Joanna Klink, _The Nightfields_

WRAPPING UP ANOTHER Poetry Week here at Loads of Learned Lumber, and it was a good one. Every volume was good, and two might be masterpieces: Timothy Donnelly's The Problem of the Many and this one. I am moving Joanna Klink up into my contemporary American poetry pantheon.

Briefly described, the book is about loss (a painful breakup, a 90-year-old blue spruce uprooted by a windstorm, the death of her father) and looking at the night sky. That is, the book is about two of poetry's most ancient and foundational themes. So why does it seem so fresh and original? 

Mainly because of Klink's always surprising language, I think. "Motors carry you, / or feet pull you forward / in cool dispersals of color." Or: "the ground doves in their murmuring feathers." Or: "Devotion is full of arrows." 

Perhaps also because of her idiosyncratic spirituality, which might show up as a strange prayer:

Please. Give us birds.

A light unto the world. An undistorted,

ancient ornament--some swift way

out of the earth.

Where the stones are laid.

Where we are laid.

Or that she would wrote a poem called "New Year" that includes the statement "it was already too late"--and then the poem (I think) turns out to be an update of that classic of belatedness, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

Or just the ambition of "Night Sky," a long poem (or sequence, I'm not sure) about looking at the night sky that slowly becomes a poem about everything.

The republic may be going to hell, but our poetry remains worthwhile. It's something.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, _The Boys of Bluehill_

 FOR A FEW months late in the 1990s I was immersed in Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Magdalene Sermon (1989) and The Brazen Serpent (1994) because I was writing an article about her. I was living in those poems.

 I read The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001) and The Sun-fish (2009) when they came out and liked them— Ní Chuilleanáin is amazingly consistent—but not with the same obsessive attention, I have to admit, since I had said what I had to say and was not planning on writing more about her.

I bought this one, The Boys of Bluehill, when it came out in 2015 but did not get around to it right away...and now it’s been five years, and I learn Ní Chuilleanáin had new book out in 2019 (The Mother House) that I did not even know about.

There was something in those two books, Magdalene Sermon and Brazen Serpent, that I just absolutely had to figure out, explain to myself, and then try to describe for other people. I felt no such urgency with the subsequent books, though. And now Ní Chuilleanáin has had a new book out for going on two years without my knowing it. And I have, if anything, been reading more poetry than I was in the 1990s, by no means less. I feel disappointed in myself.

Her poetry has not changed, or not a great deal, and certainly not for the worse. The Boys of Bluehill may be a little more sombre, a little grayer than the earlier books, but her distinctive notes are all there. Ní Chuilleanáin poems work by holding a lot back, the details of the poem suggesting a narrative of which the bigger and more grievous facts remain unstated, but still have all their weight. One poem ends, “he can see the chair, and the red rug, the coloured // covers of the magazine, and everything that followed.” We do not know what followed—but you feel all of what happened, even without knowing what it was.  Or try this: “while the child you forgot to fetch from school / goes alone on dark bus journeys along the boulevards.” Feel that. And we don’t even know what was going on that led to the forgetting.

Ní Chuilleanáin‘s manner is very much what it was, then, maybe stronger and leaner, and her concerns have been consistent as well: art, music, religion, the church, loyalty and betrayal, the work of women and men’s ways of ignoring it. I wonder if the catastrophic hits the authority of the Irish Catholic Church has taken in the last ten years have something to do with the dry-ice anger under the surface of some of these poems.

Ní Chuilleanáin has not changed so very much—she remains a powerful poet, and either Muldoon or she is the greatest living Irish poet. I’m different, somehow. But not in any way I understand.

Timothy Donnelly, _The Problem of the Many_

 BOOKS SUCH AS this give me hope, not because The Problem of the Many is in tone hopeful or optimistic or uplifting—its score on any such scale would be modest, at best—but because the mere fact that anyone will take poetry seriously enough to write this well and construct a book this carefully and take the pains that have here been taken...well, that such things happen gives me hope. 

Seven years between Donnelly’s first book and his second, and then another nine for this one, his third, so as I finish Part 1 of The Problem of the Many, I am thinking, “Hmm, Mr. Donnelly, you know that would have made a nice slender volume all on its own.” Part 1 has intriguing formal variety, the ancient world as a leitmotif, and a corker long poem with which to close. Moreover, it sketches an expansively fertile theme: the relation of individual units (of matter, of time) to the collectivities they form, how one cannot necessarily guess the nature of the collectivity from the nature of the individuals composing it. That was excellent, I thought. Why not publish that, I thought, and not make us wait so long? 

But then Part 2 also seemed capable of being its own volume, for much the same reasons, and then Part 3 seemed like its own volume, a more satiric one, as did Part 4, a more elegiac and contemplative one, so I was compelled to acknowledge, okay, Mr. Donnelly, I see why you wanted to have all these in the same book.

The long poem that concludes Part 4, “Hymn to Life” (Donnelly notes Lou Andreas Salomé’s poem of the same title, not Longfellow’s, but I suspect Longfellow is in the mix somehow), shows a nice array of his gifts. Much of it is about extinct species, presented in the unscrolling syntax Donnelly has employed to good effect in his earlier books, but it also shows deftness of form in its 6-line stanzas and makes juxtapositions so jaw-dropping, of such different yet still complementary registers, that talk about mere montage or Pound’s ideogrammatic method seems inadequate. The problem of the many (that is, the relationship of the nature of the individual to the nature of the collectivity) reasserts itself, especially its temporal dimension and what it means for the collectivity that individuals die out and disappear.

And the last poem—the very last, coming even after the notes and acknowledgements—somehow does an even more persuasive job of closing the book than “Hymn of Life.”  

So, I hope I am still on the planet for Donnelly’s fourth book.

Mathias Svalina, Dream Delivery Service

YOU CAN FIND out the main public facts about Mathias Svalina's Dream Delivery Service here--http://www.dreamdeliveryservice.com--and while you are there, you should go ahead and subscribe, because it is definitely worth it.

A subscription provides you with a month of dreams written by Svalina, delivered by him to your very door if you live in the city he happens to be residing in that month, or by the U.S. Postal Service if you live elsewhere. (I have subscribed twice, both times receiving my dreams by mail.)

The dreams are prose poems in a quite small font (9 point, I guess?) on a small (five-and-a-half inches by four-and-a-quarter inches) sheet of white paper, and I would place them among the best work Svalina has done (and I am a long-time admirer). They occasionally remind me of James Tate by their ability to sweep you off in a surprising new direction before you even notice it. More remarkable, though, is Svalina's sheer power of invention: the extraordinary variety of scenarios, landscapes, characters, and events compassed in the dreams.

And most remarkable, I would say, is that in a literary landscape where the "dreamlike" has become a tired old mill horse ceaselessly wearing a path around the same old tropes, Svalina's poems really do evoke the oneiric--better than anything I have read since Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, certainly. 

Svalina's dreams accept the most fantastical premises--e.g. that you are being chased by a giant in a supermarket, the center of which is a volcano--with a deadpan matter-of-factness that extraordinarily mimics the tone of my own dreams, and like my dreams Svalina's are not exactly light, not exactly dark, but oddly serene with a gentle but chilly undercurrent of disquiet. His dreams are uncannily like my dreams, save that they do not vanish like smoke while I am trudging to the bathroom to brush my teeth in the morning. No. They may be read slowly, savored, and re-read, as often as I like. Bless the Dream Delivery service.

Bhanu Kapil, _Schizophrene_

 IN A PREFATORY note, Kapil writes of trying to write an epic on the Partition of India and Pakistan and its "trans-generational effects," including "high incidence of schizophrenia in diaspora Indian and Pakistani communities [...]" (her emphasis). She threw the unfinished epic in her backyard one Christmas Eve, recovered it the following spring, and began to rewrite it, using words or phrases that remained decipherable.

Unusual work methods, certainly, but memorable results. Schizophrene is not on an epic scale so far as length goes--69 pages, some of which bear only a few words--and only in a few passages hints at the terrible events of the Partition. Somehow, it does convey a sense of what this rupture meant to someone not born until 21 years after it had occurred. 

Kapil does not make any explicit, sequential argument about how historical trauma can be inherited by those who did not in their own persons experience it, but the text does succeed in testifying to how that inheritance can take place and make itself felt. Accordingly, the ramifications of this very short, fragmentary book are vast--think only of what it suggests about slavery and the United States, for instance.

Karen Solie, _The Caiplie Caves_

SOLIE IS CANADIAN, but the poems in the book are mainly set in Scotland; the Caiplie Caves are on Scotland's east coast and are associated with St. Ethernan, a 7th century CE missionary, probably a bishop, possibly a martyr, possibly a hermit--a figure of indistinct outline, then, thus well-suited for poetic inhabitation.

Both Part I and Part II contain a group of poems in Ethernan's voice, which I was interested to see have  the right-hand justification used in several poems in the new book by Jorie Graham, which I wrote about yesterday. Solie does not conure up quite the against-the-grain feeling that Graham does with this device, but her Ethernan is certainly an against-the-grain character, disillusioned with humanity and with the church. (Ethernan on the proliferation of relics: "our dear  saints possessed, in addition to divine attributes / more than the usual number of working parts".)

I read Parts I and II not sure what interested Solie in this setting or in Ethernan, but there is a surprising swerve in Part III--a group of poems in the form of Ethernan's (right justification, double-spaced), but in the voice of (it seems) Solie herself.

the solitude

there are no two ways about it 

you can live here but don't expect it to entertain you

like a can on a fence it will set you up

test on you its experimental drugs

dress you in its homemade clothes

hunger breaking you in two to make you last

Solie's desire for relief, refuge, a place apart, would be eloquent on its own--but in the context of her seeing the relics of and then re-imagining the hermits and martyrs of the early church, that desire rings a little differently and a little more poignantly. It's not, we realize, a modern complaint, but an ancient one, and no remedy, then or now, be it spiritual or pharmaceutical, is going to do all that we hope it will. "I want to see the end of / it does not end."

Jorie Graham, _Runaway_

 LET'S START THE new year right, with a Poetry Week.

Graham may be rounding the turn into her late manner. Overlord, Sea Change, and PLACE, it seemed to me, had Graham in a holding pattern, doing good work but in a familiar vein--Graham-like without being Graham at her exploratory, audacious best.

Fast did seem different, though. Graham was always interested in the immediate and the urgent, but in Fast she seemed interested in immediacy and urgency in a new, stripped-down way. She seemed willing to abandon her usual toolkit. 

That willingness continues in Runaway. The five poems with right-side justification, for instance, which I don't recall her using to this extent before.

 I do not understand why this relatively simple device has an effect, but it does, and somehow Graham is very deft at it. The tiny skip this technique puts into the rhythm of reading may be the key. Whatever it is, I found going back to re-read these immediately after finishing, trying to see why they were landing as they did, and I'm still not sure.

A larger group uses quatrains with unusually long lines--I wonder if the book's design, with its unusually wide, almost square pages, was a way to keep these long lines all in one line of print. Here too something happens in the rhythm of the reading that feels...different. So even when Graham is doing basically what she has been doing since The End of Beauty--unpacking phenomena, self-correcting, suddenly getting feverish, hallucinatory--her doing it in these long-lined quatrains makes it all register in an unfamiliar, oddly stately way.

And what about the two "Sam" poems, "Sam's Dream" and "Sam's Standing," in ten-line stanzas, the one seeming to be about an embryo, the other about the same embryo once he or she is born? Why the nod to Dylan Thomas's "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"? Why the recasting of Edward Thomas's "As the Team's Head Brass" as though it were filmed by Alain Resnais?

Graham is back at the old cauldron, but she has some new spells.