"The Absurd Man"

from "The Absurd Man" in The Myth of Sisyphus

by Albert Camus (Nov 7, 1913 - Jan 4, 1960)

"By thus sweeping over centuries and minds, by miming man as he can be and as he is, the actor has much in common with that other absurd individual, the traveler. Like him, he drains something and is constantly on the move."

"The Naming Of Cats"

THE NAMING OF CATS

by T. S. Eliot (Sep 26, 1888 - Jan 4, 1965)

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have three different names.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey --
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter --
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum --
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover --
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanimeffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

"Saved"

SAVED

by Irving Layton (Mar 12, 1912 - Jan 4, 2006)

Scourged and bleeding the Jew
stumbled into the church; he knew
the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and French
were right behind him by their murderous stench.

The priest stopped the service
at once, smoothed down his surplice
and helped by the bandy-legged sexton
lugged to the altar the bedevilled man.

Ablaze was the kind priest
as saying, "Drink the blood of Christ"
he gave him a small carafe of wine
which the dying Jew instantly gulped down.

A Response to Nigel Beale's Review of Ken Babstock's Methodist Hatchet

Nigel Beale’s recent review of Ken Babstock’s latest poetry release, Methodist Hatchet, is available online at guerilla, issue 34, vol 9 winter 2013.

 http://www.getguerilla.ca/index.php/issue-34-feature-4

Round one sees the reviewer rush to centre ring at the bell and throw a series of haymakers at his virtual opponent. This is where the analogy breaks down, of course, because it’s up to readers to decide whether or not the punches connect.

Beale believes that Babstock’s attitude is a “fuck you” to the reader. Many people, (me included, in this example) “applaud without knowing why”. But I’d just as easily turn this next analogy around and say that those shut out of Babstock's specific poetic territory are simply using the wrong key(s) in their attempt to gain entry to a different kind of house, not a prefab Canadiana block structure, not even a charming hut or an accomplished mansion (the minimalist or maximalist idiosyncrasy that leaves no influence), but an unexpected interior, a house by turns fun and haunted.

My review of Babstock’s volume was highly laudatory, and my chief argument, itself a critique of earlier reviews of the book, was that form and content were expertly merged. So when Beale claims that “[r]eaders aren’t invited into this erudite little game, and there’s scant incentive for them to join in; to make them care”, I’d counter that the mellifluous or knotted music (scaled to the particular mood or topic from which it plays off) is the first draw, as it should be of any worthy poem, or book of poetry. I don’t go directly to poetry for any of the contemporary topics Babstock explores. But, once energized and pleased by the sounds, I always look, usually on multiple re-reads, for the sense. And in Babstock, I frequently get that, too. If I’m avoiding examples here, Beale is, so far, also speaking in generalities, so that doesn’t help either side. But general statements have to be challenged on their own, too. We’ll get to some of those poem quotes soon enough.

Beale, to his credit, lays out his criteria in specific terms. “Memorability; authentic, original use of lapidary language; rhetorical power scored to important human themes; synoptic understanding of our complex human lives;  staying power … all of this seems rather quaint, slightly naïve, ridiculous even, in the face of such cool incomprehensibility.”

I’ve hunted up these passages in direct response:

Memorability: “Butane extracted/from filched Bics.//Car seat on springs/pulled up to a pit.”

Synoptic understanding of our complex human lives: “Configuring the small emptied/talismans of my own loneliness//so they stared back, hoping they’d inscribe/an identity onto what was left/after chewing away at the core for a decade.”  

Authentic, original use of lapidary language: “Wattle and Daub, a law firm of Newfoundlanders/or a crafts supply in keeping with the poultry theme,/smells weakness, softens its smuggest aspects/with miniature jingle bell over the gripey hinge.”

Staying power: “she chewed through/the fabric, a hole you could slide an arm into./Slide an arm right through/the surface of this picture,/into whatever spacial realm lies/behind the depth.”

(One can add -- when reading just these four examples and among many other qualities of good poetry not included in Beale’s list -- connective power, organic intelligence.)

The next section of Beale’s critique enlists the help of Wallace Stevens. This is a dangerous (though gutsy) ploy, since it takes a great argument to be able to plane  Stevens’ terse generalities (here) to fit Babstock’s poetry with any authority. Secondly, Stevens is a problematic example, perhaps even a contradictory one, to use in the context of clarity,  and to the “fuck you” to the house visitors. I’ve read many a Stevens poem (I think he’s the second greatest U.S. poet, by the way), and I’ve been baffled for long stretches with what can only be categorized as wilful diction, malicious connectives, philosophical speciousness and pseudo-elevation. All the things, in other words, that Beale decries here in Babstock. But – and here is, to me, a key contrast – I only persisted in reading Stevens because so many brilliant critics had done the heavy lifting (in an aesthetic sense, but to the importance of the issue at hand, in evaluative distinction) that I figured, “what the heck, I can soldier on, there’s supposed to be something to this guy”. Of course, the sound is there right away with Stevens, too, the rhythm, the crazy juxtaposition of cool anecdote with psychological suggestion. Kind of like someone else we’re talking about. It’s no surprise that Stevens was a huge influence on Babstock.

But now we finally get some quotations of the offending lines. Beale’s first choice from Babstock:

“Colander, canopy, colander. Contrivance
Of green light-spots we’re leoparded by.
Wild grape ampersand.

Fine perhaps as lyrics to a psychedelic sixties song—“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” say, but nothing that sticking a microphone in front of some stoned sophomore wouldn’t produce.  

These lines sound like they come out of a random word generator. Like free association. Gibberish.”

These are the first three lines from the hilariously wonderful (except for the horrid last sentence, not quoted here) poem, “Carolinian (Crosscut With Saw)”, with Beale’s commentary behind it. The first line is not random, not like a stoned sophomore’s gushings, not gibberish, but a delightfully inventive sound pattern (a giant hint should be taken from the title) that mimics the action of the saw in its repetitive hard Cs and alternatiing vowels. And what a remarkable “sense” choice to go with that sound -- “colander” --  which conveys the moving sunspots which colour the onlookers, as well as  the dividing word which eliminates, temporarily, its effects. Then, “contrivance” is another wonderful  choice which sets up one theme of the poem. Whose contrivance is it? The walkers’, of course, but also the poet’s. And instead of the usual postmodern moan and groan about the impossibility of accurate transcription, let alone Truth (always with that capital!), Babstock’s tone affects a curious, and  complex, authenticity. Who indeed hasn’t been jolted by conflicting moods in a walk, who (if one tends to make literary associations, as do most poetry readers) then go on to wonder about the traffic between danger (note the other main meaning of the non-hyphenated title word) and artifice or wonder. I could detail more of this excellent poem, but I’m just responding to Beale’s specific quotation.

“Babstock’s poems are hyphenated by frequent references to “difficult” philosophers and artists. Their names seem sprinkled in like flavourless pepper. Used for show. Little context, just a muttering, some of it inaudible; a joke that only the poet seems to understand. High-styled, pseudo-intellectual lace seductively placed atop the stanzas. Names, gratuitously cited, bobbing on the surface, orphaned, undefined, ill-fitted to any coherent whole. Without relevance, it’s hard to see them as anything but pretentious props, the poet usurping cache, ripping off reputation.”

This is Beale’s next charge. And it’s a serious one. And with serious charges, it’s incumbent upon the accuser to be much more specific, citing many examples. Because, unlike many contemporary poets to whom I think this accusation can and should be levied against, (pretentiousness often has more to do with introducing names and artistic movements the author can't follow up on than it does with inherently difficult material) I find Babstock’s use of names either charming, intriguing (and after a follow-up, appropriate), part of an extended analogy, or the (yes) impetus for an in-joke. To those who think that that latter admission is somehow a confession of defeat, try out some of Geoffrey Hill’s name-checks, or Dante’s. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional joke for those who’ve an encyclopedic knowledge of arcana. One doesn’t have to know every reference and meaning to enjoy the rhythms and dynamics, the stresses and tempos of those names (with their surrounding sounds) read aloud. And, if it’s really important for the reader, a consultation with Monsieur Google-ectomy is a much easier way of stripping things than the (only) twenty-years-ago option of a special collections library visit to the speculative science room. I didn’t get many of the winks and tricks in Methodist Hatchet. And I’m fine with that. But the book is like a fine buffet. I don’t worry about the exotic dishes left over when my stomach’s pleasantly full from the first class palette of appetizers, entrees, desserts and aperitifs. The references, in any case, aren’t all high-and mighty. There are plenty of associations involving sports stars (Butch Goring), central figures from realms usually off-limits (for some reason) to poets (Mies van der Rohe), and central (not “showy” or pedantically-inspired) artists (Don DeLillo). When checking those three names in the contexts of the poems they’re in, one will note, with even a surface familiarity of their import, how the names are tied in with the organic content of the line, stanza, poem. It’s not, then, a pretentious book bicep-flex, it’s an allusively savvy attempt to link literary history or architectural mores with how we see the world this day, every day, both in physical space and imaginative reverie.

Beale next moves to the brilliant opener, “The Decor”. This poem is a high-water mark, even for a poet with many highlight efforts to his credit. Here’s the reviewer’s quote selection, with his brief follow-up:

“ “Slide an arm right through
the surface of this picture,
into whatever spatial realm lies
behind the illusion of depth, to hold
the hand of the person
wanting so badly to be seen precisely
as they feel themselves to be

(from “The Décor”)

The fact that depth is only an illusion makes it very difficult to want to decorticate meaning, or care about seeing this person “as they feel themselves to be.””

It’s here I wonder if Beale is paying attention to the poem as a whole. In our time of shorties – 30 lines and often less – “The Decor” covers four pages, and has to be read carefully in order to make the requisite connections. One of the main themes of the poem (by no means the only one) is how depth is perceived, now, by all of us to varying extents, in what is presented by aggressive multiple media sources with their manipulative evils, by ingrained visual cues, and (in the immediately preceding, canny passage) by persuasion over result. (Even the dog, in its clumsy way, exposes the charlatans. Why can’t we?) Against this, a real human connection is increasingly a matter of effort, sometimes heroic effort, in order to break down the cynical walls we all have in place to defend ourselves from the ubiquitous scream of the surrounding stimuli. The illusion, then, is created by those shadowy figures. It’s not a who-cares ploy by a poet enamoured of passionless pomo smugness, but a denunciation and a call to see it for what it is.

Beale’s last quotation perfectly illustrates the frequent inability of readers to understand why a poet chooses to use the sounds he or she creates in a poem. Again, here’s Beale’s response, this time preceding the poem-snippet:

“The only discernible rhythms or music in Babstock’s poems are wretched. Like a retching, gagging reflex, the words are frequently curt, abrupt, aggressive; projectile:  

Scything the new, chilled air over Moabit –
Skeletal, balletic – the cranes insist
        We graph it out
Form up in the EU yellow and blue. Cost
Of jet fuel per person, cost of Khartoum.
        Egypt at the Pergamon. Jeffs
At the Hamburger Bahnhof, again,
Koons and Wall, or walyas and the man
In Mauerpark market
Raking crop circles in crepe batter
Over a heated skillet.

(from “As Lowell on the Ringbahn”)

Are these sounds unpleasant? Of course. That’s the point. I frequently recall, with amusement and deep respect, Shostakovich’s response to the members of the Beethoven String Quartet, for whom the great composer wrote his #11 and #13. During a first rehearsal, with Shostakovich in the audience, one of the musicians paused and said to him, “this passage would sound better as arco”. Shostakovich: “I know it would sound better. But just keep it as pizzicato.” Babstock, too, knew what he was doing here. The poem deals with the inhuman, infiltrating sounds in a circumstance difficult to get out from under. The harsh c and k quick repetitions, the puking (when also quickly repeating) “blue”, “fuel”, “Khartoum”, the expertly realized confusion of the two-line “Koons .../ ...market”: this is showing, not telling, at its best (though the telling is there, “slant”, as well.

I’ll close by coming back to Stevens. Here he is, in The Necessary Angel, agreeing with this quote by Dr. Joad: “”Every quality of a body resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes. What is it that vibrates, moves, is changed? There is no answer. Philosophy has long dismissed the notion of substance and modern physics has endorsed the dismissal ... How, then, does the world come to appear to us as a collection of solid, static objects extended in space? Because of the intellect, which presents us with a false view of it.””

Stevens goes on, though, to refute that “[t]here is no answer”. Imagination was his only subject, his only theme. Babstock’s use of “reality”, whether through historical figures or landscape, dialogue or reappraisals of memory, keeps Stevens’ god in view. But for the reader to take that walk with him, it’s a good idea to carry a microscope, a telescope, a kaleidoscope, sight glasses, sunglasses, a steady use of peripheral vision, and, above all, a persistent mindscape.

My fave books of 2012

A little rushed this year, but most of these I've already covered at some point. Doesn't include books I'd previously read one time or more.

1) Orhan Pamuk, Snow (2005). Blogged 12 hours ago.

2) Orhan Pamuk, The Museum Of Innocence (2009). Blogged April 24th.

3) Ken Babstock, Methodist Hatchet (2011). Reviewed earlier this year for subTerrain.

4) Carmine Starnino, Lazy Bastardism (2012). Blogged Nov 13th.

5) Leigh Kotsilidis, Hypotheticals (2011). Poems which use scientific exploration not as self-important muddle, but as genuine observation and extrapolation. They don't all work, and a few cute tricks are replayed much too often (the end-line/mid-line full rhymes), though I can overlook flat effects next to the exciting "what are we driving ourselves into" (top notch poem).

Orhan Pamuk's Snow

One gets an idea that a novel may be a bit of all right when three heavyweight writers step to the scale with vastly different readings of it. John Updike liked Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2005), though he was discouraged by its tonal resignation; Christopher Hitchens panned the novel, imputing to its author a cowardly skirting of contemporary history and moral sympathies; and Margaret Atwood raved about it, though mostly from the gender angle. That all three eminent writers are off base (at least Atwood covered well what she did focus on) is another feather in the lapel for Pamuk, who continues to confound ideologues, whether aesthetic or political or cultural, and astound with complex stories – one might call them postmodern fables – engaged with human dilemmas in prose both practically intelligent and mysterious.

I dislike plot summary reviews in anything but barebones-impetus outlining, so here goes. The narrator (whose story is told by a fictional Orhan Pamuk who will be inserted into the novel after the half-way point) travels to Kars, a crushingly impoverished town in northeastern Turkey, after a twelve year political exile in Frankfurt, ostensibly to attend his mother’s funeral, but really to catch up with a flame (Ipek) from his teen years when they lived in Istanbul. A snowstorm redundantly shuts off  Kars from the outside world, Turkey or otherwise, and narrator Ka gets on as a journalist to investigate a story about girls and women of the town who commit suicide as a response to Ataturk’s  legacy of monochromatic secularism. The girls, you see, have been forced to remove their head scarves at school.

The plot, like any good postmodern romp in the bed of Pynchon or Tarantino, quickly evolves into a labyrinthine series of twists which incorporate past elements but also  further mysteries that take our befuddled guide into zones where he can only record. And it’s this recording, this wise and careful observation, that the above three reviewers seemed to miss. Regarding Updike, of course Ka’s reaction is passive and halfhearted. That’s the point. The novel is titled so, and the snowstorm is a giant sledgehammer of a hint, in order to underscore Pamuk’s intention. (Hitchens makes this mistake, too.) Pamuk, through his main character, but also through the poor (in spirit and physical resources) town residents, reveals how inertia is self-perpetuating, a law of physics. Hitchens wants a heroic attempt through the lens of political morality, but nothing in the novel lets the subjugated off the hook, though Pamuk does succeed in painting them with sympathetic colours. The Muslim terrorist Blue? Hitchens thinks he gets singled out as the strong candidate for our approval, but Pamuk’s point is that – though Blue is imprisoned – the secular military are there to keep power. The spiritually gentle, of which Pamuk has much to say through several remarkable characters, don’t pose a threat, so of course they aren’t going to get the same kind of “martyrdom” as the troublemakers.That said, Hitchens is astoundingly obtuse about the young Muslim students Necip and Fazil. Pamuk's attitude towards them is complex. He gently mocks them (Hitchens misses the point of the stilted dialogue -- some people do talk that way), but he also saves a large piece of his fictional heart for those two, caught up in religious narrow-mindedness, secular indifference and selfishness, and economic and intellectual stagnation throughout the town.

Atwood eschews tonal preferences and political siding for pointless gender speculation on what drives men to write puzzle-within-puzzle-within-puzzle novels. (Because a woman protagonist would be snuffed out before the first plot twist resolution, she concludes. I’m not sure I follow, since a woman author can choose any character – male or female, bold or tentative – she wants as a spokesperson.) But she makes some on-the-mark points about situational gender roles, even if they’re relatively reductive.

Snow’s  scope lends itself to thematic concentration. Unfortunately, the peculiar and consistent concerns of these authors in their own creative writings spill over into their reviews, and were one to consult them before reading Pamuk’s masterpiece, the general impression of the novel might be one of a polished or cracked pane rather than a sun-refracting cathedral mosaic. I choose that metaphor with care because, ultimately, the book is worshipful and spiritually investigative. Its many scenes of ghostly night-walking overseen by the hidden, lurking informers and military low-level collection men, its interior philosophical jousting between sexual need and solitary meditation, its heartbreaking rendering of the protagonist’s last days in Germany and the follow-up questing by character-Pamuk in securing Ka’s 19 poems in a book form that may or may not exist – these and other considerations show the author in a mood both expansive and quiet, and there’s no getting around the incredible feeling of desperation mixed with the occasional balm of understanding that suffuses the novel’s conclusion.

Lorna Crozier's Small Mechanics

I’ve already provided a year-end review paragraph-bite on the poetry of Lorna Crozier, as well as an anecdote on squishing a mammoth moth that touched down on a poem of hers I was reading in Everything Arrives at the Light. So why one more review visit? Because after finishing her latest book, 2011’s Small Mechanics, I turned to the online feedback, and other than Shane Neilson’s spot-on take on the matter, voices were unanimous in their praise. With over 95% of poets, this doesn’t matter since time renders the passing enthusiasms of the heavily-weighted “yes!” camp to an eventual “maybe”, then “meh”, and finally “who?”. The problem here, however, stems from Crozier’s position in the poetry community. In her post as writing instructor at the University of Victoria,  dispensations in that capacity winning her the 2004 Distinguished Professors Award, not to mention her numerous other tributes, prizes, honorary doctorates in unrelated fields, benefit readings, and receiving-end flapdoodle panegyrics, her stature as poet and -- most important to my point – shaper of poets, is unimpeachable. It shouldn’t be. The flaws which accumulate in almost every one of her poems in any of her sixteen books are not subtle, even though disagreements always end up in that futile but partially understandable “matters of taste” concession. Many people enjoy her poetry, too, so it’s not just a case of students keeping their heads down and handing in party-line papers. But when a poet who has grave problems in fundamental areas of composition – including, but not limited to, image, metaphor, tone, rhythm, diction, organic control, voice and vision –  also teaches the young and naive who, to their defense, note the prefatory distinctions of that teacher, the situation is far worse than a once-lauded poet slowly fading into obscurity. Those students, and their students, form much of the reinforced connective edifice that dominates the landscape for another few generations, like mutant, identical Wal-Mart stores in different cities continually squeezing out the hope-against-hope Mom-and-Pop outlets where gems occasionally reside, untouched before the foreclosures or buy-outs.

LAST BREATH

Crozier’s first poem in the collection starts out with a grammatical error. “Not a living soul about,/except for me and the magpie.” This is, of course, mixing the singular and plural constructs. The enjambment between lines 6 and 7 contradicts the effect she’s trying to reach: “on his tongue before it slides/down his throat.” If she had wanted to emphasize the pause after “taste”, a more believable and sensuous quick-time imagining, a much more effective break would have occurred as, “taste it on his tongue/before it slides down his throat.” Next up: “He’s the bird Noah didn’t send out,/afraid he’d carry the ark’s complaints to heaven.” Why would the magpie feel so compelled? If a magpie refused to mourn Christ at His crucifixion, I’m not sure what motivation it would have to fly to heaven with its complaints. Besides, after refusing entrance into the ark, I’m sure it was more than happy sitting on the roof while the other obedient animals were stuffed into an unbearably stifling indoor situation, not to mention the other birds which obviously suffered even greater problems. Then we come to, “Tonight he scallops from the copse of willows/to the power pole”. The choice of “scallops” makes no sense in this context. Of the five verb variations of the word, none have to do with moving, flying, flitting (etc.) from one place to another. Two lines later: “the bird part of my brain lit up”. Unintentional humour in an otherwise disastrous poem, I admit, offers a little entertainment value, but I don’t think it strengthens the overall impression. The pronoun in “He flips his tail”, a few lines later, confuses the preceding subjects (she means the magpie, not the coyote), as well as making a gender assumption. Next, Crozier describes the magpie’s song: “bringing up the oboes/then the high notes of the flutes.” Has Crozier attended to the timbre and pitch of the oboe? I haven’t yet heard the bird who could mimic the scary low registers of that instrument. Then, after a fanciful interlude which hides its inflated nature anecdote behind a parable, the poem concludes with, “mouthfuls of silence that, if not for coyotes,/the magpie would hear.” Now, this is puzzling. Who is the magpie here? Remember, Crozier inserted herself into the poem’s first sentence. It’s “me and the magpie”. Is the coyote a deflected stand-in for the poet? If so, does that make the coyote-poet the successful protector of the victims of thieves and others who would “pluck/the breath from my body”? The entire conceit seems rather overblown. If one is superstitious (though the Chinese regard the magpie as a “bird of joy”), there’s plenty of advice on how to eliminate the curse of seeing the lone bird by chance. I’m fond of the “Hello, Mr. Magpie, where is your wife?” option, but then, I’m just considering an entertaining game of armchair prophecy, not making a case as a Messiah for poetic expression.

DON’T SAY IT

This is a real head-scratcher. The wild grasses are silent, and “the meadow is more beautiful//for all it keeps inside.” But there is no inside and outside with nature. The poet receiving “syllables of seeds” when communing with the “beautiful” has nothing to do with nature’s withholding. It’s not pathetic fallacy at its worst, fortunately, but it’s something almost equally insidious: the poet who, once interpreting nature’s silent bounty, is elevated by an indiscriminate belief that any and all words that record reverent outdoorsy vagaries are due their proper awe. There are a million and one nature poems by awful poets, whether published in respectable journals or gathering dust on shelves. Let’s assess the poems as poems, not as automatic spiritual triumphs because of subject matter alone.

THE FIRST DAY OF THE YEAR

Shane Neilson has already unearthed the creepy meaning here for those unaware of  Crozier’s position as creative writing instructor. It must warm the hearts of those students to find themselves being referred to as infants. It just brings out the dark side of matronly oversight. And of course, some parents don’t allow their offspring to grow up, but if those diaper-swaddled cuties ever do, look out.

BECAUSE WE ARE MADE OF MOSTLY WATER,

The comma isn’t a typo. This is a particularly clumsy way of laying out the title-as-first-line poem. “[E]very time we speak,/our words are mist, are rain”. Then, three lines of nature inflation later, “[s]ometimes//our words are snow.” Again, we have a simple parallel error. The first “every” is then incorrect. But Crozier likes to get carried away, and then forgets to pull home the kite after her reappraisal of the wind. Cliches and dull descriptions take over: “the sting of winter”, “everything inside us/freezes shut”. The poem ends as so many bad poems do, in a hopeless grab at spiritual profundity: “our mouths odd//with cold and urgently dry/from the effort of making/no sad sound.”

TRANSPLANTED

“[W]ind grieving/in the poplar trees.” Whoops. There’s our Ruskin bustin’. Despite that, the conceit here – a history of a transplanted heart – is handled with sympathy and, at times, vivid transposition. “Often//it skips a beat – grouse explode from ditches.” And later: “Some nights it is a sail billowing/with blood, a raw fist punching.” I especially like the appropriate “b” alliteration.

THE UNBORN

Here’s the first stanza:

“They don’t show up that often

and when they do, it’s possible

to ignore them like all the other things

that go on while you sleep.”

This is a sleepwalking poet, dictating her nocturnal urges. It’s lifeless even if you were to eliminate the line breaks and read it as prose. Later on, we’re treated to “misforgotten”. Is this like one of the current euphemism-lies, “misspoke”? But at least there’s a connection in logic to the latter verbal indiscretion. How can one forget incorrectly? Or does Crozier mean it’s a mistake to forget? But to forget something isn’t an act of will. That’s why criminals on the stand often fall back on the lie, when Perry Mason grills them on their whereabouts the night of Oct 7th, between 8:00 p.m. and 8:17 p.m.: “I don’t recall”. “In snow’s unmothering abundance” begins the final stanza. The emotions are evoked consistently well after the first stanza, but the main problem with the poem is its layered abstraction. With such an emotional subject, a symbolic nature-ordering works much more effectively when there’s a corresponding vividness involving the reality of that loss. Crozier could be talking about someone specific, but she’s talking about Loss, with the capital L, philosophically. It mutes any dramatic effect and emotional scarring the poem might have otherwise achieved.

THE SOLSTICE BIRD

“It’s taken the rising sun two hours/to find these hills. It will take less time/tomorrow. Few things you’re sure of,/this is one”. Thousands of years ago, the scientifically unsophisticated lived in terror of sundown. They didn’t know if the sun would rise again the next day. We can smile now, but it’s a good reminder that playing the spiritual victim over another two reduced minutes of sunlight in early December doesn’t get a reasonable person’s sympathies involved for our common latitudinal fate. And when the theme is empty, it’s hard to avoid the follow-up misplaced importance. Thus: “What is winter in you begins/to shift, begins to feel like a hunger.” Instead of describing an actual person, not one of anyone undergoing the same seasonal shifts, Crozier goes, once again, for the lazy abstraction. The second-person murkiness is just a platform for her to wax profound on banal and often-visited tropes. And it’s not like the language resuscitates a dying theme. “The bird lands anyway, the black nibs of its feet/scratching commas on your palm”. But, aha! Now the reader understands it’s not about sharing a common lugubrious moment with everyone else north of the 49th. It’s about the poor poet who, much like winter’s onset, undergoes fallow periods in her career trajectory, where the words will not break through the earth, or whatever trampled-to-death metaphor another would select. The linguistic “commas”, here, is a common sight in the book, and, indeed, among many other contemporary poets. This is no better than the postmodern obsession with talking directly about poetic process in poems. The concern is narcissistic, and the effect is one of indifference, even cold disdain among those who have no idea of, or no concern for, the struggling creative fortunes of poets condemned to a life of being dragged here and there by a capricious muse. This kind of selfishness and self-importance has no equal in other non-word art forms. And why “commas”? Shouldn’t it be scraping erasures? Too bad it’s just an imaginative foray. Such a bird I could really sympathize with.

FACTS

“Did you know an ant has four/olfactory organs on its antennae;/the female mouse, a clitoris?” So begins the revelation. Why stop there? According to that great source of animal wisdom, wikipedia, “the spotted hyena, which has a particularly well-developed clitoris, urinates, mates and gives birth via the organ.” I mean, if the object is to produce shock, or at least surprise, in the reader, why pull up short on first base? But of course, this is Crozier, and we’re not dealing with facts for the sake of learning in scattered accumulation. Soon comes the real poem, for which the opener was just a table-setting excuse: “Did you know that grass has legs and feet?/That’s why it’s never still/but runs on the spot like a child in an old gymnasium.” Facts are cute, then, but mere triflings when compared with the imaginative profundities that arrive with the spin-off. If anyone can make sense of that gym simile, they’re cleverer than I.

LICHEN

“Lichen” is one more entry (we’re only at poem #9) in the poem-and-poet-as undiscovered-brilliance catalogue. “Something that comes close to holy:/you must fall on your knees/to see it clearly.” This is didactic mysticism at its worst. Listen up, unholy students. And listen reverently. This poem is more than worthy, sings Crozier. The next stanza has some nifty music – “tactile photo of the crab nebula/blazed into mineral” – which transitions immediately into, “like the bright side of a shadow/burned into a Hiroshima wall.” Uh oh.

GIVING UP

The moon is given its due as another personified benefactor that has turned its back on ungrateful humans. (We’re not sure why, since there’s no backstory or complementary contrast.) When D. H. Lawrence wrote on the same conceit, he didn’t have a silent, withholding moon as mirror for the “no one, no one, no one will fall/in love” of Crozier’s bathetic ending. He placed a god where the moon lamented, and had him speak. The first-person contrast was dramatic and damning, there was a personality at work, not the Crozier-as-moon sadness which, self-important as always, can’t help anyone with its unheeded wisdom. Here’s Lawrence/Quetzalcoatl: “Get rid of their heaviness,/Their lumpishness,/Or I’ll smother them all./I’ll shake the earth, and swallow them up, with their cities./I’ll send fire and ashes upon them.”. A few lines later: “For the sun and the moon are alive, and watching with gleaming eyes./And the earth is alive, and ready to shake off his fleas. And the stars are ready with stones to throw in the faces of men.” The poem extends to further elements, with further dire consequences. The striking thing to note is the contrast in mood. It’s Old Testament vs New Testament. But whereas a good case can be made for the New Testament in that old argument over which reaction (or initial action) is best in an ungrateful world, in Crozier’s New Testament creation, indifference or a weird passive-aggressive withdrawal replaces compassion. Lawrence’s poem is studded with his usual flaws – repetition ad nauseum, didacticism – but it’s an honest poem, and gives contours and boldness in the face of actual vices which engender that opposition.

---------

And it’s here, patient reader, that I stop, (thanks to the last poem’s title’s cue). I don’t have the time (though I have the inclination) to go through the next 71 poems in like fashion. Many of my arguments would become variations on a redundancy, anyway, since Crozier, as evidenced by comparisons with her previous books, brings similar thematic material, with similar attendant problems, to the table. I sincerely hope that my words have enraged one or more Crozier poetry lovers to respond with their own review(s), because the pathetic attempts at investigation I’ve stumbled across haven’t amounted to more than non sequiturs and mood agreement. One good poem, several others with promising scenarios or realized lines, and one excellent line (from the titular poem) – “The shadow in the empty barn has blood in it” – doesn’t add up to a successful book, but, you know, it’s impossible to subvert a rushing, rising waterline. This is just one sandbag. And I know there’re a few others out there. Nature, malevolent or benign, triumphs in the end. Here’s hoping for an abatement during the current hurricane era.