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.

Annelyse Gelman, _Vexations_

 I BOUGHT THIS back in January, inspired by Anahid Nersessian's review in the NYRB, and when it arrived I was surprised to see a little badge on the cover announcing the book had won the James Laughlin Award--doubly surprised, I can say, first because the Laughlin Award goes to a poet's second book and Nersessian had called the book an "extraordinary debut," second because Laughlin Award winners are mailed to me every year as a membership benefit by the Academy of American Poets, and thus I did not need to purchase the book at all. Well. Turns out that yes, this is Gelman's second book (the first was Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone), and when my membership copy arrived in the mail I found it a good home.

And it deserves a good home--an extraordinary book. It's a single poem, 220 sestets--a narrative poem, perhaps, although that may be assuming too much. Something apocalyptically catastrophic has happened, ecologically or epidemiologically, but we don't know what it is. Somewhat as in Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet, we learn little to nothing about the actual catastrophe but experience instead its effects: removals and dislocations, the vanishing of things long taken for granted, improvised communities, strained relationships.

We do not get a plot, exactly, and thanks to the unvarying regularity of the sestets and some recurring details (a song called "Elsewhere, Elsewhere," the word "creamy," a grasshopper that gets killed) time seems to be standing still. Gelman mentions in a note that the poem was in part inspired by Eric Satie's "Vexations," a one-page piece of piano music that is to be repeated 840 times, with performances taking as long as 20-some hours. Gelman's Vexations has a similarly mesmerizing here-we-go-round-again feel. 

Part of the trance is that the text has no periods, making the reader's parsing of individual lines somewhat mobile. Sometimes two consecutive lines will seem to be syntactically and semantically entangled, but just as often they seem to be non sequiturs, and sometimes they flicker back and forth, now waves, now particles...an Ashberyean effect that kept things from ever settling down into predictability (that great hazard of post-apocalyptic fictions).

We know time is passing, though, because the narrator gives birth to a daughter on the first page and by the last page the daughter is (I think) on the verge of puberty. The narrator's valiant attempts to honor the duties of parenthood in the wake of civilization's collapse might remind you a bit of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but making it a mother-daughter story places it in quite another key, with (for me) the Persephone archetype looming awfully on the final page. 

Quite a book. Hard to put down, and not just because it has no end-stop punctuation.

Diane Seuss, _Modern Poetry_

 I WONDER WHETHER the Pulitzer-winning success of Frank: Sonnets and Diane Seuss's subsequent appearance in high-profile publications that publish only a handful of poems (New Yorker, NYRB, New Republic) put her in a retrospective frame of mind about the formation of her calling and her relationship to poetry. Breaking through in one's sixties must feel odd...not that I would know, but so I would guess, and the breaker-through might well think back to early influences, classes and teachers, the anthologies one worked through, all of which get poems in this new collection. Her becoming a reader and writer of poems is presented both directly ("My Education") and indirectly ("Allegory").

Seuss is not particularly oriented towards looking back. "The danger / of memory is going / to it for respite. Respite risks / entrapment, which is never / good," she writes in "Weeds." Likewise, she is not oriented towards composing her own ars poetica. "Poetry," which could pass for an ars poetica, at first gravitates towards talking about beauty, truth, and wisdom, but seems immediately uncomfortable with such abstractions.

So, what
can poetry be now? Dangerous
to approach such a question,
and difficult to find the will to care.

Seuss seems a little more comfortable in the poem "Against Poetry," (as in Moore's "I, too, dislike it," I imagine), but even as she admits "Lately, / I've wondered about poetry's / efficacy," she taps on the brakes: "Fearsome, to doubt / your life's foundation."

Poetry is a dog--"this dog I've walked and walked / to death"--or shoes left behind by the dead ("Legacy"). It is "useless at its core, / but not valueless." 

Still, even though Seuss has misgivings about looking back and more misgiving about poetry, she ends the book by looking back to her early love of Keats, and Keats himself, whose commitment to poetry defined his brief life and has kept his poems in circulation these two two hundred years now. The incongruity of a poet in her sixties cherishing a poet who died at twenty-five, the diffident battered-by-experience modern poet celebrating the High Romantic one--the embrace of that incongruity in the book's final section is the volume's most Seussian moment. The incongruous is her happy place. What matter if the actual Keats, had we a time machine, would not quite be, umm, Ben Whishaw? Let me quote the book's final poem in its entirety.

You would not have loved him,
my friend  the scholar 
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. Wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

The poem is titled "Romantic Poet." But who is the Romantic poet, Keats or Seuss? Exactly.

Bob Kaufman, _Collected Poems_

 I OFTEN PLAY pool with one of the nation’s best poets—sounds like bragging, and I guess it is—but I mention it by way of explanation of how I came to pick this volume up. My pool partner once mentioned that he thought Bob Kaufman was the best poet of  “that whole scene,” which I took to mean the writers loosely classified as the Beats—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, et alia. I thought, but did not say aloud, “really?” What I actually said was probably something like “hmm,” since I had read only a few anthology poems and did not remember them well enough to confirm or contest any opinion of Kaufman’s oeuvre. I decided that I needed to look into this and ordered this volume, published by City Lights (how Beat is that?), from Open Books in Seattle.

First bit of new information, when the book arrived, was that Bob Kaufman was Black; I had lazily assumed, given his name, that he was Jewish. Judging from the foreword and biographical chronology at the beginning of the volume (which, following my usual practice, I read last), he had an almost painfully archetypal poète maudit kind of career: nomadic, with lots of couch surfing, sporadic, with many and brief stints of gainful employment, occasional stays in jails and institutions, drugs, a ten-year silence, Buddhism…he checked every box.

And the poetry, which is all that matters at this point, really is worthwhile. It has a lot of what I think of as classic Beat moves: strings of participial phrases, Whitman-like catalogs with surreal twists, a kind of bop rhythm. I wouldn’t say his best poems are better than Ginsberg’s best poems, but he has a lot fewer forgettable ones than Ginsberg does. And in three longer and later poems—“The American Sun,” “The Poet,” and “The Ancient  Rain”—he sounds more Blakean than Ginsberg ever did, tapped in more deeply to the visionary vein denouncing empire. “The American Sun” is actually terrifying, as it seems perhaps even more true about America’s global presumptions than it was at the time of its composition in the 1970s.

And then what seem to be his last poems, the ones at the end of the “Uncollected Works” section, which seem to be the fruit of his study of Buddhism—“A Closer Look,” “A Familiar Tune,” “The Struggle of Muscle,” “Falling Forward,” “Mining,” and “Human Being”—I expect I will be returning to these. This is how “Human Being” ends:

Thoughts
will come
and go
if we allow.
Just let them
go about
the business
of illusion
on their own.

If you think

them real,
at where

they came from.

gently look

at where

they came from.

No one’s home.

See?

Now you are free

to be. 

Selby Wynn Schwartz, _After Sappho_

 A NOVEL, BUT an unconventional one. 

It has a lot in common with group biography (as in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club or Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), since it presents a cast of notable lesbian writers and artists who lived in Europe and England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, René Vivien, Radclyffe Hall, and quite a few others. The title points to how discovering Sappho was a moment of recognition for many of these women, and how those tantalizing fragments became a place for them to meet and know each other. 

Given its objects of attention, it also has a lot in common Lisa Cohen's All We Know in depicting the relatively more privileged regions of a 20th century lesbian cultural milieu.

However, stylistically, it also has a lot in common with Eduardo Galeano's amazing three-volume history of Latin America, Memory of Fire, which also told its story through short, vividly written vignettes rather than in conventional historiographical discourse.

Schwartz begins the 17-page "Bibliographical Note" at the end of the volume by acknowledging that the genre question is up for grabs: "This is a work of fiction. Or possibly it is such a hybrid of imaginaries and intimate non-fictions, of speculative biographies and 'suggestions for short pieces' [...] as to have no recourse to a category at all." 

Several dissertations worth of research went into the book, as the note attests, but Schwartz felt free to invent, embroider, rearrange, and omit. As she mentions, she simply omits Gabriele d'Annunzio, the flamboyant writer who loomed large in the lives of some of her subjects, which would be a problem if this were meant to be a comprehensive history--but it isn't. A comprehensive history would likely also spend more time on Stein and Toklas, but I was glad to read instead about Lina Poletti and Sibilla Aleramo, figures much less known in the English-speaking world than Alice and Gertrude.

After Sappho is a brisk and enlightening read. Given that is subjects are mainly white and independently wealthy, I wonder whether Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments makes for a comparable project that it is a little nearer the bull's-eye of the zeitgeist. Well, we'll see.

Sara Baume, _Seven Steeples_

 EXTRAORDINARY NOVEL. UNUSUAL, though. The two main characters, Isabel and Simon,  who are referred to throughout as Bell and Sigh, have decided to quit their jobs, detach from what we used to call the rat race, and live as modestly as they can out in the country. They are not off the grid, exactly, but they are only lightly attached to it. The novel describes their first seven years in their new life, one chapter per year.

One unusual thing about Seven Steeples is that there is next to no dialogue between Bell and Sigh--no conversations, no arguments, no discussions, not even much in the way of "what would like to have for dinner?" or "the door handle is coming loose." For that matter, there is next to no interiority, nothing about what either is thinking or remembering or hoping for. Their personalities hardly emerge at all; their two dogs, Pip and Voss, are much more sharply individuated, much more distinct from each other, than Bell and Sigh.

What we get instead of dialogue or interiority is what they perceive and what they do. We get descriptions of the small house where they live and the routines they establish. We get descriptions of the attached property and the local landscape, including glimpses of a neighbor and the nearby village where Bell and Sigh shop, but mainly just the natural environment.

This might strike you as a poor substitute for getting insights into the characters, and if I say Baume's descriptions of the house and region are poetic, you might say "uh oh, sounds like trouble," so let me hasten to say that the poetic quality of the descriptions lies not in the ornateness of their imagery or a bustle of exotic adjectives but in Baume's use of spacing and line breaks. That is, the ending of a paragraph often looks like poetry, with phrases separated by white space, and interestingly enough, this made me read it differently and made the descriptions land differently. It's a simple trick--some might say gimmick--but surprisingly effective.

The main feature of the local landscape is a mountain, from the top of which one can, reportedly, see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. Baume has the audacity to sometimes write from the point of view of the mountain--that too might make you say, "uh oh," but she makes that work, too. Bell and Sigh never get around to climbing the mountain, however, until they are seven years in...at which point their long-delayed ascent feels like an acknowledgement of something, a culmination, a ceremony. They have made a home. 

And so this novel that barely has enough plot for a short short story and in which the characters scarcely emerge from the background ends by being moving, insightful, and unforgettable. 

Emily Berry, _Unexhausted Time_

 THE FIRST POEMS by Emily Berry that I read, way back in 2020, were excerpts from this book, which was published in 2022.  I liked the excerpts well enough to buy copies of her first two books, which I also liked, and here I am circling back to “Unexhausted Time.”

The jacket copy leaves it up to the reader to decide whether this book is “a long poem” or “a series of titled and untitled fragments.” I lean toward calling the book’s first and third sections a long poem, with a middle section of prose poems serving as a kind of perpendicular element that is part of the book but not exactly part of the long poem “Unexhausted Time.” 

The long poem does seem to be composed of fragments, we could say. One could connect them into a narrative…actually, one could connect them into any number of narratives, as one could draw any number of pictures from a constellation of dots, but the story I saw was about a “you” that may have been the speaker, may have been the reader, but seemed most often to be a (possibly former) partner, with whom the speaker once formed a “we.” 

There had been a rupture, though. Possibly a death—the poem “This Spirit,” which opens the second part of what I am calling the long poem, occurs in some soft-boundaried, transitional space between this plane and the next one. More often, the rupture felt like a breakup, a separation, a divorce. You wouldn’t call it confessional poetry—far too oblique and disjunctive for such a designation—but it did feel personal and close to the bone.

The middle section of prose poems seemed to be about dreams, e.g., “I went to visit André and for some reason I had a snake with me that I had to kill.” Oddly enough, these seemed clearer, plainer, more down to earth than the poems about the “you,” as though the unconscious mind spoke a simpler, more transparent language than the conscious mind does. Well…maybe it does. 

The prose dreams share elements with the lyrical fragments of what I am thinking of “Unexhausted Time,” creating a kind of intersection, or two different paths through the same material. 

I hope her American audience grows.