Mathias Svalina, _Thank You, Terror_

 MATHIAS SVALINA IS not so old as all that--I think he is in his forties, perhaps--but here he seems to be already developing a "late style," the kind of stripped-down, frill-free approach that artists adopt in their seventies. The old eye-catching tricks disappear--the desertion of Yeats's circus animals--so Thank You, Terror does not have the floral bursts of surreal surprises that characterize a lot of Svalina's work, nor the same blind-siding dada humor. Some kind of terrible (but perhaps cleansing) fire has passed through here. We're in a valley of bones--on several pages I found myself thinking of Eliot's appropriation of Ezekiel in "Ash Wednesday." But at times, too, the bones are putting forth shy, pale green leaves.

As often with late style, ambition and sophistication are renounced in favor of the big, simple truths that have a chance of staying true--gratitude, fear, gratitude for fear ("thank you, terror"), mourning, love. 

Thank you astonishment.
Thank you fear.
Thank you.
I failed you.
I loved  you.
I fail you.
And I fail you.
And I fail you again.
Thank you for my failures.
Thank you for my love.

The quoted lines come right after about 200 lines each thanking one of Svalina's friends. The renunciatory simplicity of that--the abandonment of any attempt to dazzle in favor of acknowledging what people have meant to him--I found very affecting. 

This is Svalina's most openly personal book, I think, especially in its fifth and final section, most especially in its final poem, where he is (compared to his earlier work) startlingly candid about his memories and losses. To invoke Yeats again, we are in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart here.

(I would give poem titles here, but in true Svalinian fashion (cf. Destruction Myth, Wastoid, and Wine-Dark Sea), all the book's poems have the same title--"Thank You, Terror.")

I think this is his best book, and I say that as someone who loved the earlier books. For a writer as wildly imaginative and verbally inventive as Svalina to come down to the plain, unadorned, and undeniable--"We need each other. / We are each other"--just takes me apart, when I think of what a perilous voyage he seems to have made to get to that plainness (please do note the passages on Odysseus in the next-to-last poem). Takes me apart and puts me back together. 

In a parallel and better-managed universe, Mathias Svalina's books are in all the libraries, and they are in constant circulation.