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Lisa
Samuels' Paradise for Everyone contains
43 poems and they are in 43 different forms. This isn't the only thing that
distantly recalls Browning's Men and Women, another triumph of
universalist optimism. As with that great collection, you can spend days
revelling in the fullness and variety of Samuels' offerings, and you can also
spend a few darker moments working on the nagging sense of limitation.
Cataloguing Samuels' forms requires a somewhat different vocabulary from
Browning's; instead of trochee and triple-rhyme, we need to talk about
parentheses, non-stanzaic spacing (of lines or words), justification, page
dimensions, particles, French words, nonce-words and the letter U.
Oh, and iambics - occasionally. Sweep referentiality out of the door, and an
unemployed music creeps in at the window. There's some plainer examples in
the book (one is quoted a little later), but I'm not talking here about
ruthless regularity of the sort that the New Formalists have always been
content with, nor about the brazen clodhopping that Ashbery has sometimes
enjoyed. I really mean this:
or taking the moment
further than measurement
we could call
it
soporific
sunshine -
equivalent
your eyes
getting dimmer
by the year
folding
into dromedary
lashes -
[from 'Something for you']
That placing of the word 'dromedary', so you can hear all its humorous
somnolence, is a piece of virtuosity that can only be called prosodic.
These highly worked forms, every one so distinct, are no small part of my
pleasure in Paradise for Everyone. It comes with the shock of moving to the next page,
say from the four overlaid and distressed scattershots of 'After the
accident' to the insolent play
of rhyme and assonance in 'The end of distance':
fearsome predator of the leaving air
spent waking and spent experience
dangling from the courses
and clearly
meant
________________
I've hardly
taken to any life at all
that is a
penchant for falling, a syllable
wreathed
reckless on the air
that I don't
mean, or measuring
has habited
us to complicated beds
where we do
or do not say the things
we are. I've
taken to adjusting from afar
You might surmise that my revel with Samuels' forms is me marooned on a
mudflat with nothing but a broken TV, and starting to enjoy tracing the
circuitry. Transmission is actually fairly full-on, but unlike the melodies
it doesn't stay penned within a single page. Even so tiny and contained a
poem as this:
Upwind
animal pause
the sally
paths
unquiet lope
we all should
have
a soothing
urge
a dining win
the hands
taut
round the
shape
we're in
carries only a modest charge without awareness of the rest of the sequence,
its interest in the mammalian rhythms of breathing, air and speech, its more
specific awareness of how - unlike us - ants don't have the 'divisible expenditure'
of lungs ('The host of questions'), or how - unlike us - trees live mainly in
their outer cambium, which is essential to the line 'beseeching trees to
strip their bark and hide' in 'Riddle poem'.
Even in the brief excerpts from the two poems above, it's apparent how,
despite the radical change in character as we move from one to the other,
there are continuities of interest and feeling, or in this case falling.
The book's title announces preoccupations with the antediluvian myths of
Genesis that are pervasive. Rather obviously we are involved in lapsarian
material in 'The operator in question' and 'A suitable expression'; more
pervasively with movements that involve falling, collapse and rupture. Less
obviously the poems address volition ('Connubial bliss', 'The rack of
consent'), nakedness and dressing, not to mention eating the fruits (the
whole sequence ends with the delicious and deadly 'Fruits of conviction').
But still, I have a sense as I'm writing this that these extracted themes are
far from central to what the poems are. Analysis itself, the poems repeatedly
assert, is not at all what it claims to be:
rationality
is after-the-fact
to make
something that doesn't matter against the desire
for matter
requires you
to be as empty as the tools....
there is no
through to get through
[from 'Nun walking naked..']
Besides, through many readings I've become awkwardly aware that visiting the
same poem at different times can induce extremely contrary ideas of its
feeling and direction, and I believe that's an important aspect of Samuels'
art. A poem such as 'The Doctrine of Equivalents' has a full hand of pronouns
(one, her, their, we, you, I'm, you) but the pronouns don't seem to be stable
references to persons, so on one reading it might seem to speak of a
community and the next time of a movement within a single mind. By the same
token a poem that seems to be serenely contemplative might next time seem
impacted by violent passions. And curiously, it doesn't matter which; 'The
rack of consent', for example, remains steadily incandescent. This is how it
begins:
The world in
all magnificence surrounded by rope -
it protrudes
in animundo, flaccid and succulent like tongues
your lying articles
have reached me and the moment
here, unbraced, as if for turpitude, innuendo
what she said
and what was said by her lies
quivering on
the floor quite meshed, unseemly
or then
forest-bound - like trees
taken to the
side and opportuned
for speaking
in a language
I no longer understand
It was - like
that - toast, a word for toast
and what we
ate crumbling each other
it wasn't
meant to reach the same confusion we caused
infructuous, cohabiting
like pears wrecked on a plate
The whole poem, which develops wildly from this opening, I take to be Samuels
at her very best (I already mentioned the letter U, didn't I?). As physical
as it is philosophical, it typifies the kind of place where our best poets
are beginning to exert pressure and it's beginning to give, with startling
results. It gets me every time - that trick of infiltrating the baffling
darkness of 'opportuned' so the ear accepts it as 'importuned'. This is anti-personification
of a high order.
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Rosanna
Warren is a late-comer in the Lowellian tradition. There are lines in Departure
that you would
swear are half-remembered quotations from For the Union Dead. It's raining, and
therefore the ex-Presbyterian fieldstone church
on the corner
of Fairview and South
announces
"The Boston School of Modern Languages"
in an eddy of
street torrents and regurgitating storm drains
and foists
its mute megaphone clamped to a chimney pot
against the
gargled sky.
[from '5 P.M.']
Or, in a plane,
Unbolted, my
heart
is a missile
heading, in
every sense, in the wrong direction.
[from 'Travel']
But I can half-imagine Warren saying (like Brahms when they discovered the
echoes of the 'Ode to Joy' theme in the finale of his First Symphony) 'Any
donkey can see that'. Warren, one must assume, is perfectly aware of being
another gigantic carved head invoking Rome and endemic violence from a place
that is Bostonianly near to the power-centres of our own time. Her
inauguration poem for Clinton (an imperial reading of the Aeneid) is not only another
recollection of Lowell but is also patently concerned not so much with the
emperor as with poetry that aspires to the emperor's ear.
To speak in a tradition is not to stand still or cease to exist as an
individual, though if any poet would accept that fate you think it might be
Warren, who loads her book so heavily with the work of other artists that she
is sometimes almost a hostess whose greatest happiness is to 'bring someone
out'. At least that's how I think of 'Mud', whose stanzas add hardly anything
to the exhibition catalogue of John Walker's paintings (though some of the
lines can hardly be understood without it - the inexplicable 'duchess' is
Goya's Duchess of Alba); while 'Departure', though it ventures to weave in a
few words of Guido Guinizelli, seems to sacrifice its own modest claims
completely by inviting you to experience for yourself the terror of Max
Beckmann's triptych. Inevitably, the painting just blows the poem away.
But though I don't admire either of these poems I'm interested in the process
by which, thoroughly accepting the moves of an all-too-familiar tradition,
they end up taking them to a kind of extreme and, in the end, giving birth to
something different. Here's a stanza from 'Mud':
the clay grew
tall?") across canvas: he can't
bury fathers, uncles,
sons, they keep
sprouting,
worms their words ("Men went
to Catraeth as day
dawned"): Our words, his
This is, in part, Warren on Walker on David Jones on Aneirin. It's a kind of
compost of the chattering classes, and there's an awkward dissonance between
the horrors of the ostensible subject and the pert natter of the delivery
('"God" rhymes of course with everything'). The poem in fact by setting out
to be so programmatically worn and derivative actually turns into something
else, it bites its tail by acknowledging that 'The words belong to no-one'
and permits - though it hardly enforces - a critique of civilized lamentation
(for instance about the nightly newscast) that is 'a seethe on the surface we
cannot possess'.
'Postscript' is a better poem that evinces the same kind of pressures. It
arrives in the middle of a group of poems about the death of Warren's mother,
and seems willing to conform to its grief-stricken genre; a familiar one of
course. It is painful to ask, what are such poems doing? For their pressure
to be written means they are certainly doing something. But I think Warren
does ask. 'Postscript', faced with the fact of loss and the all too abundant
material of pain, keeps trying to assume the shapes of verse narrative:
toothbrush
and dentures
a still life on the
faux-marble washbasin;
her
washcloth slowly stiffening on the towel rack;
Yet its assumption of lyrical forms is short-breathed; one after another they
founder, and we become conscious of an impatience, both in the mother:
how to ease things a little - if
anything can -
Time to break
this off -
and in the daughter-narrator:
So she
floated in the red
armchair, so her tongue couldn't find
its lair in
her mouth:
so her ankles
swelled, so
each breath snared and hauled
up a groan
from its burrow of dark:
Warren over-emphasises the structure of narrative, its logical colons and its
'so' and 'and', until we become aware that the speech-act is ready to snap
because of the huge weight of its inner desire to stop, its awareness that
loss is really empty.
We are Greek
figures in a bas
relief,
two women leaning
But only in the poem's narrative, which creates the bas relief. Outside the poem these two
figures are not there, one of them in particular. And though the poem is so
intimately close to those seared moments in the hospice, it never aspires to
using the second person.
Without narrative, what conclusion? The poem ends:
So have whole
tribes
passed from
the memory of earth.
The missing article is significant. There is indeed a memory of earth, though
it's a short one, little more than a surface. Warren's imagination is always
quickened by these few inches of topsoil and by the surface water that runs
along and through it, its destruction but also its expression. Thus Jan‡ček
(in 'Intimate Letters') is seen taking dictation from
the little
well hidden through tall grass at Kazničov,
springing up
through the roots of three lime trees, "Helisov's Well,"
and in 'What Leaves'
the fountain
acknowledges the epic of water
and keeps
spurting, from its aorta, its own small line.
The capability of these surfaces is everything we have, but it is limited to
now, or rather to a sequence of nows:
since now is a proposition
molded over
and over
in water,
loam, and stone.
[from 'Portrait: Marriage']
I am only slightly committed to Departure as a collection, and these are
all the poems (with the addition of 'North') that I like. But in them one can
begin to fasten on the source of its vague sense of subversiveness within
tradition; it is humility. Warren is 'chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets', but this extraordinary title becomes part of the collection's
meaning. Her poems are full of names, but nothing suggests that the poems
claim immortality or claim to set canons in marble. It's just the opposite.
The poems use names because they instantiate language making its small
responses, the names are like 'a nick of light, as from broken glass' or part
of the 'endless mumbled rosaries of water'. This is a book that knows, as few
do, that it will yield almost at once to the books that come after. The third
part of 'North' asks about 'ablution' and soon this becomes absolution, but
How absolved, if the heart keeps sloshing more
pleas forth
from its dim
pump?
As the poem continues we see that its answer is neither ablution nor
absolution but dissolution.
© Michael
Peverett 2005
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