Laura Kasischke, _Space, in Chains_

I DON'T RECALL why I bought this; strangely enough, I bought it before it made several best-of-the-year lists, even though I had read none of her seven previous volumes. I must have been tipped, somehow, but by what or by whom?

The title poem reflects, I'm guessing the idea that the matter (atoms, particles) dispersed scattershot over the cosmos, drifting whither it will, that we call "space" is the very same matter that mysteriously congeals and accumulates into forms like planets, people, Tinker Toys, Elmer's Glue, and so on--the matter that adheres together into is also space, but confined, limited, bound--in chains, in short.

Why does matter compound into forms, into people, say, who see, speak, act, and remember, who generate new people, then disperse again?  Why do we come into being, and then cease to be?

This question--which takes many forms of its own--pervades the book, triggered perhaps by the deaths of the poet's parents and by watching your young son grow up.

It's all very Lucretian, really.  Which reminds me, I have to read that Greenblatt book. It's in one of the piles in my office, I'm almost sure.  What with Greenblatt's volume and this one, 2011 was a boom year for Lucretius, which probably come around less often than the Transit of Venus.

Kasischke is not what I would call an adventurous poet, but she does seem to like similes that hover tantalizingly just beyond the reach of ready comprehension.  Like this, of a grandmother glimpsed in a photo album found in a junk shop: "her face waits on every page / like an ax left behind on the moon."

Like an ax left behind on the moon? Hmm.  That is, like something we forgot in a place where we will have no opportunity to retrieve it? Like something that is useful in some places, but of no use at all where it is?  Like something that can conceivably do great harm, but is harmless where it is? Like something that does not exist (no axes having been left behind on the moon)?

"Neil, did you grab the ax before we got back in the capsule?"

"I...damn!"

Kasischke's fondness for the enigmatic only helps the book, though, I'd say.  No fewer than four poems are titled "Riddle," riddles being a bit like similes in which you guess what the tenor is based on the vehicle, inside-out similes shall we say, and all the more fun for being a bit oblique. A poem titled "Confession" is almost all simile:

Like the hospital room of the child after the parents have left
Like facing your prom dress in your nakedness

Like facing Oblivion in your prom dress

LIke black coffee spilled on the lilies
Like milk splashed onto the ashes

Is it the act of confession that is like these things?  Or is the poet confessing something via these similes? This sort of mystery kept me reading.

Kathleen Ossip, _The Cold War_

Surprises of the week:

Echoes of Keats in Heaney: You might not agree that "Who is this coming to the ash-pit" is an echo of Keats's "Who are these coming to the sacrifice," but I think it is. "Apart: the very word is like a bell"  and "the heel of my once capable / Warm hand" are undeniable, though (both from Heaney's "Chanson d'Aventure").

An echo of Pound in Ariana Reines: a line near the end of "Permanent Water"--"A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you"--seems to me a pretty crafty revision of a line in Pound's "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter."

And now two echoes of Pound in today's volume! In the first poem, "Human Mind," a couple of lines--

Mania we drank, adrenaline we chewed, and for what?
A few women botched in teeth (unfluoridated).

--echo Pound's famous lines on WW I from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly':

There died a myriad,
and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization [...].


And then a few pages on, in a poem about 1950s suburban life, Ossip rewrites the first line of the Cantos: "And then went down to the church."


I can't quite recall why I bought The Cold War--a favorable review from Stephen Burt, perhaps? If so, Stephen Burt is right once again: an excellent book. The more memorable poems here circulate around the texts and ideas of not-exactly-major-but-arguably-symptomatic intellectual figures from the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s: Karl Menninger and Wilhelm Reich (psychology), Yvor Winters (literary criticism), Will and Ariel Durant (history), Vance Packard (sociology). 


Judging from her author photo, Ossip does not seem likely to have been born before 1970, but her portrait of the Truman-to-Kennedy era puts Mad Men to shame.  The energy she (like the series) might have put into the clothes, the furniture, and the cars instead goes into the psychological structure of that time, its  hysterical insistence on its truths, its forced, blinkered, doomed-to-disappointment optimism.  That "Document:," a post-9/11 poem, slots seamlessly into the middle of this volume indicates our own moment's illness is no new one.


All this and just about the most incisive account of that incredible personage Yvor WInters I have ever seen--and in a poem, no less.

Ariana Reines, _Mercury_

AFTER TWO EXTRAORDINARY volumes, with two quite distinct approaches--The Cow used a variety of ingenious structures, Coeur de Lion sounded as candid and spontaneous as a journal--Ariana Reines's third volume, Mercury, is as crafty as her first and as swift an arrow to the heart as her second.  It's astonishing.

Might have been a mistake to read this in a day--it's 237 pages long--but it was not difficult to do so, given its headlong momentum. It's a long, deep rabbit hole, but there's no stopping once you have stumbled into it.

Five parts.

"Leaves" gathers 31 mainly short poems with separate titles, largely in the voice we already know (& love): "Writing beautifully made me feel like a fake / Which is part of feeling like a person. / I began to write in an ugly way / To subtract myself from womanhood and see only / A person in bas-relief with crucial parts and cartoon / Grief." Old themes resurface: the cow, "they seal the thing / Of cheese with a lion rampant." What is Nicolas Flamel doing here, though? Why the alchemical symbols, the allusions to mystical marriage, to the transmutation of elements?  The section's final poem, "Truth or Consequences," describes what we can only call a vision, though there is nothing gauzy or ethereal about it.  The poem ends with its speaker "not happy at all / But glad.  My secular life / If I ever had one is over."

"Save the World": Reines is dragged off, reluctantly, to the megaplex to see the film version of Watchmen, which is about saving the world, of course, and about saving the world from those who would save it. But Reines is a less concerned with the Dr. Manhattan-Ozymandias matchup than with the Silk Spectre and what women might conceivably have to do with saving the world, which leads...okay, let's pause to note that Reines gives Hollywood a bit of a scolding here, not least for putting Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" to the Silk Spectre-Nite Owl sex scene, a decision that certainly calls for scolding...leads to her pondering the work of an unnamed poet who, at least in the eyes of some of her readers and her publicists, is saving the world, though Reines seems not quite to buy it.

"When I Looked at Your Cock My Imagination Died": What does Reines's participation (real or fictional, I know not) in what sounds like the most abject kinds of pornography have to do with saving the world? I can't answer that, really, but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement, as another poet fascinated by alchemy once put it, and if you have to love the world to want to save it, you have to love the whole world, not just the pretty parts.

"Mercury": Full on with the alchemical symbols now, presented, interpreted, re-interpreted, as prelude to a lyrical treatise--only oxymorons will swerve by this point--on self and gender that takes us to...

..."0" (or "O"? Is it letter or number? Both?), a heart-piercing account of Reines's mother.

Mercury is not quite like anything else I have ever read--reminiscent in some ways of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, perhaps, but not really like that, either. It may not save the world, but it's an unforgettable book.

Seamus Heaney, _Human Chain_

I HAVE TO do something to whittle down the stack of unread poetry volumes around here, so here is my resolution: to read one a day this week.

I'm not sure why it took me eighteen months (more?) to get to this one. Heaney was my Favorite Living Poet from 1980, when I first read him, up until early 1990s; something of the gleam faded for me with Seeing Things and The Spirit Level, but I've still read each new volume.  And I liked District and Circle.  So why the wait?

Dunno.

Heaney is still Heaney in Human Chain, affably serious and seriously affable, a dab hand at translation (Colmcille this time), a subtle master of form (quite a few short-line poems here, not much seen since North), a man awake to the natural world:

Never, in later days,
Would fruit

So taste of earth.
There was slate

In the blackberries,
A slatey sap.

Heaney revisits old themes, but with a difference.  "The Conway Stewart" describes the pen that may have been the one that rested, "snug as a gun," in his hand in "Digging," and it is described as memorably as the the spade in that poem:

The nib uncapped,
Treating it to its first deep snorkel
In a newly opened ink-bottle,

Guttery, snottery,
Letting it rest then at an angle
to ingest [...]

There is a visit to the underworld, á la Station Island, cast this time in the terms of Aeneas's visit to the underworld in Book Six of the Aeneid (but with terza rima recalling Dante), and, once again, tributes to his parents' taciturn love. Heaney can still conjure an uncanny image, as when describing the next-day shape of a banked fire:  "The cindery skull / Formed when its tarry / Coral cooled."

New notes?  A poem for a grandchild, and what seems to be a poem ("Chansons d'Aventure") about having a heart attack.  Did Heaney have a heart attack? Mortality has never been far from the surface in Heaney's poetry, but frequently in Human Chain he seems particularly conscious of his own. The volume's title poem is about passing things along, as in a bucket brigade, or the heaving of bags of grain, as Heaney recalls, especially the blessed relief of letting go of the burden:

With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave--

The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed

That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.

Alex Ross, _The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century_

I READ THE first part of this--200 pages, roughly--back in 2008. I put the book aside, meaning to get back to it as soon as possible since I was getting a lot out of it, and then, somehow, four years went by. The daughter who graduated from high school about the time I interrupted my reading of The Rest Is Noise has just graduated from college. Who knows where the time goes, as Sandy Denny memorably put it. But I picked Ross's book up again a week ago and have just finished.

Ross is music critic for the New Yorker, and the book is a history of (what I guess we will have to call) classical music composition in the 20th century, starting with Mahler, Debussy, and Richard Strauss, and proceeding through Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and others to Steve Reich and John Adams.

The Rest Is Noise is written for a non-specialist audience--Ross uses no musical notation anywhere in the book, and when he throws out a term like "tritone" or "passacaglia" he always defines it.  The book is light on (though not devoid of) original research, but skillfully synthesizes a great deal of scholarship. I am guessing that musicologists would have the same kind of (perhaps not envy-free) misgivings and flare-ups  about Ross that psychologists have about Malcolm Gladwell, at the rate of perhaps 1.7 carps per page.

As for me, though--I thought it was an excellent book, and I learned a lot.  I was broadly familiar with these composers before reading it (I was pleased to see that of the thirty CDs Ross recommends in a list at the end of the book, I already had fourteen), but Ross's history has a narrative arc with enough conflict and characters for several novels, not to mention a few tablespoons of gossip to keep things lively. He brings old controversies to life, and shows you what was at stake in, for instance, how one felt about serialism. He is illuminating on the intersection of music and global politics in the 1930s (the Nazis and Wagner, Copland and the Popular Front, Shostakovich and Stalin) and during the Cold War (the USA and the USSR were competing not only in aerospace and in armaments, but over who had the most vibrant culture).

Musicologist or no, Ross always made me want to listen to familiar pieces again and to seek out the ones he wrote about that I had not yet heard.

Contemporary musical composition, like contemporary poetry, is always in danger of seeming as though its practitioners are its only audience, always liable to the charge of being elitist, closed-off, irrelevant.  I never thought that about contemporary poetry, and thanks to Ross, I will never think it again about contemporary classical music. It's here, it's alive, it's making a difference, it counts.

Mario Vargas Llosa, _Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter_

I HAD READ a pair of Vargas Llosa novels before this one--The War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat--so I don't know why it took me so long to get to this one, which I remember lots and lots of people reading in the 1980s. (In fact, my copy is a Quality Paperback Book Club edition--whatever happened to them?--which suggests how widely read this novel was.)

The story is set in Lima, Peru, in the 1950s. The narrator is an aspiring writer with the same name as the author; he is trying to finish a law degree while working on the staff of a radio station, but spends most of his time writing and rewriting short stories that he cannot get published. He becomes fascinated by Pedro Camacho, the author of a proliferating number of radio serials that have made their station Lima's most popular--this is the scriptwriter.The recently-divorced sister of the wife of one of Mario's uncles arrives in town, and Mario has the task of being her escort to the movies, a task he resents until he begins to be fascinated by her as well, even though she is twelve years older than he--this is Aunt Julia.

The title led me to expect that Pedro and Julia would meet, fall in love, etc. They do meet, but it is Mario who falls in love with Julia and persuades her to marry him, over the opposition of their whole family, especially his old-school cut-you-off-without-a-penny patriarch of a father. We find out in the final chapter they do not live happily ever after, exactly--the marriage lasts eight years-- but love does conquer convention and family opposition, which makes for a classic comedy ending, at least.

Apparently Vargas Llosa himself married an older female relative; according to Wikipedia, "he married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age of 19; she was 10 years older." The most interesting aspect of the novel, though, is not its possible autobiographical connections, but its attention to storytelling: the urge to tell them, the costs of telling them, our intense emotional engagement with them even though we know they are illusions.


We have not only the big-arc story of Mario's and Julia's relationship, but also numerous micro-examples such as the lies Mario tells to persuade various officials that he is of age to marry, and in between the chapters on Mario and Julia we have the stories told by Pedro Camacho's scripts, which start blending into a bizarre recursive mélange as he gradually forgets which character belongs to which story line. 


Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter kept reminding me of Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller (which was published two years later) in being a love story interleaved with a compendium of many other stories of many different kinds.  Both novels let us revel in our fascination with stories, while also considering how our stories create us, sometimes betray us, are in any case an inextricable element of our being in the world.

Johnson, _Radi Os_

READING REDDY'S VOYAGER inspired me to re-read t his, which I enjoyed anew, with even greater relish. Johnson's erasure poem not only engages Milton, but also engages Blake's reading of Milton by finding in the first four books of Paradise Lost the drama of the emergence of consciousness--which in turn seems to draw this poem into the orbit of Johnson's own magnificent ARK.