Jill Bialosky’s third volume of poems, Intruder, presents a series of intimate scenes. The worlds she creates uncover the most hidden of our truths, the thoughts, desires and fears that exist, usually, just below the surface of our consciousnesses. These aren’t the huge secrets which haunt the front of our minds with guilt or longing. These reveal a more quiet awareness, the slideshow we glimpse in the just-falling-asleep moments.Bialosky gracefully and accurately captures the intensity of the most private places in our minds. A reader may feel forced into the role of intruder, voyeur or eavesdropper.

This type of witnessing, this level of intimacy, may cause a reader to want to turn away. Bialosky second guesses this thought, addressing it in the fourth poem of “Intimacies: Portrait of an Artist,” a series based on paintings by Eric Fischel. After acknowledging our discomfort with the private moments the poems invite us to see and understand, Bialosky gently pulls us further in, causing us to surrender to our role in these scenarios:

I know you feel you’ve intruded
on their privacy, entered their secrets
and lies, invaded their private space.
I know you want to leave. But the boy,
he’s you, isn’t he? Doesn’t he make you ache?

Our own grieving, romantic disappointments, creative gestures, attractions and terrors become a part of the volume. As much as one wants to be looking at a scene inside a snow globe, to be able to perceive from higher ground and with a sheet of glass between oneself and the people, landscapes, and emotions of the poems, the reader is slipped into these scenes. One is coaxed into collaboration, taking a hand in the poem-making process, when reading this volume.

Sometimes the role of collaborator feels closer to accomplice. Disaster and destruction are portrayed as sublime, like in the first poem of section one, “The Seduction,” which reads, “and it was gorgeous, dazzling,/the orange and reds of such ruin.” This poem continues by asserting that if one tries to halt the onslaught of destruction, one can’t see:

Once the water met the flames
the fire transfigured into smoke so thick
they could no longer see
. . .
she thought it must have been her internal desires
gone askew. . .

These lines convey the message that one must look into, walk through the terrible to regain balance. This is not a re-tread of Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime. We are never relieved by standing at a satisfactory distance from the text, enjoying it as fiction, giving us the ability to feel pleasure. Though as readers we know this is a book, we also must admit we are culprits in the truth the volume unveils. The implication is that humans enjoy destruction, are “prepared for disaster” (“The Seduction”). In “The Myth of Creation,” she writes, “Do not be afraid,/the voice said, as if fear were another definition for happiness.” Every time we are caught in traffic slowing near the sight of an accident, we prove the powerful attraction that destruction holds.

Bialosky often writes those who people these poems into disaster: “An avalanche set loose. . . .He falls with her.” (poem VI of “The Skiers”) Her poem, “The Figure,” talks of the violence of the creative act: “The paintbrush unleashed a river of blood.” These actions are also put in kinship with romance. In the same poem in “The Skiers,” the fall is followed by, “And as they/fall is aroused to love her.” “The Skiers” is a beautiful and curious sonnet sequence in which a pair of lovers, in a kind of dream-scape, are continually interrupted by downhill skiers. Each poem approaches the scene through a different lens, showing Bialosky to be refreshingly generous in her vision and curiosity of the world. While at times seemingly personal, the poems are always reaching out for other perspectives.

In the course of this reaching, Bialosky’s work moves seamlessly from the concrete detail to the abstract concept and vice versa. From “The Poet Contemplates the Nature of Reality”:

. . .Freud said work is as important
as love to the soul—and at night she sat with a boy,
forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes.

Bialosky’s weaving of the world of ideas with the everyday helps her accomplish the good work of poetry, which, at its best, aids readers in the process of seeing newly what we’ve grown accustomed to taking for granted. Theater artist Robert Wilson, in an interview about his opera “Einstein on the Beach,” said if you take a candelabra and put it on a stage on a large formal dining table, no one will see the candelabra, but if you place the candelabra on a stage and set it on a huge boulder, viewers will see the candelabra again. Bialosky manages the task of giving readers new sight in a much less obvious way than Wilson proposes. Poetic sight becomes a natural extension of the everyday, as in the poem “Dreaming of Two Worlds Coexisting in Harmony” in which a poet is sitting on a deck reading about Odysseus and Calypso while “[i]nside the Knicks were on and she could hear the cheers/and cursing through the screen. On the lawn were two birds.”

Because of her comfort with both the domestic and the lofty, Bialosky has been compared to Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck, and Louise Bogan. However, this grouping of women seems reductionist. Grouping her only with other poets who are also women recalls a scene from the movie “Pollack” in which the artist visits fellow-painter Lee Krasner’s studio for the first time and asserts, “You’re a damn good woman painter.” Krasner, played by Marcia Gay Harden, responds with a blink of disappointment, as if she’s been stung by the comment.

As Bialosky is as equally skilled in the realm of ideas as she is in the concrete, her work just as easily makes her a descendant of Wallace Stevens. The ninth sonnet in “The Skiers” uses Stevens’ “Gray Room” strategy of bringing what’s absent in a space present by noticing and naming what’s not there: “Where are/the hummingbirds, jays, and falcons?” The volume also obsesses on the nature of the creative process and how it creates and is created by the actual world. From “The Poet Contemplates the Sunflowers”:

This is how she imagines it. A stillness.
He enters the room and is not afraid.
Once the poet watched a fence being torn down

In this poem, the lines between the poetic imagination and the observed world are blurred. This alternating between ideas and the sensory world also recalls the exquisite poetry of Jack Gilbert.

Bialosky herself defies the poet’s identity as being defined by gender, as the volume’s ninth poem with “The Poet” in the title, “The Poet Confronts the Self” has the female poet confronting a male “self”—or vice versa, depending on how one interprets where the confrontation begins. The poem begins:

She took off his coat of envy.
She took off his sweater of anger.
She took off his shirt of resentment.

It closes:

Is this who I am? he said,
naked of the wounds
of his multifarious nature.

As much as Intruder makes us look at the difficult, the painful, the ugly, it also gives us a chance to watch the insides of a snow globe swirl, to enjoy beauty in all its victory, through images, rhythms and dreamscapes, for moments, throughout these pages:

And for one moment the world revolved
      around her like a sea of shimmering stars
      where she was the center of the universe,
      where she shut the door and no one dared enter,
      where she dreamt of lovers who would never want her,
      where the rain fell regardless. (“Myth of Creation”)

Passages like these remind the reader that there is joy in the process of the deep diving we do when we open a book of poetry or set our pen to a blank page, that it is, to use the title of one of Bialosky’s poems, a “Cathedral of Wonder.”

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Anna Journey’s debut collection of poetry, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, does an excellent job of feeding—in order to reconcile—these gators. In fact, the book’s first poem is titled “Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?” These poems borrow from the genres of horror, ghost story and darker fables and fairy tales. Journey’s fable-poems, such as “Shapeshifter Introduces Her Village to the Moon” recollect short story writer Kelly Link. However, the volume as a whole performs more tasks than the creation of new mythologies.

The book is obsessive and purposeful. Its project, while stylistically at times mentoring itself to Sylvia Plath, is something wholly contemporary, slick and filmic. It’s also rooted in what seems to be a deeply personal story, even if the speaker admits “Some of What I Write Are Lies” (“Elegy: After Filling Out Egg-Donation Forms”). However, most writers understand that lies can sometimes cut closer to the truth than the facts as they stand.

The driving purpose of the volume is a reconciliation with the darker parts of human life and fantasy, which for Journey hover throughout gardens, houses, churches, sexuality, and family. Personal losses riddle the poems. “Rose Is Dead and Crashes the Party,” refers to a miscarried sister who appears throughout the volume. The speaker’s ancestors appear, ghost-like, in many poems, including, “My Great-Grandparents Return to the World as Closed Magnolia Buds.” Her poetic ancestors appear as well, chiefly Keats. There’s evidence of life after death in this book, in the way these ancestors haunt the livings’ faces, poems, and imaginings. The speaker, or singer/siren, keeps the dead vital by continuing conversation with them and through the consistent presence of their bodies and stories in these poems. Breathing continual life into the dead may be one way Journey helps her readers bear grief and guilt associated with the loss of loved ones.

Poet Scot Cairns, in his memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, writes “[Poetry] is not a means by which we transmit ideas or narrative events we think we already understand, but a way we might discover more sustaining versions of them.” Journey’s work seems to be in tune with this poetic theory. She writes, “I want to believe that, after he died, the cat didn’t / gnaw off his face.” Later in the poem, Journey continues, “I need to know / he kept his face that day” (“Elegy: I Pass by the Erotic Bakery”). This “need to know” drives the poems, seems to drive the writing of them as well, so there’s an urgency and almost frantic velocity to them, as if the writing of these lines will soothe the hauntedness of other, less palatable images that hang with the speaker.

Another poem engaging in this kind of self-soothing is “Since the Rabbit Was Singing.” It starts, “I didn’t hear my mother fly through the attic floor, / where she snapped/her vertebrae” and goes on to make the house the culpable agent in the event. Journey writes, “What does this house think it’s doing, / still bodiced // in water damage and poor boards?” The speaker prepares for the chance to be present at the event again, with the closing lines, “Mother, this time / I swear I’ll look up.” The poems become opportunity to correct responses to loss and disaster, to right one’s past by re-writing it.

In this regard, the poems act as a kind of amends-making, a process of rigorous self-appraisal. In even the smallest details of the past, the speaker attempts to bring to light where she could’ve done more. “Lucifer’s Panties at Lowe’s Garden Center” describes an interaction the speaker had with a customer when she was working in a garden shop. “I pointed to the label, direct sun, but couldn’t say, // Bring the blooms indoors before the frost.” This level of honest self-examination is impressive and generous.

This generosity is also given to other characters who appear in the poems. It’s highlighted in the poem, “He has given his face to the waters of the lake,” which recollects a string of family members giving actions to other people, actions that one doesn’t usually think of as gifts: “My mother / has given her knuckles to the boy on the school bus– / the groper who’s hand was a salamander”; “My aunt has given her fugitive / son his escape to a Mexican schoolhouse”; “He has given his girl’s lover / a blown-off leg beside the bar.” In this, the poet changes the reader’s perception of the world, helping us to see every action received as something to treasure, like it’s been gifted us.

These poems, as well, are gifts—often gifts to the dead. The dead are the gators that need feeding in this speaker’s world. In “Carnival Afterlife,” Journey asserts that feeding the dead requires continual effort. She writes, “Because the corpse opens his mouth for change even now, / decades after the embalmment.” The poem ends with a teenage girl dipping under the carnival tent “to stuff a fistful of late summer myrtle / down the throat of the hanged man.” The poem’s final line reads, “and he hung there, swaying from her touch.” Journey’s poems put their hands on the dead and bring them to life, making more beautiful the horror we associate with the dead and other spirits.

She often uses flowers or plants for this task.
I tell her I won’t go
to the Italian place

with the full copper bar because it smells
like blood since the surgery. No, she says. The smell

is wild mint in a white-peach orchard…” (“The Gypsy’s Late Arrival”)

This poem again revises the truth to make it more sustainable. Other poems prettify evil with the presence of flowers:

My demon
stamps inside like a starved goat—black

hoof on my tongue,
its bitter eggplant. My lips
won’t hold long

their cloven shapes
or his song: Blue thistles

bloomed in cities. (“Night with Eros in the Story of Leather (2)”)

This use of flowers recalls the Grimm fairy tale, “Jorinda and Joringel,” the tale of a young man who’s lover has been turned to a bird by a witch. He dreams of a blood-red flower with a pearl inside it that will free his beloved. Joringel finds this flower in his waking life and frees Jorinda and 7000 other maidens who have been captured and kept as birds in cages in the witches castle. The beauty of flowers—or wild mint and white peaches—in Journey’s work, has the effect of freeing the speaker from dark obsessions.

However, flowers are complicated in the Journey’s work; they come with their own dark tales: “The devil pries open my red hibiscus like skirts” (“Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?”); “The flower with my own name, Anna Elizabeth, was too damn pink and ruffled. I switched / its label, wrote Lucifer’s Panties, stuck its white plastic/flag back.” (“Lucifer’s Panties at Lowe’s Garden Center”); “Your sister and you decide the biggest / flower in the world is enough // to hold buckets of dead birds” (“Corpse Flowers and Grackles”); “Flowers / as snipers in the arrangement” (“Snipers in the Arrangement”). This poet, these poems, refuse simple symbols, entwine and conflate dark and light, and in the process turn reader’s assumptions about good and evil on their heads.

Though the poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting root themselves in traditions of superstition, these superstitions are re-understood and reversible. Journey writes, “The black cat crossing your path. To change your luck, / run backward.” (“Snipers in the Arrangement”). In digging up graves and rooting through the past, Anna Journey’s rich lines assert the writing of poetry as the vehicle that can change one’s luck, one’s history and future.

Read Danse Macabre, Mississippi: My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun” by Anna Journey in Rumpus Original Poems.

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Brian Teare’s second book sorts through the past and charts a new path for the future of poetry.

A palinode is a poetic denial, a poet’s way of taking back what he has said in an earlier poem. And while one of the poems in Brian Teare’s second collection, Sight Map, ironically complicates this denial with abandonment (“Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June”), as a whole, the volume can be understood as a series of palinodes, a complex array of assertions and denials.

Teare refuses to be pinned down in terms of worldview, subject, or poetics. At times, the poems in Sight Map communicate a frustration with language, come up against the limitations of words the same way Oakland’s Lake Merritt is held from its natural flow: “What could have been waves/instead tick—walled, halted—against brick” (“Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus”).

Since words are limited in the work they can do, Teare’s poems give importance to silence. Whole stanzas in “Morphology” are left entirely blank, and phrases are replaced with brackets emptied of their words in “To Be Two.” An apprehensiveness about language is also suggested by the assertion that words trump actual matter with their mattering: “more words for color than tint” (“Long After Hopkins”). However, the work remains hopeful about the possibilities and purposes of language, as expressed in “Pilgrim”: “[T]here is, isn’t there, a language entirely wakeful, you ask : because all you left behind has dreamt of it.”

Sight Map’s mountainous scope of subjects and formal experiments leaves a reader awestruck. The volume encourages hope that a new poetry can emerge from the rubble of postmodernism—if postmodernism has left young poets standing in the wreckage of the past, Teare is kneeling here with reverence, choosing shards from the piles and sewing together new shapes. The book becomes a guidebook to the past and present sources that contemporary poets have to sift through, an excavation and re-forming of our roots. It also functions as a manual for prayer for us poets who’ve “lost our God of tradition” (“Emerson Susquehanna”) but still crave a sense of something larger than ourselves.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, in his guidebook for Orthodox Christians, Beginning to Pray, writes, “Very often we use words of prayer which are extremely rich but we do not notice the depth of what we say, because we take the words for what they mean in our ordinary speech, while they could have deep echoes in our hearts if we only connected them with other things we know.” Teare writes, “what’s rootless/goes wrong-like” (“Lent Prayer”). University of California Press points out that Teare’s work is rooted in that of San Francisco Renaissance poets such as Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser—yet these poems clearly dig from deeper, older wells. Whole sections of poems (as in “To Be Two” and “Sanctuary”) recall primal chanting, Greek choruses, and prayer, demonstrating the calming effects of repetition and the healing power of mantra. This is particularly evident in “Sanctuary,” in which the speaker grapples with the pain of sexual and romantic betrayal.

Apart from Teare’s continual etymological digging, he directly quotes Emerson, Thoreau, Hopkins, Djuna Barnes, a Manichean hymn, field guides, Luce Irigaray, Ludwig Wittgenstein, graffiti from San Francisco’s Castro district, and other sources. He also references, echoes, or responds to work by contemporary poets such as Brenda Hillman and Jorie Graham. “As If from Letters of Surveyor Samuel Maclay” cuts phrases from Maclay’s journals and recalls Lorine Niedecker’s Jefferson and Darwin poems. Some of this poem’s rhythms, sounds, and line breaks are dead-on Niedecker:

                        “concluded the month of May obliged
            to spend the morning baking
 
                        bread things I admire their industry”

This poem may well also recall Niedecker in the phrase “no geese,” if one thinks of it as a wistful memorial to her first book New Goose. Teare’s exploration of the natural world and descriptions of a river in various seasons also bear homage to Niedecker’s work.

Brian Teare

If we do sense a wistfulness, it’s because, in comparison with today’s world, Niedecker’s time was simpler and somehow less dark. In Sight Map’s final poem, “An Essay to End Pleasure,” Teare writes, “if ornament could adorn/the worn shore of the ordinary : goose shit on the lake path, a flotilla/of plastic bags in waters.” Though he searches for and hopes, with words, to discover the joy that his predecessors transcribed, Teare comes face to face with the pollution of the city which has marred the natural landscape, and the loss of more innocent times—as well as the loss of God. The sense of a comforting Presence has been lost in the opening poem: “God has always been my mother’s/fingers separating/my sister’s hair, three strands gathered in a braid so tight white at the parted dark/roots” (“Emerson Susquehanna”). God is soon replaced with the lover, the kneeling of prayer and the kneeling of sex conflated in “Sanctuary”: “when//did I substitute the word prayer/for fucking.” When the lover leaves, halfway through Sight Map, the cynicism of the poetic intelligence overtakes any sense of hope.

The volume ends with these lines:

“…a new kind of bird
feeds at the lake : think of weeks the eye will take

to count its feathers; years
the mouth will wait
 
to drink what small air from its bones.” (“An Essay to End Pleasure”)

The geese of Niedecker or New York poet Joseph Ceravolo (who wrote, in “Drunken Winter,” “’geese geese’ the boy/June of winter”) have been replaced with an as of yet unidentified bird, one that will be consumed as soon as it is named. In this, Teare questions the whole poetic exercise. He writes “birds/without names/fly anyway” (“Emerson Susquehanna”), and “A letter can’t write itself, though/a life can” (“To Be Two”).

For all its complexity, music, grace, and newness, Sight Map stands out from other formally experimental collections because it shows no evidence of trying to impress. Reading these poems, with their deft use of sound, line, image, sensory detail, and pause, readers can’t miss Teare’s simple humility in his craft. The work starts by kneeling, at the feet of language, to discover

“the language of prayer : to disturb
words addressed to where God is is
what writing is : alphabet alive beneath
the alphabet so far into whiteness
each mind to itself creation come crawling
matter out of nothing”

and

            “. . .what once overheard the talk
            of God became matter” (“White Birch”)

And though the poems repeatedly express doubts about language, they leave us with the hope that there remains “a language entirely wakeful… because all you left behind has dreamt of it.” In Sight Map, Brian Teare offers a new sense of sacredness, new eyes with which to navigate the past and incorporate what we left behind into the future of poetry.

**

Read “Largo,” a new poem by Brian Teare, published today in The Rumpus.

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Kazim Ali’s speaker in The Fortieth Day is a liar, full of contradiction, but what else can words do but lie? Even if we poets want to put our faith in them, we find they come up short again and again. Ali’s speaker acknowledges his own lack of faith in words in “The Year in Winter” when he says: “How is it possible I ceased to believe in tongues.”

Still, one can’t fail to acknowledge that Ali is as skilled as one can hope to be using these broken tools. The poems are brilliant pieces that spill (spell) the bricks of the Tower of Babel onto the pages of the volume, falling into place as a map to God, defying the stubborn notion humans hold onto that there is a singular direct, skyward route to God. Ali finds a way to cobble together the limited devices of words, sounds and rhythms like birds build homes by twining together strands of hair and flimsy grass. Ali brings us closer to God by netting together varied pieces of this speaker’s life. What arises in the work is a sense of a Presence, but one defined by its “Lostness.” It is in this sense of an inability to locate God (“You’re unlocatable” in “August”) that Ali’s speaker, and his sympathetic readers, garner as much comfort as one can hope for in “a world contracted to expire” (“Interrupted Letter”). “Lostness” is the volume’s first poem and it speaks of the comfort in this truth: “how could I live without You if I were ever given answers.”

Though the poems as a whole insist on a non-vertical approach to God, even Ali’s speaker at times is confounded by this truth. In “Chasm,” he writes,

Why do you not colossus me
how is it you Babylon me

Babel me, sun whisper
and steeple me

In “Rope,” the comfort comes directly from above: “Each strand of his father’s voice a shaft of light from Heaven/A rope thrown down to rescue him/He wants to grab hold, disappear.”

The volume takes its title, The Fortieth Day, from the Islamic tradition of holding a second funeral forty days after death, which is when “we return to watch the soul/take reluctant leave of the body” (“Night Prayer”). Those who might crave a narrative strand in the volume might want to guess whose funeral this is, who the “disappeared friend” is in “A Century in the Garden.”

Some readers, like the friend who pleadingly asked over dinner the other night, “When will language poetry go out of fashion?” may have less patience with these poems that mean on many different levels. Though this volume wouldn’t be categorized as language poetry, it borrows elements of that tradition such as continually unfolding meaning systems. The buried in “Second Funeral” could be a family member—perhaps the speaker’s father, or a friend, or the second major human loss the speaker has experienced.

Kazim Ali

However, there are many references in the volume to a part of the self being lost or buried as well as God being lost. The final poem “Four O’clock” speaks of a perpetual state of lostness through a narrative about “an old man with a box of chocolates, lost on the sidewalk” who’s missed by his granddaughter at four o’clock. The poem’s penultimate line states, “It’s a minute before four.” But those impatient with the kind of archaeology required to dig out the layers of meanings present here will miss out on a poet and a poetry rich with sounds and meaning, eerily musical, and full of truth.

However, if one craves narrative, a reader might look to the funeral of the book’s title and guess that the speaker’s own reaching toward God is a response to an actual loss of a “dear disappeared” (“Dear Sunset, Dear Avalanche”). We might consider that the speaker is reconciling the idea of death by practicing how it might feel to die. “How are you supposed to remember where you live /in a world contracted to expire” (“Interrupted Letter”) is a question the poems turn over again and again. The speaker continually understands loss by becoming lost.

Ali uses words, sound and rhythms to feel through this loss, even if he knows the tools being used are limited. He finds a way through these allusive, lyric poems, to chart new constellations that will give us a map of the universe. But first, we have to acknowledge that the old maps are useless: “the vast sky/disowned from his constellation” (“Ursa Major”). The new path is marked by repeating themes, sounds, and images and each of these functions as a kind of “lantern” (“Morning Prayer”) lighting our way as God might (“should You light the way/or should You hold me” from “Dear Lantern, Dear Cup”), though “light is blinding and physics fibs” (“Evening Prayer”). As many of the phrases are sound-generated, we can’t discount the repetition of “spill” and “spell” throughout the volume and fail to make a connection between the two. Thus spelling out words is a kind of spilling, which is a mark of Ali’s humility, a suggestion that the poems happened by accident. Music also makes a continued appearance in this volume, in poems such as “Double Reed” and in the hauntingly lovely dream piece, “The Ocean Floor.” Water also returns again and again, in many different forms.

These poems span distance, reaching from the ocean’s floor to heaven. They bridge time, from antiquity to this very minute. The subject matter also covers a vast range, from everyday tasks like “Doing laundry” (“Afternoon Prayer”), the current ongoing war, seasons, astronomy, and a divided self—as in “Math”: “Who is that in the space your/self and your self do not meet?” Family, heritage, the danger of faith and the rhythms of a day marked by regular prayer are also honored. In all these pieces, though, there is a reaching for a sense of God. So God is spilt throughout the pages of this book—in the everyday, in the sacred, in the light coming through the window:

God in the sky and God in the water
dissolving at the horizon,

or God in the air and in the plant condensing

These poems by Kazim Ali are gorgeous, each phrase a breath of prayer, the words presented as humbling offerings, each one a deep bow. Even if “the lyre is a liar” (“Rope”), there’s still incredible music being made.

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