Jana Prikryl, _Midwood_

 What most struck me about Prikryl's second collection of poems, No Matter, was its being quite different from her first, The After Party; this, her third, is not much like either. Like No Matter, it feels stylistically unified (all short poems, with a remarkably consistent voice), but even more than the earlier book it seems intended to be taken as an integrated whole. The "you" of the poems, for instance, seems like the same person throughout, and the twenty-four poems titled "Midwood" interspersed through the book read like a sequence thanks to shared arboreal imagery. 

However, Midwood also has the range in time and space of The After Party, making it quite different from the here-and-now focus of No Matter. Much of the book seems set in Italy (e.g., the seven poems titled "The Noncello," a river in Italy). but Canada, New York City, and the town in Czechia where Prikryl was born all figure as well. The remembered and the anticipated get almost as much attention as the present, as though Prikryl as picking up on the poet-as-river idea that crops up in Heidegger's analyses of Hölderlin.

At the same time, the paratactic crops up, as in Adorno's analyses of Hölderlin. Here is "Midwood 3":

Out of the garment of the land
            it is not spring, why then you say
rank, but isn't 
an oracle around perimeter of which 
the words their lipid speeds pull from
and here so on the face of it
reserve, is it a reservoir
            if spill headfirst another's shape

Prikryl avoids end-stop punctuation throughout (no periods, question marks, exclamation points, or even semi-colons), which does a lot to unify the voice of the volume but also creates an unmoored effect in the syntax. The reader never knows for certain whether one line continues the sentence of the preceding line or starts a new sentence. 

Sentences thus unanchored and adrift were rare in Prikryl's earlier work, but I really liked the effect. I assumed from the outset that the title Midwood alluded to Dante's famous and unbeatable figure for a midlife crisis, that we were with Prikryl in una selva oscura without map or compass...unanchored and adrift, in sum. Where are we, and how the hell did we end up here?

Midlife crisis looms especially in the Noncello poems, which seem to be about an adulterous affair. I am not at all positive about that, but adultery or infidelity seemed to be hovering behind the lines, as in Jorie Graham's The Errancy. 

And the self-doubt of a classic midlife crisis? Plenty of that, too, as when the trees in "Midwood 20" are "like me // annoying strivers / in constant danger of making bad choices."