When Susan Stewart, Harold Bloom and Marjorie Perloff blurb a book of poems, you don’t need me to tell you it’s good. If you like John Kinsella, you will like this representative book; if you’ve never read Kinsella, then this can serve as synecdoche for his oeuvre. Kinsella is the Yo-Yo Ma of poets: musically gifted, classically trained but with a charmingly willingness to explore other traditions; the resulting work expresses a subtle understanding of the inherent complexity of mixing these practices. Like a plant that does best in poor soil without water, Kinsella thrives in the challenging context of rural Australia. In “Digging” he suffers his landscape even as he praises it:

Ground baked so hard you can only scrape
And pick at it, occasionally shattering
Into sheets and chips around a rocky protrusion.
It is dirt around stone. Prise and quarry.

“Prise” and “quarry”: What English words! So English that they catch my attention when I find them in Jam Tree Gully where the “kangaroos are gathering.” With metrical and direct allusions to Hopkins and Heaney, the (truly excellent) opening poem, “Prologues,” situates Kinsella’s work in the English tradition:

Sprung, the wild-oat seed cocks
a grasshopper leg ,and another
corskscrews into a heavy sock,
too thick for summer.

Sun skinks are fat on the fence
And a Christmas spider – horned
And enameled – puts on a different face
To each approach – none is scorned

Like Hopkins, Kinsella finds himself enraptured with the natural quotidian and with the pulsation of the language he uses to express it. (Of course, for Kinsella, that quotidian is as banal as cleaning gutters, something I don’t imagine Hopkins mucking about in.) Romantic nostalgia for Nature in its full, voluptuous summer self permeates the text, but Romanticism does not blind Kinsella to the underlying reality of the setting. Like Heaney Kinsella knows his place at the periphery of the English tradition, in its vast colonial borderlands. In the landscape of “Digging,” a queen moves insidiously, leading “white ants” who “migrate to their next meal.” The poem ends, like many do, a bit melodramatically, explaining the speaker’s irrevocable attachment to the place: “The dirt stays under / my fingernails. There’s not enough water / to clean it away.” Where the human figure of Heaney’s father emerges in the foreground of his “Digging,” the dirt itself, the “cellulose” digested by ants, stays the focus of Kinsella’s poem.

In Jam Tree Gully, the very dividing line between the human and animal, the political and the natural is at stake. What divides the human political realm from the natural, polis from physis, order from becoming, the realm of speech from the unspeakable? In his landscape, Kinsella seeks to understand what Hegel and Foucault called the prose of the world. The world has not only meaning but an almost grammatical structure. During a storm, “night has already collected” and “in there are / the mixed metaphors and split infinitives/ you grew up fearing.”

In this study, Kinsella echoes Thoreau to whom he often alludes, directly in epigraphs and indirectly within many stanzas. In the same strong sense as the German Romantics, Thoreau writes poetically to escaped standard conception of the world, thus forwarding unsystematically – but no less effectively – his perception of it.

Kinsella achieves a similar effect, but he does not philosophize. He provides no theories to explain the underlying conditions in his neighborhood. Thoreau’s famous phrase, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” is followed by the verdict, “But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Thoreau passes judgment on his contemporaries who have not yet chosen to live deliberately; he writes a prescriptive not only descriptive account of his life in the woods. Kinsella does not attempt this. Much could be said about the causes or results of colonization, climate change, or economics that shape his landscape, but he resists diagnostic commentary. Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life. He chooses more often an intimate “we” as subject rather than the sturdy “I” that for Thoreau indicates “a simple and sincere account” of life: “We look hard at what might / have been. We listen and taste the air. Our skins / tingle…” and so on. He knows he is neither the only nor the first person to appreciate his landscape. Even the epigraph to this book – like others – makes an acknowledgement that approaches apology (for theft? for debt? for ): “The author wishes to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land he writes.” For this humility, I can only respect him more.

In “Goat” he sees a goat with one hoof missing who “scratches its chin, back left leg hobbling, counter-/balanced on rocks. Clots of hair hang like extra legs / off its flanks.” This goat is a “devil,” it is “Pan in the frolicking growth / of the rural” but “to us, it is Goat/ who deserves to live.” Elsewhere, he comes “across the leg of a sheep, flesh / eaten away, bones held together by sinews… It points neither up nor down the hill, nor divinely / the length of the waterway.” This sheep part does not serve as a sign through which he can divine another spiritual realm. The sheep leg delineates the contours of this world: where “clump of fat and wool remain. And the leg. / It keeps its own counsel.” For Kinsella, as often as possible, legs are legs and goats are just goats: they are not metaphors, not allusions or signs. Their prosaic existence alongside his own fascinates him, and his success as a poet lies in communicating this fascination to his readers.

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Since Andrew Grace’s Sancta is a book about death, you might expect to hear that it is a “dark” book. In fact, it is a light book. Death illuminates life to excess: “There is so much light we can’t keep it out of our eyes.” All through Western history, God and angels are luminous, radiant; the divine radiates. But in Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure: “…the sky is all cinders and oil. The ribs of heaven clutch its disc of sulfur…”

For Grace, the death of his father has cataclysmically washed over experience, creating a wasteland of a familiar landscape: his father’s lakeside cabin. Over the retreat hangs a “white sky” that resembles what he imagines “the mind to look like: expectant screen onto which synapses erupt like sparrows.” (I think of the opening to William Gibson’s post-apocalyptic Neuromancer: “the sky was the color of television.”) Like the forest around Chernobyl, seemingly natural, pricked with bird songs and busy mammals, this landscape is endangered and dangerous: “There are objects along the shore so undone we can only call them remnants. Deathless matter. There is joy in this, the resilience of what’s left. The hypodermic needle’s glint, archipelago of Coke. The bones that will crowd out the lake. Flesh devout as junk.”

These poems each contain seventy words. In his author’s statement available on Ahsahta Press’s website, he admits that this is unusual and somewhat arbitrary: “The natural question is: why 70 words? I have no insightful answer – it all stems from that first poem I wrote just to keep my fingers moving. The strict word count taught me how to move a poem along quickly, something I had struggled with before.” The choice to write in word-count form lead to a book with tidy, consistently appearing pages and sometimes to a compressed syntax and diction in, for example, compound phrases like “dream-sites,” “rain-soaked,” “sick-on-a-journey blues,” and “sodium-flare.” He also favors Hemingway or Salter-esque sentence fragments, as in “A penultimate fall, only aware of itself by what it spills. (Flour and hair.) Only articulated in burnt grammar. (Sorry and ash.)”

But the eyes, not the ear, are the organs in charge of this book. The tongue “needs conditioning” (58) and “description is a filibuster against emotion.” Instead, the “Look, is all. The cabin. Look. The lake” (79). The eye swells taking in, taking over. The light overworks Grace’s eyes: “At times, the eye seems charnel house of the known and can only be slaked by novelty… But tonight the eye seems instrument only, stunned as a lighthouse strobe.” Sensation takes over, and he wonders, “Have I become my senses, all else gone?” In the end, it’s “not the darkness we die of” but overexposure to this world. He tries to master through perception, to “win victories over the ordinary eye.” In the end he says he “learned: the light will never end if I don’t let it.”

At the close of the book, Grace specifies his theology implied through the text: “When I say God I mean any way of navigating the radiant aftermath of loss. And what I mean by radiance is what the lake is doing, marbled by the moonlight and shaking like a lost man.” Saints “refuse” him, but he respects them. After all he’s suffered, he says he still can “almost believe God cannot be unkind to us,” implying that God is either actively unkind or a-kind, without kindness the way the wind is without morality even when it knocks down our houses. So reduced by grief, Grace finds himself a child again but without a caretaker, looking at a world that is neutral to the point of hostility. This God blesses the dead, not the living, though Grace heretically challenges him: “Blessed are the risen. May the risen-from also be blessed.”

You have to be willing to listen to someone suffering to finish this book. You have to be willing to stay with that single theme, page after page, seventy-word poem after concise prose poem. That can test your patience, can feel like a battery the same way the light batters Grace. But many moments of illumination that validate the repetition. Jewels like this stand out: “Don’t you ever feel like description is a filibuster against emotion?” Yes, yes, I do! I thought. At the same time, the sheer honesty of his descriptions and their fidelity to concrete details compelled me on.

Although this book contains many metaphors and similes, most attempt to convey the concrete details of the lakeside setting, not death itself. Perhaps this is because “life after death” is not metaphorical or supernatural for Grace: this is his life, after the passing of his father. Death is, without comparison; his father’s passing is not like anything else or a symbol for anything else. Grace – the poet and the divine gift – tears back the curtain in front of the sanctum sanctorum and gives you that inner place with scrupulous realism.

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Campeche is a staunchly reflective, lyric book that knows its place in a long tradition of men
philosophically watching the world: recently, John Koethe, more canonically Whitman and Wordsworth. “I see my reflection…”, “I watch the two…”, “I feel waves…”, and “I see citizens,” writes poet Joshua Edwards in the opening stanza, unambiguously alerting us to his stance on the scene.

Working with his father, Joshua Edwards has also created an intriguingly masculine book. The collection presents father and son’s perspectives on an American landscape molded and scarred by men. Beside Joshua’s poems, photos by his father, Van Edwards, underscore the themes and attitude: the book opens with a black and white photo of a man in boxer-briefs with a gun tipped at a phallic angle, and then a coiled snake on the road, shot in dry, pebbled precision. Elsewhere Van represents a sculptural nest of Greco-Roman figures grabbing one another, and Joshua’s speaker tells us, “On my second day, eating chicken carcass, I feel like a man.” When Joshua refers to the species, it is “mankind.” If you feel you belong more properly to “humankind”, you might have to set aside some frustration, but it is worth it to appreciate the blunt to cruel clarity of these reflections.

“Mankind” always shows up against an amoral natural backdrop, often the ocean. Water threatens and entices both the poet and the photographer. The opening section title, “Deucalion” invokes powerful water and powerful father-son duos: like Noah, Deucalion, son of Prometheus, saved himself from a flood. Like the epic figures, both Edwards are compelled or impelled to sites where, as Joshua puts it

It’s a nice place to watch

Nature’s indifference
Break like a winter wheel
Against mankind’s talent
For physical withdrawal.

Before this poem, “Seawall,” Van presents first a shot of the ocean at the edge of a storm, and on the verso an image of a curved seawall. This wall’s concrete disconcertingly mimics the wave it should prevent, and the image inverts the normal contrasts in a seascape: the wall is white, the land dark stone. “The ocean cleans the face / Of the old, friendly wall // with bubbles of soft foam,” says Joshua’s speaker in the following poem. But this is not a comforting image: the familiarity arose because the ocean once passed destructively through the place the wall supposedly protects. Both Edwards ask us to stand just on the edge of the sublime that borders on terrifying.

In a video on-line, Joshua tells readers that symbolists, especially Paul Valéry, influenced him, particularly in “Leviathan,” one of my favorite poems. But for the most part, it is unlikely you will find that France or French symbolism to color overtly the book. Instead, this is a profoundly American book, set in Galveston, Texas and usually articulated by a coolheaded rational “I.” Both the lyrics and photos work in clean lines to delineate a particular slice of Americana, in a manner that sometimes echoes Edward Hopper, sometimes Diane Arbus. The photographic and poetic images are in that sense stylized.

Joshua tells us “I know a place beyond style. / Let us call it the self.” But I don’t think we go to that place, though we walk around it. These selves are guarded by walls as carefully—and perhaps futilely – constructed as the sea wall, portentously holding back rather than confessing. Edwards offers conclusions drawn philosophically – such as, “It is time to listen to predecessors” – or sometimes presents “[m]odern parables composed in half-light” or “architectural parables” but rarely gives readers immediate access to emotion. These are lyrics emphasizing the latter part of Wordsworth’s definition: “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and the best is composed “by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads).

That said, at the best moments in this book, such as “Leviathan,” that long, deep thought manifests itself as a parable that borders on supernatural revelation rather than philosophical exposition. Here, Joshua departs from realism and enters the surreal, perhaps in the manner of Valéry as he says, but perhaps with an even more mystical sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch or William Blake.

Let me conclude with its representative ending:

Beware. Your time is near.

Someone has learned lessons
You didn’t mean to teach.
A crowd is gathering.
Your skull is their kingdom.

 

Read “The Translators,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Joshua Edwards

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