Microreviews
I Have Not Been Able to
Get Through to Everyone
Anna Moschovakis
Turtle Point Press, $16.95 (paper)
Plato’s Republic begins with the Ring of Gyges fable and ends with the banishment of poetry from the realms of knowledge. Near the beginning of her remarkable first collection Anna Moschovakis offers her own speculation on knowledge in a prose poem entitled “Thought Experiment: The Ring of Gyges”: “the content leaves something to be desired, but nobody knows what it is. Instead, they all know each blade of grass, how a criminal’s made, what constitutes grief and how it’s removed. In addition, they (kind of) know Kung Fu, Swahili, and the waltz.” With Plato, George Herbert and an unnamed Hélène Cixous acting as guiding lights throughout the book’s several sequences, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone is concerned primarily with knowledge, its forms and its limitations. In this so-called Information Age we seem to know an awful lot, but the depth and rigor of our knowledge (like “the content” above) leaves something to be desired. In opposition to this Moschovakis pursues a knowledge stripped bare of pretensions. In one lyric she sets her mind on the relationship between names and sex, moving from insightful, disinterested comparisons of the two (people change their names and are treated as fundamentally the same while people change their sex and are treated fundamentally differently) into a less scientistic, more intimate space. “Like many people, I like hearing my name spoken during sex,” Moschovakis writes, nicely undercutting the impersonality of her speculation. Moments of intimacy like this save Moschovakis (not to mention the reader) from her own steely intellect. Instead of concluding in the antiseptic emerald city of Plato’s republic, Moschovakis’s inquiries leave her winding down poetry’s open road, and it is here that she is at liberty to be most herself: “In the city of my book,” her final “Winter Song” concludes, “the character’s blown-out / winding up alleys & leaving.”
—Nicholas Bredie
Always Danger
David Hernandez
Southern Illinois University Press, $14.95 (paper)
In his second collection of poems, David Hernandez offers a guided tour of the dangers lurking around every corner—from the bully who “pummeled the school mascot” to the “fallen / dominoes of a derailed train”—while also keeping watch over what’s already been damaged. The book opens with a one-armed man, about whom “we wonder / which war, what factory machine.” “Damage makes a notch on us all,” Hernandez writes, but his people are fighters; they keep going. The amputee re-learns how to button his shirt, “his hand a swan pecking / down his chest.” Like the rest of us, the poet is also a kind of survivor. In “The Taxicab Incident,” a boy is nearly hit by a cab. We learn that he is Hernandez’s future father, the narrow miss a lucky break without which the poet would not be here to describe it. Hernandez’s accomplishment is to take sad but common experiences—the onset of a disease, say—and make them strange again, somehow beautiful: in “Alzheimer’s,” for example, a woman knits a sweater even as a crow unravels it. And he knows when to keep his cards close to his vest. Describing a high-schooler “lean / as a sunflower stalk,” he shades in the picture for sixteen lines before coming clean: “Only one finger’s / needed to empty her stomach.” But the book falters, at times, when a poem centers on a startling image without doing anything startling with it. In “The Soldier Inside the Horse,” the image of the soldier crouched inside a disemboweled horse contrasts predictably with his childhood innocence as “a boy who wanted / a pony.” What follows never quite lives up to the absurd horror of that opening image. But Hernandez is usually a compelling cartographer of survivors’ wonder in “a world that kicked / our hearts so hard with its beauty / it always left a bruise.”
—Matthew Thorburn
Man and Camel
Mark Strand
Knopf, $24 (cloth)
In his eleventh collection, Mark Strand continues to refine his play with the high absurd: dark, fast-paced, spare, and thoroughly pleasurable, Man and Camel shows Strand working out the surreal eventualities of fables, be they about the twined song of a man and camel, sharing a drink with horses at a pond, or encounters with a sometimes personified Death. On the surface, there appears to be very little work for the reader, since Strand lays things out so clearly and persuasively, though the poems sometimes rely too much on the wonder inspired by grand, ponderous gestures. For example, the title poem’s epiphany, where a man and camel tell the speaker that he has “ruined it forever,” is theatrically inexplicable, and the shift, from the speaker’s observations to the man and camel’s accusation, is frustrating, both in its suddenness and in what it doesn’t reveal. What “it?” “Ruined” how? Why “forever”? But this is what Strand’s work survives on: the amorphous, unknowable “it,” almost always ruined or lost. A similar, more effective ending comes in “Black Sea,” when the speaker, thinking of a precious someone now lost to him, asks, “Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all / that the world offers would you come only because I was here?” This is a book about loss, ruin, and endings, and thus nowhere is it better realized than in its own beautiful closing, “Poem After the Last Seven Words.” Ruminating on Jesus’s final utterance, Strand celebrates the gargantuan unknowability of faith and the afterlife: “what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand / has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart. / To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.” This echoes the sentiment of an earlier poem, “Mother and Son,” when, as one figure leaves the body of his departed mother, the poet writes, “If the moon could speak, what would it say? If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.” With this book, Strand confirms himself as the master of this grand, wondrous nothing.
—Charlie Clark
Correspondence
Kathy Graber
Saturnalia Books, $14 (paper)
“Some days I’m reckless, & some days, I board each thought / as though it were the crosstown bus,” Kathy Graber writes in her debut book, whose reckless (and restless) musings draw inspiration from sources as varied as Walter Benjamin, dog kibble, and busted rowboats. The title, Correspondence, refers to letter writing, alignments, and congruity. It also recalls Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondences” and with it the French word for synaesthesia, the realm where one sense leaps to sympathize and stand in for another. This collection draws its power from such sympathetic leaps: poems move from Heroditus to plastic snap beads, from scavenged quilts to tattooed arms, and from Kafka to empty storage containers “stacked like children’s colored blocks.” As the poems slide, they gather garbage and philosophy, resurrecting things that might otherwise pass for junk, including the peculiar movements of the mind itself. These strands build fragile, unexpected bridges between the felt and the seen, trying to explain how we know what we want and how we find what to gather. They ask how we value. They ask how, if at all, we can arrange the world’s streams of objects and desires into the flawed and often incongruous medium of language. As Graber writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “I have no rhetoric for this woman / I carry inside me. She had no syntax for the woman insider her . . .” In these poems, it’s the way in which correspondences slip and fail to correspond that generates the beauty and deeply felt intelligence of the whole: “I want it all. Every broken brick: / if not the fruit, the flower, if not this, the rind, whatever it is / that’s left over.” Here, it is the struggle with incongruity that binds each assemblage together.
—Tess Taylor
Averno
Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $12 (paper)
Readers familiar with Louise Glück’s work might consider the ordeal of Persephone an unsurprising or even predictable choice of thematic frames. In truth, Averno reminds us, a poet does not so much determine her themes as decide how to work through them. Averno is an important collection in that it shows Glück struggling with certain givens, such as the supposed certainty of myths, or the hopeful premise that poetry represents the possibility of change. But the one true change, Averno suggests with complete candor, has in fact already occurred—in its speakers’ sudden and traumatic matriculations from innocence to experience. To this end, each poem’s consolation rests in its existence as an exquisitely rendered, formal experience outside ordinary time, a notion for which the poem “Telescope” provides this analogy: while gazing up at the night sky, “You exist as the stars exist, / participating in their stillness”—until, that is, “you move your eye away” and realize “not that the image is false / but the relation is false.” Through Averno we come to see that Glück’s skepticism is not about poetry’s supreme fictions but about the relation between these fictions and the non-fictions of experience. “Snow began falling over the surface of the whole earth. / That can’t be true. And yet it felt true.” Composed largely of serial poems whose open-endedness charts the mind of a writer dispossessed of conclusions, Averno has the feeling of an urgent inner dialogue between the believer and the skeptic, the survivor and the analyst, the first person and the third. Refreshingly, the third person takes precedence throughout much of Averno, where rather than impersonations of Persephone, for example, the Persephone myth is examined for its interest as a story: “Now over and over / her mother hauls her out again—// You must ask yourself: are the flowers real?”
—Zack Finch
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