Jennifer Chang
Joanna Goodman, Trace of One
University of Iowa Press, 2002, 66pp, $13
The poems in Joanna Goodman's Trace of One hover
between the physical and spiritual worlds. They are poems
of hectic grace, busy converting one matter into another,
transforming identity and space, and bridging distances while
discovering new ones. Goodman often uses the second person
to join the lyric "I" and the reader, so that even the story of
inconstancy is one we all share. This is perhaps the reconciliation
behind the poet's insistent ruminating. Whether the
end is physical or spiritual, it is the traveling, not the arriving,
that propels these poems: "the moment before we turn / to
stone leaves us most deeply, most / blazingly ajar—." And
what propels a reader through Trace of One is the affecting
confidence with which Goodman interrogates mystery—not
the least of which is relationship, which she regards with
careful awe. Here we have a poet of luminous observation,
sharing a voice both vulnerable and daring in its humanity:
"I need some help / to brave this fool's ship, it's off-course,
/ bungled in the unseen worlds that echo and dunk and rise /
like marionettes dropped from the hieratic stars." A startling
first collection.
Joshua Beckman
Geoffrey G. O'Brien, The Guns and Flags Project
University of California Press, 2002, 85 pp, $16.95
| For years it's over and then it really begins,
a clear flame flickers in the heart of each thing
but it is the same one, cool to the touch
and those who walk about are as little jars
the grayness of the sky gave rise to,
the trees painted wildly enough they are not
to be noticed for more than a central flame,
the song that survives its chorus only to
leave off being, wherein a peasant feeling
that the soil travels toward other colors.
Thus the truth was passed like a rifle
leaned against a window. |
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The poems in Geoffrey G. O'Brien's first book present a
compelling mix of visual landscape and philosophical inquiry.
Rigorously constructed, they attempt the investigation of ideas
through a somewhat jarring accumulation of images.
Drawing on an uncomfortable simultaneity of intuitive and
intellectual knowledge, these poems constantly circle around
themselves and their moment of inspiration. Their density is
engaging, and with a purposeful complex language that
seems of another era, they are a pleasure to read. In The
Guns and Flags Project, O'Brien prioritizes observation over
voice. His objective tone creates a distance between the
writer, the subject, and the reader, one in which even the
most emotive moments express a somewhat historical sensibility.
In a time when so many poets are doing the very
opposite, this distance is a welcome path toward both
emotional and intellectual clarity.
Matthea Harvey
Rebecca Wolff, Manderle
University of Illinois Press, 2001, 72pp, $12.95
Rebecca Wolff's first collection of poems takes the name of
the house in Daphne de Maurier's novel, Rebecca. When the
novel begins, Rebecca is already dead and the house holds
only the memory of its former mistress. Are we supposed to
conclude that Rebeccas haunt Manderleys? Wolff is certainly
a spectral presence in her own book—and even we, as readers,
haunt, but never fully inhabit the "I" of these poems, which
touch down on the real only to bounce back into abstraction.
This leap comes in a number of forms—sometimes through
such music as "rhododendrons not in flower / but in redundancy,"
sometimes through the pogo-sticking of simile and
metaphor: "lobsters crawl onto the succoring shore like
cockroaches / tasting sugar on a counterculture, giant /
instruments of cold salience." Wolff's speakers are often
flustered flaneuses with minds that dash far ahead of their
feet: "Walking: my theorem runs." When, on the other hand,
the poems do inhabit the physical world, they choose the
most intimate of subjects (though they do signal an ironic
distance through their titles). There is "The Proverbial
Handshake: The Sharon Olds Poem," in which the speaker
discusses the way her cervix clenches her lover's penis after
sex, or "Mom gets laid," which describes just that. Wolff
has an Ashberian talent for titles—one favorite is "Don't
know what to call him but he's mighty lak a rose," a poem
in which Wolff plays tone like a xylophone, sliding swiftly
between registers. I thank this book for its thinking. Wolff
writes, "I have fun with you in the mental landscape" and
we do.
Jeffrey Shotts
Miranda Field, Swallow
Houghton Mifflin Company/Mariner Books, 2002, 53pp, $12
"Everything survives / the story of its fall," Miranda Field
writes, and in her voluptuous debut collection, Swallow, she
coaxes both the story and the survival out of an Eden-like
language, like meaning—intent on staying private, exclusive,
hidden, "The point of entry is a locked box in a drawer, / a
locket lying in the box." The effect is an ever-opening eye,
the senses slowly coming to, enrapt by charged atmospheres—
quixotic orchards or the time-stopped climates at the Museum
of Natural History. The hesitant accrual of her lines breaks
open into brutally revealing admissions as in: "The midwife
held him up, / his huge head hungry on its stem: too big, too
old, too slow, / then sudden: a son. Not the girl I wanted. The
boy slit me." The lush music at work in these poems, in the
diction of both splendid brocade and unkempt wilderness, masterfully
registers the poet's genuine desire for ecstatic truth and
the hard-earned revelation that it only comes gradually.
 As Field writes in "Affliction Is a Marvel of Divine
Technique," "Sometimes a shattered thing / gains value." This
is urgent and startlingly honest in the context of Field's proffered
treasures—polished lockets, overripe pears, wine presses,
perfumes, silver spoons—an ephemeral past spread out before
us, the consequences of excess that are difficult, indeed, to
swallow.
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