Michael Palmer, _Sun_

 ANYONE OUT THERE remember the golden age of the North Point Press in the middle-to-late 1980s? Evan Connell, Guy Davenport, James Salter…it ran out of gas about 1990, but what a run, including this collection from Michael Palmer. I recently ran across some praise of this, and now I can’t remember where, but it sounded worth searching for, and lo and behold, when the interlibrary loan item arrived it was from the library of my alma mater. A good sign.

I had encountered poems by Palmer before in Douglas Messerli’s anthology From the Other Side of the Century and Paul Hoover’s Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry without their especially registering on me, but this collection definitely worked for me.

Here is a good short excerpt from “Baudelaire Series”:

The secret remains in the book
It is a palace
It is a double house 

It is a book you lost
It is a place from which you watch
the burning of your house 

I have swallowed this blank
this libel of shores
nights that like the book are lost

The secret seems both securely contained—in a book that is like a palace or house, or inside us, our having swallowed it—but also vanished—the book lost, the house burned. We have it and we have lost it. The poem has a relatively definite referent—the secret— but of course we don’t know what it is, so the word “secret” points candidly and unambiguously into a borderless mist. The poem hollows out its assertions even as it makes them.

Most of the book is like that—something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? The vertigo of such gestures is exactly what my friends who don’t like poetry don’t like about it, but it’s exactly what I go to poetry for. 

Something about what Palmer pays attention and finds worth mentioning, something about the unspoken, unfathomable logic with image follows image works for me. So thank you, whoever it was who praised Michael Palmer's Sun.