driving emotion and so restore us.

I haven’t decided that either one of the thoughts posed above is more true that the other. I have mixed feelings about Winter’s Journey, a book I did enjoy. I find his oppositional stance toward the lyric to be a challenging question, at the same time as I find it tiresome. And I suppose if this review were a Winter’s Journey poem, it could hold all these disparate and contradictory thoughts.

Reading Winter’s Journey now, one might think through how poets should respond to starvation, war crimes, and our own country’s bombs in Syria. Can a lyric hold this uncomfortable (because so comfortable) distance?

The best of Dobyns’ meditative poems is the last, in which he ruminates on complicity and resistanceby thinking about Anna Akhmatova and Savonarola, a 15th century friar who was burned as a heretic. The poem takes place while Dobyns vacations in Florence (and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t roll my eyes when he said he and his wife were spending a month there). But he uses the setting to think through his own complicity, and that of all U.S. citizens in the Bush II years:

. . Freud said the neurosis
of thinking the wretchedness around us doesn’t exist
lets us stay sane, although at times it seems that sanity
comes at too great a cost, so even the joy of walking
with one’s son along the ocean’s edge extracts its price
in drops of blood.

American life, the style in which we have chosen to live, does extract its price all over the world. There must be a better way to respond to that besides these poems; yet, these poems are the imperfect way we so often respond.

Home Burial by Michael McGriff

The poems in Michael McGriff’s Home Burial (Copper Canyon, 2012) inhabit a landscape of county roads, fence posts, rotting barns, and junked Studebakers, where the dead stay close, interposing themselves into constellations and muddy creeks. McGriff, who is the author of one other full-length collection and a chapbook, gives almost every thought an image rooted in rural Oregon.

McGriff has translated the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, and many of the poems have a Tranströmer-like quality in the way they connect seemingly disparate ideas and images. In “Alone in Hell’s Canyon,” the first stanza is grounded in campfires and wildflowers, as the speaker smells smoke and knows someone else is in the canyon. But the second stanza leaps to the driving image of the poem:

Perhaps he too awakened last night
to the noise of a grand floating hall
where an entire people
was celebrating.

The image grows and culminates in the sound of a person tending to the candles in the floating hall. It’s the kind of leap Robert Bly described – or prescribed – in Leaping Poetry, where he claims that when forced to find the relationship between two very different images, we access unused parts of our brain. Bly’s neuroscience may have been off, but McGriff’s leaps are still intensely satisfying.

So is the patience he takes in building images, particularly in long poems where he lingers on a scene, building through a series of short lines that run down the page. My favorite of these is “The Cow,” a five-page poem that describes a shed left behind by the speaker’s grandfather, who likely committed suicide. Like a camera moving from a wide-angle shot to close in on a tiny detail, the poem travels into a painting “the size of a dinner plate” left on the wall of the shed. McGriff’s facility with verbs drives the poem. A note of music ripples, wobbles, and collapses, drawing us from the family in the painting to the cow:

What passes for middle C
ripples away from the uncle, the children,
the pinochle game—
the wobbling note finally collapsing
in the ear of the cow
standing in perfect profile
at the far right of the painting.

Elsewhere in the book, fog tumbles, light staggers and the night undresses. Everything in the landscape is alive, even though many of those who inhabit it are not. The long poems also offer another pleasure: while free verse is ostensibly free of structure, many contemporary free verse poems follow the same arc from image/story to epiphany. Read (or write) too many and it starts to feel like repeatedly listening to remixes of the same song. Instead, McGriff’s long poems follow an arc that is longer, more pained, and more expansive. We enter a land haunted by the dead, where “the night’s coarse tongue/scrapes your name/against the trees.” Here, a dying rural infrastructure has abandoned people, but land speaks to those same people in a way that is terrible and vital.

In the final poem, McGriff shows how dislocation from that landscape undoes the speaker’s sense of self:

Against my will,
I am reborn as a bird
who claws its way
from the throat
of a man

who never cared
for the moth-light of August . . .

The man wears “the heavy jewels/of compliance/around his wrist,” and is a “denier/of barn dust,”– along with everything else that has rooted the other poems in the book. The bird’s job (and presumably the poet’s) is to continually tear itself away from this dislocated man and back toward the Oregon landscape, toward his original grief.

[insert] Boy by Danez Smith

In [insert] Boy, Danez Smith wrestles with having a (black, gay) body that the (white, straight) world wants to annihilate. In his poems, black boys are aware that they “came out the womb obituary scribed on the backside of [their] birth certificate.” The never-ending list of police shootings and the history of lynching hum in the background of poems like “Alternate Names for Black Boys,” in which the suggestions include “guilty until proven dead” and “what once passed for kindling.” But the book considers other types of violence as well: the violence demanded of men, the violence men do to each other, and what violence wreaks on those who practice it. “Faggot or When the Front Goes Up,” begins with a boy with “feathers for muscles” who by the bottom of the page has “turned action figure” after being repeatedly shamed by his grandfather. The boy has to hurt others to save himself from the violence directed toward male bodies that challenge gender norms. He survives as “a boy who swung to keep from singing.”

[insert] Boy is Smith’s first full-length collection. The poems run the gambit from prose poems, free verse, and his own invented forms. One poem is a series of letters to the wife of the speaker’s white john. Towards the end of the book, a modified sestina form that stretches over eight parts. Firmly rooted in the body, many poems mix sexuality, violence, and religious language. Smith builds intensity through rhythm and repetition, as in “Craigslist Hook-Ups,” which begins “forgive me father, for I have called another man daddy.” Another poem, “Genesissy,” begins with the story of  “the first snap, the hand’s humble attempt at thunder” and ends with the funeral of a genderqueer child told in a series of “begats”: “his aunt’s disgusted head shake/begat the world that killed/the not a boy-child.” “Genesissy” transforms from a prose poem to free verse that bursts across the page, to the block of the final six lines that tell us the annihilation of the child defies even God.

Some of the most disturbing poems are those in which white men buy sex from black men, and intertwine racial and sexual violence in the interaction. Smith dwells in the mouth in these poems, “ a wet shelter, a soft temple,” that takes in what the men are “glad to rid.” Writing about these deep wounds, Smith is both explicit and lyric, as though by saying the worst of it, he can rescue the body from what it has suffered. In “The Business of Shadows,” he reclaims the narrative and the ability to name, putting his own experience front and center: “I keep lists, but nothing like: James, Donovan, Michael. / more like: salt, unripe limes, nickel, mustard, nothing.”

Towards the end of the book Smith turns his attention toward transformative love between black men, which is always precarious given the line they inhabit between life and death. The narrator tells the beloved “Thank you for not fading to ash & memory.” The reprieve comes late and feels tenuous. Perhaps this is why in an interview Smith worried that he had “written about blackness too sadly.” There is a way in which writing about pain is actually celebrating its opposite, and Smith certainly pushes that line.

In the same interview, Smith said “being black and gay is a gospel, an armor that I love dearly.” [insert] Boy feels like that gospel, an act of rescue in a world of violence and annihilation.  

November Books

In November, I read: 

• The Soldiers of Year II by Medbh McGuckian (truth be told, I read about half, but I think you should get at least a year to read a McGuckian collection) 
• [insert] Boy by Danez Smith
• Home Burial by Michael McGriff
• One Child: The Past and Present of China's Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong
• (the end of) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 

What This Is

 The best poetry that I've produced almost always comes during or after a period of intense reading. I'm working on a new book project and challenging myself to read four or five poetry books per month. To keep myself accountable, every month I will post two 500-word reviews of books, and list the other books I've read. Because who better to keep you accountable than the entire internet? I will also read prose, but I won't review it. 

Writing the reviews is a way to say to other poets: hey, I see you, and I'm reading your work. It's also a way to make sure that I stay engaged with the material and learn everything I can from it. I hope that it will give readers who aren't poets some tools to help them approach poetry. Unfortunately, poetry, which is a kind of prayer, is often taught as if it were a word problem, an equation to solve. But poetry is about what cannot be solved or explained. The poem itself is the solution. That is why we need it so badly, and why I'm excited to challenge myself to read more of the amazing work that poets are making every day.