Rachael Allen, _God Complex_

 BEN PHILIPPS'S RECENT REVIEW of this book in n+1 persuaded me to pick it up. As I read it, to my surprise, I kept thinking of Eliot's The Waste Land, but maybe The Waste Land would fit Philipps's category of "eco-confessional," now that I think about it.

Besides being, like Eliot's 1922 volume, a book-length poem ("a sweeping and corrosive epic," according to the jacket copy), God Complex resembles The Waste Land in showing both the natural world and social institutions locked in some feedback loop death spiral, each coming unglued in response to the other's coming unglued.

Once, twice, three times a year,
the river would burst its bank.
The river would burst its muscly bank
all over the closed bars and into our house,
dark, destroying our rooms,
like someone in an unpredictable rage.
The parasols and our belongings heading out to sea.

Phrases like "one sanitary pad floated in the river's dank" and "rat-sweetened water" might have come right out of that description of the Thames that opens "The Fire Sermon."

And, as in The Waste Land, at the core of all the coming unglued lies a disastrous relationship--there are several in Eliot's poem, actually: the "my nerves are bad tonight" couple and Albert and Lil in "A Game of Chess" and the typist and the clerk in "The Fire Sermon." God Complex has just the one disastrous relationship, but it is as bad as all of Eliot's put together. The speaker is in a slow-motion shipwreck with a fellow next to whom Eliot's clerk, the "young man carbuncular," seems like a chivalrous charmer. 

"I called the wrong thing love for so long / I cannot switch it back," Allen writes. Much to one's relief, however, the very last poem in the book (p. 99), cast in the third person, suggests she has started to do a least a little better. Just about anything, though, would be better than what she has been through:

In this pain I was a charred donkey in an office chair--steaming, stupid and unusual. I'd have whole conversations with myself pretending half of me was you. I was so alone, so deeply, there was only river, and an inexplicable dome of smoke in  the sky.