Faking out death is a feat usually reserved for Evil Knievel or Jesus Christ or video game characters. But if you think of lyric poetry as a kind of suspended disbelief in temporality as well as other inexorable facts of life (i.e. DEATH), for as long as the song lasts, then yes, poets fake out death, too. (Maybe the most successfully because words last forever?)

Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent to experience (perhaps, because they are).

Poem 11 from “Meditation on a Meditation of Frost”:

Elves, backyard pit barbeque, lilacs,
termites in the backseat:
the sum of it makes a person
want to: lemons, lemons, lemons.

Or, Poem 9 from the same series:

Everybody has their own thing
that they yell into a well about

It isn’t life, in other words, that disappoints—it’s the poems about life—or, what we choose to see. “There are three dead people inside me,” says the speaker, who carries this oracular burden (the dead want a place at the table, too) with a gravitas that at times borders on hilarity: at others, as a bonafide momento mori. Deleuze’s notion of “becoming-animal,” or “becoming-molecular” (both tied to the political aim of “becoming-minor”) surface throughout this aphoristic text—not as forms of shape-shifting or as means of identification with the natural world, but, rather, as a more expansive view on subject-object relationships—and the relationship between material reality and ideology.

Poem 4:

“ . . . because I forgot
how soft . . . ”
I heard you say
as you turned me over
like a split white fish,
ribs flapping. The other half
of the sentence lost inside
your other manuscript.

The speaker’s beauty, and the beauty of the other, undergo transformations—but again, from the level of an internality or subterranean reality which cannot be spoken of it not already experienced (“This will meaning nothing/ to you/ unless you live underwater/ with birds”). This underwater terrain, in other words, is a world wherein values still abide, hence: “Because you are unkind/ to me, you have become/ less beautiful.”

From the serial poem, “The End”:

I miss my beauty
in the field

the long
tree

yelling
palls of hair

my dead
mouth

open
no bird

And, from “Hasp”:

In the sun
pants riding
my hips I was
so beautiful

Why did you leave
me open
like that?

***

The pressure put upon the poem when the lines are one- or two-words long, is significant, as is the success borne from the tensions that ensue between the stanzas, the couplets themselves, and on the individual line between the two or three words (if that many are included). While the formal experiments of The Grief Performance vary (e.g. the prose-y “The History of Knives”; the block stanza of “I am the Scenery”) the desultory and yet strategic language of the terser poems proves the poet’s economy of expression as a rare gift—and even rarer aesthetic choice, in today’s light verse culture.

More sincere than a new sincerist (because more convinced that rather than being f-ed over by god, capitalism or the government, “We’re being/made love to”?), Frey’s debut collection is akin to the bird described by the poet in “Birds are So Soft”: a small creature whose faiblesse is its vulnerability to life, and to love. Walk this line with this poet, upon initial and multiple re-readings, and the promises extended to the reader in “Birds are So Soft” may be, as “an act of magic,” revealed.

Birds are so soft.
You can’t imagine . . .
They get pin feathers.
New feathers that grow in plasticky sheaths.
You have to break them up with your fingers.
Fabulous. A head massage for the birds .
They coo, close their eyes,
and coo. You’ll see . . .
Remove the sheath. It’s heavenly.

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The question of whether 21st century America more resembles the dystopic vision prophesied by Orwell (governmental oppression) or by Huxley (self-chosen stupor) is a question asked by Destroyer and Preserver, Matthew Rohrer’s sixth full-length collection, a compendium of fragmented, lyric poems that court rather than resist the pathetic fallacy. Here, Nature is figured as a broken figure whose dissemblance mirrors, as a form of identificatory comfort, our own. “Winter gets into everything,/ the small of her back/broken off/ in the night./ Winter moves/ her fingers to the sea,/ her promontories are locked/ in ice/ and I am just one man…” Against all odds the poet continues, at times hopelessly, to craft poems that speak to a theme not likely to be gleaned from watching the latest podcast or late-night talk show, however mimetic of our trying times or possessed of corrosive wit: “The governance of fear will be checked with love.” The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation (“I do not belong to anything but books/ which is very sad”; “ . . . the day got/ away from me/ holding the phone/ to my left ear for 45/ minutes para español/ marque número dos/ for someone else’s appointment”; “I am a dream a black obelisk dreams/ & forgets.”)

Frequently, what might have existed as a moment of levity or grace is overshadowed by the presence of a surveillance figure who supervises the poet’s natural (if smothered) elan. From “Poem for Starlings”: “When you try to make a joke/ in a bank/ it falls flat/ there’s an armed guard/ standing there/ wearing sunglasses indoors/ motionless…” The heaviness—and pervasiveness—of this nameless stand-in for despair populates the collection, from which battle cries are issued (“YOUR POLITICS ARE DUST”) alongside moving paeans to the speaker’s children and vestigial memories of saner times. Certain poets of this generation bear the burden of memory more gracefully than others. Take, for example, the signaled “death” of beauty (enunciated by Jorie Graham in 1987) and its tentative reemergence as a legitimized social practice (outcroppings abound, one of the most recent being philosopher Roger Scruton’s 2011 BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters”). Rohrer finds ways to ply this discourse with cultural memes that still smart to the touch, as in his poem “The Terrorists”: “A terrorist walks into a bar/ he gets a beer/ nothing has ever tasted better/ and nothing draws him/ through the air afterwards/ into a cloud of grackles/ by the harbor/ the whole thing started/ because of beauty/ his love of beauty/ it was all a big joke beauty/ played on love… ”

Destroyer and Preserver,’s speaker is plain-spoken in his speech acts of remonstrance and longing. When his diction is high it is not high modernism or high culture—it is Greco-Roman (“ . . . I urge/ my chariot to the hippodrome”). Many are the poets (Hungarian poet Zsuzsa Beney comes to mind) who believe one is writing the same poem over and over again: this collection bears witness to that adage. When Rohrer’s unpunctuated, paratactic style works, it works brilliantly; when he falters, it is a faltering born of a new sincerity the world (of which readers are a part) renders suspect, as a form of (good-natured) vice. These poems—and the oeuvre of this poet—deserve careful readings, and re-readings, to train ourselves to perform John Cage’s ironic challenge: to see what it is we’re looking at, and to feel what it is (if anything) we feel.

Check out “A Little Sign,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Matthew Rohrer.

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The principal muse of Saint Monica is none other than Saint Monica, patron saint of, among other persons, abuse victims, alcoholics, difficult marriages, widows, and wives. Monica is also the mother of St. Augustine, perhaps best known in that context for her long-suffering and unremitting prayers of intercession while Augustine lived a life of happy profligacy in Carthage. Biddinger’s take on this figure is to imagine a present-day figure Monica and to follow her through adolescence and young adulthood, christening her along the way with attributes that more resemble those of Augustine than Monica—which is to say, more resemble a “real person” with her share of failed dreams, tragedies, and a healthy dose of impenitence despite the outer façade of domestic saintliness and the rancor such appearances incite (“Years later, they would hate/ Monica for the brilliance of her peonies,/ the straightness of her children’s bangs./ For the way she did it all, and still baked/ the best cherry walnut cobbler on the block”). Many of the book’s questions demand reframing: “Is the correct answer to a word/ ever another word, or is it a cool palm/ on the forehead, a half-hush,/ fingers through sweat-curled hair?” Biddinger’s repeated returns to haptic perception as a legitimized approach to the divine, or a sense of peace or benediction, amounts to an aesthetic necessity, alongside the necessity of putting iconicity and holy writ in relationship with narrative, reality, and the arbitrary nature of violence, accident, and error.

This latter element pervades the closing poem in Saint Monica (“Saint Monica Wishes on the Wrong Star”), a poem of quiet gravity whose carefully arranged sestets superimpose chance upon hope, with harrowing—because chronological-time-defying—results, among others, wherein superstition is linked with prayer, and the emergence of selfhood, with a rejection (or exhaustion) of both: “Somewhere she heard: kiss all four walls/ if you want to return. She won’t be kissing/ any of these walls tonight . . . ”

While veering toward the ecstatic (“Would she have to wait for the flush/ of blood, or would the transformation// be instantaneous?”), the speaker never abandons grim realities (“If your fiancé slams you against a wall/ and you suffer a concussion upon impact . . . keep marching to the bathroom with a bottle of Windex and a roll/ of paper towels and make that crooked mirror shine”), and throughout, the speaker delights in moments of “revelation” that insist not upon worldly transcendence but a firm commitment to the real, with all the horror and innocence it contains (“When Kevin McMillan/ winked at her, Monica unbuttoned her shirt, showed the hot pink/ swimsuit underneath”). Believers who insist the Virgin Mary appeared to them in a swirl of diesel in Cheyenne aside, the speaker enacts a brand of materially substantiated faith that transcends doctrine and at times, even hope.

Most of the poems speak to rites of passage common to all, such as “Saint Monica Gives it Up” and “Saint Monica’s Sweet Sixteen”; among the book’s other outstanding poems are the densely layered narrative prose poems, including “Saint Monica Composes a Five-Paragraph Essay on Girard’s Theory of Triangular Desire.” If Girard was right, and all desire, mimetic or not, is at its root metaphysical (“all desire is a desire to be”), Monica’s growing awareness of self amid a backdrop of indoctrination is indeed a feat of imagination on behalf of her author, no more so than when she encounters the other—both in the sense of shared tribulations and the joy of coexistence: “It takes her seven minutes/ to realize that she is not alone.”

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In a world where the question “what happened” (event) or “who did it” (agency) no longer has any philosophical weight (to say nothing of the poet’s own estimation of his textual legacy—“This/ is not a poem, but the/ passing/ of a poem”) the only thing constant is not so much change as it is, well, trees. (Alongside, here, birdbaths and birds.) What Cezanne did for fruit, and Monet for haystacks, Tonelli does for trees, alternately defined here as “constellations” (lodestars of meaning/meaninglessness) and “truth without thought.”

Along with merely existing (outside of any anthropomorphisms), trees also serve to get in the way of a disbelief in the powers of signification. “It is important/ to still believe/ in what you know/ does not exist . . . ” is among the many koans of The Trees Around; far from advocating for an revival of any belief system we “know” to be obsolete, then, The Trees Around asks us instead to contemplate the rhetoric of beginnings and ending—and the slings and arrows of pathos—from the perspective of said trees (e.g. in any given problematical situation, a tree just might investigate the very nature of the problematic.) From “(About)”: “Problems are funny.”

The speaker of The Trees Around navigates the empty spaces on the page with as much deftness and resilience as he does the empty spaces in our universe (perceptual and actual). From Section Four of the book, entitled “No Theatre” (the natural progression from the Theatres of Cruelty and the Absurd, respectively?): “The drum in my eye/ beats; the arrows in my/ quiver. No theatre.”

Deftly fielding complaints from the speaker’s friends about how, “after the umpteenth bird/ or tree, they start to feel/ less and less for them”; the voice that animates The Trees Around is wont to remind his reader, and, perhaps, his friends, that free will is what sets humans apart from inanimate creatures but is also that which leads to error: “If a tree/ could will, it’d be wrong,/ like you. Like me. How wrong/ that bird is to think I’m against it./ How long it will live despite this./ It will live the perfect length.” Without will, there is no failure, the speaker says in “(Crows)”: there is also no progress (or progress narratives, at least). What does this radical detachment engender? “The stillness in the cold/ [is] blessed by chance.”

Faced with poems that contemporize Stevens’ formulation about beholding “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” the reader finds herself enjoying an almost complete occlusion of the subject—which is not to say that the subject is absent as a point of reference: the subject, rather than the objective “thing,” is represented in these pages as the fixed point around which the phenomenal world moves. “Subject of origin,/ action/ of origin, save us from our/ plots.”

Just when the tone—stoicism par excellence—of this collection “begins” to flag, the reader is rewarded with not a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, but, rather, the promise of the arrival of a “second new thing” on the heels of the last known thing—“the sense of possibility.” This second new thing may be a mere representation of performativity (“I draw a figure of a man;/ he has a weapon,/ wears a mask of/ endless redemption”) but it sure beats, in this reader’s opinion, vegetal existence. If problems are funny, failing (intentionally, or un-) can be fun.

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The prison of time, according to polyglot Vladimir Nabokov, is “spherical and without exits, short of suicide.” Freedom, and even happiness, to follow this logic, would be to carve a space for oneself within this time-bound context, yet in Elisa Gabbert’s The French Exit, the options for assertion of presence, and, conversely, the Stevensian art of “waving adieu,” abound. To leave without saying goodbye is to render a “French Exit,” yet Gabbert’s debut collection skims this idiom of connotations of peremptory haste, imparting to the concept (here rendered literally by the word SORTIE emblazoned on French doors which demarcate an interior) a molten wealth of contradiction: nostalgia sans sentimentality, anxiety sans self-preoccupation. Gabbert’s rhyme schemes are as subtle as her psychoanalytic investigations: “ . . . it seems like// we’re still out there: Man vs. Nature. I wonder out loud/ if it’s some kind of joke and one of them says If it is,// it’s the saddest, the longest, the slowest, most beautiful joke// you could tell. He doubles me over. He knows me so well.”

Exquisitely pictorial ( . . . “confusing feeling with seeming, I think./ And nothing, and suffering, with fog”), post-historical, and combative (“I can defenestrate anything/ except for the window”), these poems and their occasionally patterned nature (section three being composed of “blogpoems” of witty force and technoculture-saturated play) are as original as anything being written today. The first stanza of “Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin”: “Every time you reproduce a piece of art/ you remove some of its aura and that’s why/ your mix tape didn’t impress me much,/ it was so fucking aura-less . . . ”

The speaker begs the question of whence comes the desire to leave a written demarcation on the world; the answer here is clearly one part the writing of desire (“Desire explodes and the last thing it feels/ is every point touching something”), jouissance as the drive capable of ousting the death-instinct, nausea and ennui, and one part the desire to challenge the enormity of all that abuts and delimits the self.

From “Poem Without Free Will”:

. . . Time doesn’t just fly;

it ninja-stars me.
It’s obvious to want to die,

but in the poem, I have to.
No life but in desire.

One remarkable feature of this work is the specificity of the images the poet draws up as shield and savor against said enormity (and the enormity of desire) here frequently rendered not as void or abyss, but, in league with the Romantics, a body of water.

“ . . . How stupid of me// to find your pencil marks sexy. To prefer them/ to the world: the huge freezing ocean: it does nothing// for me . . . Is there a bird down there, objecting? Politely?// Excuse me, world. I wasn’t ready to be buried.” Or, “Let’s ruin the world/ and get it over with. I hate// ‘the sea.’”

The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort as endless “reveal,” like the panopticon eye of a camera: “Like a hairline/ crack down my mirror—I am always// looking at the distance, at it splitting me./ I am warped along that fault.// Sometimes the distance looks at me/ and for a moment I feel requited// but . . . It doesn’t remember// when we were touching, eye to eye.” The mirror here and elsewhere figures as a koan; from her homage to Stevens’ “The Snow Man“ “ . . . the mirror always knows. Think nothing/ and you’re still not thinking nothing.”

Ruthless in its deriding of the very metaphors it employs, there are few notes of glibness in this collection; as if happily trapped within the flux of va-et-vient, the speaker posits desire as the nebulous “thing itself” and also as the thing toward which it is useless to strive, as desire is perpetually generated by its withholding (“he wants me/ wanting more, and I want it too . . . “). In a world where the fear of madness is tantamount to the fear that madness is desirable (“I want . . . to be close// to the sky as I lose my mind—/ I’m afraid. I’m afraid/ I’ll feel pretty transcendent”), all bets appear to have been off before the poem—or time—even began. These tensions give rise to poems that glow, brutally and tenderly, as the body itself enacts the gestures needed to construct the (a) world.

From “Poem With a Threshold”:

Look into my image
distortion disorder and tell me

what you really feel, now
that you’re incomprehensible, Mr.—

tell me ‘what for.’ I love you
but my arms are full.

I opened my face with the door.

Elisa Gabbert contributed to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. You can read her poems here.

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Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening.

Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poetic persona is one of, as the title alludes, dizzying range, as are the poems themselves in The Range of Your Amazing Nothing; one recurring theme and also the title of one of the strongest poems is the “execution of lively girls.” From the poem titled same: “ . . . the men in white have a hunch/ for girls like you:/ unfamiliar understudies of existence.”

At times the speaker’s perspective is that of someone trying to deconstruct a lively girl, and the speaker is the first to laugh at their confusion. “Poised like a mathematician/ upon sleeves of papyrus,/ my god, every bit of you is vicarious,/ I have been this quilt of crushed,/ radium smiles before.” The pun on the poet’s last name and vicarious, whether intentional or not, is an entertaining way the wide-ranging speaker infuses her protean “I” with personally-felt substance. The motif of this poem—the unalienable agency of male actors (and men) as contrasted with the bit parts often given to lively women in film—makes the “brutal chrysalis of identity” of which the poet speaks that much more profound. While the rich imagery can at times overpower, the poet’s frequent use of italics and the abundant intertexual references help guide the reader to through the thicket of signification into lodestars of meaning.

From “Bird Into Building”:

She is certain to have recalled
winter’s nunnery, her tongue
from previous ecstasy releases

thoughts like little hats
all of her sick hero moments,
in an enclave of economies.

References to Vitkauskas’s Lithuanian heritage appears amid so many other cultural references as to suggest that the myth-making of this debut collection is more about identity formation on the cosmic (even Vedic or Gnostic) rather than nationalistic level, as the speaker searches for elements of language (“Crying hieroglyphs,/ arrogant from the bake/ of lifeless theatres”) still capable of communication.

“My Retinal Detachment” alludes to Vitkauskas’ multiple eye surgeries beginning in 1996 to correct a degenerative optical condition: the thin line between dread and fearlessness is palpable, and the acute tension between “being sighted” and being capable of the act of seeing (versus looking, or being seen), sensed throughout.

I’ve made the bed three times
and replaced my eye with a better voice.
Sotto voce. I’ve never been outside . . .
Even de Leon can’t locate the theatre of my fountain.
I am not afraid that this sounds.

The poet asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening. From Kidnapping Brides: “ . . . since the bias-cut/ has come back, since the/ hypothetical dossier rendered/ me the interpreter, since the/ premise shifts, since energy/ cannot be created nor employed,/ since my money is no good here,/ since I’m falling/ so gracefully.”

Plathian in her wry ecstasies, generous in her nods to poet-predecessors (among the collection’s quietly lyrical poems is a five-line homage to Szymborska) and sensitive to the implications, often dangerous, and joys, often overlooked, of postmodern discourse, Vitauskas’ debut collection is a veritable treasure-trove of sonic intensity issued from a sleuth-like intelligence, “cracking parallelograms/ on the linear beach blanket,/ bending blonde participles. This is a jar like a lottery./ Like my first Dramamine pie.”

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True geometric fractals are a rarity in nature, and represent, contrary to the Latin etymology of the word fractal (fracture), a uniquely uniform structure whose chief characteristic is self-similarity, rather than variance: a snowflake, lightning bolt or cloud can be split into parts approximating a copy of the whole, parts which are identical (or nearly) at all levels of magnification. (Ironically, their structural consistency is what makes them infinitely complex, and thus a subject of fascination for scientists.) Green’s debut collection American Fractal picks up where scientific discourse leaves off, exhibiting a rare display of confidence in this integral unity, as a metaphor for poetic practice, and as manifest in varying degrees in Nature, each individual, and humankind.

The idea of procedural intelligence in Nature may be hard for modern readers to buy, given our inhabitation of a world fraught with atomic instability and natural disasters. The epigraph by Douglas Hofstadter clues us in: “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a façade of order—and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.” These pages constitute a fashioning of and an epic search for this “eerier type of order”—pursuing, along the way, logical connections and continuities in the material world, through the analysis of not so much patterns, but forms. Juxtaposed images do this (“My/ mother making sense. One footprint falling/ into the next”) as do singular images: “Two hands/ holding flares guide the idle/ traffic home, while overhead/ in the apple-picker an electrician/ works his quiet length of cord.”

Modern history and other causal systems of analysis may appear to conflict with this perception of order-within-chaos, for most conceptual systems attempt to deconstruct or solve for, rather than admire, structural inconsistencies—but a poet, dwelling as poets do in possibility rather than formulae, is in a unique position to allow for and even celebrate irregularity (as well as to trust, to a degree, the quasi-methodical order-within-chaos of the unconscious mind itself, as relating to surrealism or neo-surrealism, or not).

Double-edged desires amount to complicity with what Elaine Scarry termed “the making and unmaking” of the world, in “The Urge to Break Things”: “It comes on young and fast, first with toy trucks, then with/ lead pencils snapped in half. Pinched flesh, plucked hair./ A little blood dabbed with a napkin. No one notices wounds/ when they heal nightly. Smashed plastic fills the dumpster . . . There’s music in breaking glass.”

How grave of an epistemological problem is it, really that “The refrigerator hums a perfect/ middle C but offers no intent”? (From “Meditation on the Six Healing Sounds.) This poem and others wrestle with Kant’s “das Ding an sich,” the thing-in-itself, and Green’s lyrical gifts beautifully augment his meditative reflections, not just on entropy and ruin (a cornered market in contemporary poetry if there ever was one) but also the centripetal movement of the poem, and of the human spirit. “The Urge to Break Things” ends with an image not so much of communion with the thing, or a speech act from or to it, but of awe: “An oxymoron/ incarnate: matter that matters: chaos quietly controlled.”

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Translators’ prefaces are generally a useful, if not necessary addition to the work itself, here presented on facing pages: poet-translator Marilyn Hacker’s contextualization not only of Marie Étienne’s literary career, prior to her formal introduction to an English speaking audience via King of a Hundred Horsemen, Étienne’s eleventh book of poems, but of 20th and 21st century French poetry, makes for a fascinating essay in and of itself.

Each of the nine sections (themselves comprised of individual prose sonnets) wrestle with the timeless themes of war, multiculturalism, and the poet’s own international history (Étienne was born and spent her childhood in what is now Vietnam and was educated in France and Dakar). Throughout, Étienne evokes—and occasionally interpolates textually with—figures as varied as Tristan Tzara and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Prose poetry is a form in which French poets, most notably Baudelaire, have demonstrated mastery (the 2009 anthology Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment serving as a recent compendium): Étienne’s gender is not irrelevant in a shadow of this magnitude. Hacker’s description of Étienne’s “I” as a voice marked as a woman’s while engaged in quests and exploration rather than self-examination is apt indeed: while anchored occasionally by lines that seem to advance a guiding trope (“I am a displaced person in a country at war”), the destabilized “I” referenced by Hacker unsettles her reader’s expectations for a consistent, or at least consistently inconsistent “I,” however supreme a fiction such an “I” may be.

The resultant lability—and subterfuge quality—of Étienne’s work recalls the paroxysms of Kristeva, Kafka, Camus and other writers whose work took place at the margins of language, culture and thought. Fittingly, in the section entitled “A Witness Disappears,” the “I” gathers itself into a cohesive representation, only to splinter apart again. “I roamed from room to room, all empty, I found a photograph, it was of a man who had governed the palace . . . Who had taken it of himself in a mirror. The camera replaced the face, it was the face.” Traces of intentionality on behalf of one of the text’s many speakers (including recurring characters “Ang” and “Lam”) can nonetheless be found (“I’m seeking the song, I must find it, find it absolutely, it’s an idea, it’s my idea . . . The song is old, barely a memory that persists and burns, that cannot be grabbed like a feather at the fair”): a narrative goal is also, in a way, carried through. “Struggling against the even rhythm, one no longer holds one’s hand to one’s heart . . . One makes little piles, with no punctuation . . . Since one is benevolent, one says song and light.”

As with much French poetry, the idée fixe of this book concerns the problematics of desire (“Lacking limits, the gaze has no where to stop”), and several of the passages are so euphonic in the original that quoting from the translation (subtle and expert, albeit subdued in parts) may lessen the overall effect for a potential reader. King of a Hundred Horsemen so clearly manifests a form of jouissance, co-extensive here with transnational consciousness, that to demand narratological consistency from such an “I” seems absurd.

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Is history’s portrait of Sylvia Plath as the arch-obsessive accurate? “I know just what I want/ and I want to do it,” says the speaker of “Last Wishes, 1963,” a poem from Catherine Bowman’s latest collection, The Plath Cabinet. Bowman’s work shifts the posthumous perception of Sylvia’s incantatory aspirations, preserved mostly in correspondences to her mother, as not neurotic, but heartbreaking, as was the simplicity of Virginia Woolf’s precursor for happiness (a room).

The speaker of The Plath Cabinet thrills at Sylvia’s ready access to the means of mental development (which, for Woolf, included library privileges to the Cambridge library, denied by a beadle), and solemnizes the implications of going without, as Sylvia’s life grew increasingly destabilized. The speaker goes so far as to re-envision the most incontrovertible “fact” of Sylvia’s life—suicide. From the collection’s last poem, “Sylvia’s Hair”:

Sweetly, sweetly she breathes, how soft the night glow—
She says: I’ll tell you two secrets, come close, very close:
I am murdered.
I did not kill myself.

A pony for Frieda, a salon in London to “get her brain back and practice/ to write herself out of this hole,” and buying a rose-quartz tweed suit with her birthday check are among the desires Bowman sets forth for Sylvia in her recreation, for which she copiously researched the Plath materials housed in the Lilly Library of Indiana University.

Few words sicken more on an instinctual level than the word “martyrdom.” Yet that is the backdrop to this staged reenactment, an inconvenient truth if ever there was one. Bowman’s materialist assemblage of Sylvia’s life and death remains true to the propulsive diction of Sylvia’s own verse. From “The Martyrdom of Sylvia Plath:”

She stands burning,
retching into bright orange
basins. Thorned hands

winnowed by angles,
laid waste and unshriven,
desire only God. Gut feasting,

the knot of worms, flies watch,
prove that flesh is real, flawed
earth-flesh, charred and ravened . . .

The banter between the recreated muse and the speaker of The Plath Cabinet is at times glossolaliac, playful. “Tie me/ to that Plath tree, fill me ample,/ make me bleed plateau. Psst, Quiet now,/ Plath me in half, grammaticized” (from “Picnic at Gobbledygoo”).

Elsewhere, this conversation is pathetic—pathetic as in unspeakably sad—particularly when the speaker juxtaposes a contemporary landscape with that of Sylvia’s epoch, showing the two to be much-unchanged. From “Sylvia’s Honey”:

Sharon, hiding naked on Christmas Eve behind a car wash, her doctor
husband searching for her with an army-issue flashlight and shotgun.
Valerie, stabbed to death in broad daylight while jogging with her
baby. A rage suppressed comes soaring and creeping out in ugly ways . . .

Occasionally stripped down to archival essentials (“Things to Do, 1953”; “Dimensions”) the list poems center Sylvia in the reader’s mind, imagistically: other poems parody Sylvia’s vatic sensibility. “Things to Do, 1944”: “ . . . paint an arch-backed mermaid, proclaim desire/ to be God, make cream puffs in foods class,/ learn how Nature protects her animals.” And many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia, showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.

From “Sylvia’s Passport”: “She is a Jonah. Milk van. A milk vat . . . She’s got surveillance training/ from the gods. She can decode/ clouds, vestibules—wrapped as she is/ in capsule, in vessel . . . She is No. 796203. She is in/ sequence . . . She wants kingdom.”

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It was unfortunate that among the many preserved legacies of female American poets, one finds a preponderance of poems in which birth is used only as a metaphor. H.D., Dickinson, Niedecker, Laura Riding Jackson, Mina Loy, Moore and Stein all birthed incredible poems, but few, literal babies, with the exception of Plath’s disturbing paeans to maternal love. It’s no longer so unfortunate, thanks to a new cache of work emerging in contemporary poetry, in which the experience of motherhood (far from idealized) is transmitted from the mind (and body) to poetic practice; anthologies such as Not For Mothers Only and The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood have also helped pave the way for challenging verse that tackles head-on, rather than avoiding, the experience of motherhood shared (who knew?) by nearly half the percentage of the global population since the beginning of time.

Children, like any being in whom the powers of actualization and articulation are nascent, keep us close to the ground of the self before the self is understood (if ever) to be a construction:  an underrated perspective, to be sure.  In the Elvis, Yeats, and Donald Winnicott-haunted pages of “>The King (Don was the 20^th century psychoanalyst who differentiated between the “perfect” and “good-enough” mother, less famous, though undeservedly so, for his brilliant formulation “There is no such thing as a baby—only a nursing couple”), the reader finds, among other antipodean glories, pastoral landscapes that break apart psychically when you touch them.  From “Talking a Walk with You”:

“Windy morning/ when there is nothing wrong with me/ faint smile/ faint agitation . . . ” This poem vivisects itself as it continues:  “ . . . shapes in nature/ (rest in peace)/ there’s no call for making something./  Walking uphill this is your mind/ it is not enough anymore to be a figure/ in a landscape.”  Of the umlaut of identity (one’s name), the speaker says:

Unless Balthus
a portal to anonymity
I can’t tell you the name
because it is of no
self-importance.
It dawns on me
that you would always
rather
be alone.

The name in question is not of no importance, it is of no self-importance:  one of the many subtle inversions in The King that may be overlooked, at great loss to the reader.

The cult of domesticity, and what Wolff describes elsewhere as part and parcel of the “coming to terms” with subject matter takes on new wings in The King. The poem “It,” in its entirety:  “You have to find a good/ recipe, one that’s not too/ sticky, or brittle,/ or calcified./  I guess I never thought too much/ about baking cookies./  Well think about it.”

The luxuriance of feeling trumps the occasional dead-ends of discursive thought, in The King; the relative value of sanity (as contrasted with the irrefutable claims of kinship) also bears down under scrutiny:  “I don’t care if you think I’m crazy,” says the speaker of “A Page from Cathy’s Book.”  “I am crazy/ but our sons will be brothers.”

Queenly, the speaker of “Everyone who is a god—” ushers in her pantheistic throng, while speaking to the necessity of an irony that provides a necessary leaven to many ills, including enmeshment with the other:  “come before me:/ suckling, toes, gesture, magisterial handling/ of snake and scepter, sister/ of mercy just don’t make/ me eviscerate myself/ I rely too much on the irony/ that comes from inside.”

The speaker stays the reader’s hand from mistaking a constructed landscape for “reality” (reality as chimera rather than fact) though an interrogation of what it means to be natural, and, perforce, made:  “To the question,/ your only possible answer:/ She’s natural,/ The sweater is deep black/ The sleeves are casually pushed up/ naturalistic . . .”, and the creator’s thrill of invention and the crises of the mechanical creation(s) of the “Maker” constitute The King’s loaded gun.  Agonizingly, from “The Lord is Coming:  All bets are off”:  “ . . . loving god or man all out of proportion/ to his creation:  windup toy,/ stuffed dimension . . . glass animals of God/ hauled before the tribunal/ nailed into position/ freed from the freedom/ in the service of which I have been.”  The threshold between sensation and interpretation proves itself not only perceptible but provisional:  “Audiovisual/ one word now.  Hand out/ for greeting, demand made upon me/ I register as erotic.  Experiment/ in shared reality:  We gather together/ to ask the Lord questions . . . Mother let me sit and stand/ stand for a moment/ while I regain perspective . . .”

The speaker of The King exaggerates dualities before denouncing them (content vs. form, surfeit vs. emptiness), in laconic poems so rich in humor that not quoting them in their entirety seems a sin.  “Gored by intent.”:  “Bored by content./  That’s why I love/ transvestites—/ or perhaps I am bored/ by transvestites/ their thin disguises.”

The King/Lord/Other of The King lives outside the body of his mother/maker, yet their connection is intrinsic:  Buddhists, says the speaker, call this (living with with what we have made) suffering, yet this relation, as does any intimacy of intimacies, challenges the parameters of linear thought and logic, leading the speaker of The King into a place where artificial boundaries do not so much dissolve as shimmer—a true seeing, a true interrelationship.  “He feels just the same as I do/ about everything” (from “Different People Feel Differently”); “Today he tasted blood,/ perhaps for the first time./  His own blood./  In his own mouth”; and, from a thirdly interrelated moment “Is it funny for you to know/ you are the only one who comes inside me?/  A more significant, lasting King of Kings,/ I’ll let you do the talking for me/ You know what it’s like inside me.”

Here, not only the boundaries shimmer, but the contexts:  erotic, metaphysical, parental; these morphologies are the closest thing to bliss a reader (and an unborn baby) can know, a deeply attenuated aural “inscape,” to quote Hopkins, that defies description.

The speaker—as a metaphor for language—“walk[s] the junkie’s walk (tilted)/ yet somehow my unborn child/ is protected”—this effect is at times jarring, but more often becalming or sublime (the tone of the longest, and last seventh section, Depth Essay) as the speaker reformulates her amniotic bond to the King.  How do I encourage religious practice?  the speaker of “Attitudes at Altitudes” asks.  “With my sentences . . . / Vantage point . . ./ Plate-blue sky . . . / Plateau of clouds . . . / Good God./  They trail off.”

Read Virginia Konchan’s extensive interview with Rebecca Wolff here. Also, check out “Stockholder,” a new poem by Rebecca Wolff, in Rumpus Original Poems.

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