Poetry Microreviews
Little Savage
Emily Fragos
Grove Press, $13 (paper)
According to the International Labor Organization, in 1999 the United States surpassed Japan as the industrial nation with the longest workinghours—1,978 per year. Small wonder, then, that time is the commodity that most of us feel we have entirely too little of. Yet time is exactly what Emily Fragos has taken with her stunningly graceful first book of poems, Little Savage. A 1996 graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, Fragos (who is in her 50s) has waited until this year to make her book-length debut, and from the unrhymed sonnet “Apollo’s Kiss” on the first page to the haunting “The Other Place” on the last, this scrupulously crafted collection proves well worth the wait. Permeated with sympathy for both humankind and nature and peopled with outcasts, artists, misfits, and musicians, Fragos’s confidently voiced poems exhibit a delicate, mature mastery of language. An amateur cellist and pianist, she uses her finely attuned ear to work subtle internal rhyme throughout virtually every piece; her sense of rhythm and pacing are impeccable, and she moves through time with poise and assurance, from the distant past of “Pompeii, A.D. 79” (“You will imagine our face as the fire overtook us”) to the quotidian but no less uncanny present of “Antarctic Night” (“I’ve found a job writing letters, / long and puzzling, on pale / pink stationery, for the woman / with glass eyes”). Whether she takes as her subject such famous figures as Glenn Gould or Maria Callas or else such ordinary individuals as the girl who “said the landlady was deranged, / had slapped her, set her German shepherd upon her / for no reason on thestreet,” Fragos takes pains to treat each of her fragile subjects with dignity, compassion, and a grave attentiveness. The poems inLittle Savage are so smooth and radiant with thought that one gets the sense that they were tumbled around in the mind of the poet until completely polished, and we would do well to take the time to read them with equal care.
—Kathleen Rooney
Of Thee I Sing
Timothy Liu
University of Georgia Press, $16.95 (paper)
The title of Timothy Liu’s fifth collection may suggest poems of a political cast, but this book is no more or less topical than 2001’s Hard Evidence, and the title’s address embraces any number of abstractions: nation, God, beloved, body. Liuis not an untalented writer, and he is capable of moments of grace and craft; two poems here, “Getting There” and “Bisexuality,”suggest a poet of sly, sometimes lovely erotic subtlety, at his best almost resembling a latter-day, lesser Catullus. But Liu seems incapable of self-assessment; this at least is the best explanation for a poem in which a line of potential emotional force and imagistic vibrancy, “Let world be more than teeth flashing in the dark,”can be followed by the nonsensical and awful “Let me be your rotisserie Christ.” Liu’s better instincts are everywhere hijacked by the indulgence of a strange voyeurism, a desire to imagine degradations cartoonish in their extremity: “threads of spider / eggs parachuting onto the lips of / dying whores,”“festering / sores on a stranger’s cock.” Scenes of abject violence and need are glutted with debasement, turning what might have been an exercise in moral imagination, or at least beneficent social awareness, into an often repulsive aesthetic of gutter-baroque: “needle stuck in the neck / of a woman giving head as a child // clings to her back, still sucking / on a pacifier.”The problem with such lines is not their explicitness but rather the tenor of their explicitness: they lack any sense of compassion, of ethical content or commitment, of what Martha Nussbaum has called“reverence before the soul.” These poems’ pageants of suffering(“a fag bashing / a lover’s brains with hammer blows / followed by twenty-two sleeping pills”) are finally anesthetic: they are not efforts at therapy, social or psychic, or invitations to empathy or even indignation; they are mere rhetorical flourishes, attempts toward the decorative, bankrupt grandeur of a negative sublime.
—Garth Greenwell
Fleet River
James Longenbach
University of Chicago Press, $14 (paper)
In this second collection of poems by noted critic James Longenbach, two travelers embark on a journey both grounded in the literal and imbued with spiritual significance. In his acclaimed critical study Modern Poetry after Modernism, Longenbach has argued cogently for a connection between high modernist and postmodernist poetics, and many of the issues that preoccupy both movements haunt the poems of Fleet River—questions of epistemology, teleology, free will and determinism, the power of language, the possibility for transcendence. In several of the collection’s key poems, most notably the aptly titled “No Explanation,” the poet resolves to“respond” passively to the complexities of experience rather than try to fix a determinate, delimiting meaning to them: “And if I sacrificed the possibility of being / Understood, I didn’t mind; // At night at times the hemlocks / Seemed otherworldly as thestars.” A somber note of fatalism darkens Fleet River, as in“Learning Window,” in which the speaker sees “no need / To imagine a future because it was / Waiting beyond [his] control.”Despite this darkness, moments of wonder, ecstatic vision, and transcendence abound in the collection, as in “The Two Together,”in which the protagonists imagine “A dream in which existing is to want / / And wanting to receive—the burden / Of not knowing the event / Beyond .which nothing more will happen / / Foreverrelieved.” An almost Romantic sensitivity to the sublimity and seeming boundlessness of the natural world (“The landscape threatened never to end”) as well as a habit of humanizing that world (“Clouds opening as if the sky, opaque / / Then clear, confused / What was about to happen with / A memory”) inform the whole collection. If in his critical writing Longenbach has set out“to assert the historicity of poetry and the political power ofpoets,” he seeks in this elegant and thematically rich collection to capture that fleeting moment of inspiration when “revelationdoesn’t wait / For us to choose a form.”
—Robert Schnall
Columbarium
Susan Stewart
University of Chicago Press, $22.50 (cloth)
Susan Stewart’s fourth book of poetry, Columbarium, is her most fiercely intelligent and ambitious to date: over a hundred pages long, its 35 “ShadowGeorgics” are framed by lengthy tributes to the four elements ofantiquity—air, fire, earth, and water—which set the boundaries ofStewart’s almost limitless concerns. Modeled on Virgil’sGeorgics, the poems at the heart of Columbiarium investigate not only the interactions of the human and the natural worlds, but also address literary tradition itself. “If I could come back from thedead,” Stewart writes, “I would come back / for an apple,” and throughout the book she celebrates physical being and pleasure (the apple) while never losing sight of the intellect’s mediating force. Thus in a later poem, “Two Brief Views of Hell,” Stewart writes,“The mind wants an object and then recoils at what it has done.”Many of the poems touch upon the Fall and the notion offalling—what is the human’s relationship to the material world, and can we remain in it happily or must we fall from it? In“Pear,” for example, the speaker, “stalled” on a bridge, observes a girl almost magically “flying and falling, flying andfalling.” Lines later, we learn that the girl is merely jumping on a trampoline, but having witnessed this event urges in the speaker the realization that “Everyone must leave . . . to burn, and burn /And burn back to the ground,” the trampolinist’s freedom having come to suggest a darker, but perhaps still liberating, image of death. Stewart is at her most urgent and evocative when, as in“Pear,” she assumes the first person; otherwise the work’sessayistic quality obtrudes upon the immediacy and music of the poetry. Alternately, when she aims to be more aggressively musical, as in “Night Songs,” the poems can sound awkwardly singsong and forced. That said, readers of Columbiarium will be rewarded throughout by the poet’s remarkable acumen and edifying sense of purpose.
—Nadia Herman Colburn
Comments
About the Author
Multiple Authors
