Wetzsteon’s formal style mixed with her populist vernacular is unmistakable and unforgettable.
It would be tempting to mine the poems that make up Rachel Wetzsteon’s posthumous collection Silver Roses for a resolution as to why the author took her own life late last year. A successful poet and scholar, the former poetry editor of The New Republic, and author of three previous collections (most recently, 2006’s Sakura Park), Wetzsteon leaves behind a substantial body of work for others to study and interpret. But to do so here would be to easily miss the abundance of grace and wit with which she wrote and intended for this collection to showcase.
Written and scheduled for publication before her death, Wetzsteon’s Silver Roses is refreshingly formal with a specific flair for rhyming quatrains, whimsical phrasing and playful concepts. Divided into three thematically linked sections, Silver Roses is a motley assortment of the poet’s influences, meditations on her craft and the quiet introspection of a complicated New York City life.
Part one, “A New Look,” is a series of Wetzsteon’s riffs on poets, films, and other inspirations, including Alexander Pope, Thomas Wyatt, and Eugenio Montale, Edward Gorey’s Menaced Objects illustrations, and a unique mash-up of metaphysical poets with Golden Age Hollywood directors (“Pursuits of Happiness”).
At the risk of paling in comparison, Wetzsteon continually infuses her own point of view—that of the modern, city-dwelling flâneur (“Halt!”)—to varying degrees of success. Setting herself against a knock-out Dorothy Parker epigram in “Algonquin Nights,” Wetzsteon’s speaker admirably recounts a gluttonous one-night stand while ruing the awkward regret the morning after.
Words woke us up, reflection turned
affection to regret:
“After she left me I tried not
to do this, but I get
so lonely” ….so I showed him out,
warbling “I’m glad we met.”But now I crave the swift return
of scotch-transfigured nights,
like Chaplin, horrified by his
rich friend in City Lights
With a controlled and simple use of diction and rhyme, on display throughout Silver Roses, and a small helping of allusion, Wetzsteon thoroughly animates not only the narrator’s inner turmoil, but also the recognizable, stammering embarrassment of the man in her bed who can’t hear how insensitive his chatter sounds. Like the best poems in Silver Roses, “Algonquin Nights” is transparently honest, yet treated with such a light touch, particularly the putting-at-ease rhyme scheme, that the reader can’t help but to identify with her insecurity and admire her perseverance in the face of it.
Wetzsteon’s wit however leads her astray periodically throughout this collection. “English Suite” follows “A New Look,” with a linked series of poems about the speaker’s relationship with language and poetics. Unfortunately this is also the weakest of the three, as it often resembles a sequence of publishable exercises. The acrostic, “Sotto Voce,” is a clever rebuke to its punchline: “WRITE A POEM ABOUT IT.” There’s a five-part poem of 26-lined stanzas called “Ferocious Alphabets,” which invariably collapse between the letters X and Z. But, despite her mostly well-executed cleverness, these, along with several poems from “A New Look,” including its namesake “A New Look at Alexander Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock,’” feel one-note all the same.
If there’s anything the repetitive nature of “English Suite” shows us, it’s the spectacular hold that the power of the written word, even the exercises, has over the author. In “Ruins,” for example, as the speaker rides the subway “reading a short history of ruins,” she reflects:
the book set me brooding helplessly,
hopefully, on the folly of recent woes […]this caffeine high,
this madcap tribute to Hepburn’s ghost,
this zeal for aqueducts and abbeys
compose a life, though someday they may rest
in cobwebbed attics, dear ruins of our former selves.
Throughout Silver Roses, Wetzsteon writes, almost obsessively, about writing and the pleasures of language and the escape it provides for her. In “Five Finger Exercise,” the speaker admits to imagining “tapping out hexameters / up and down the shoulder blades of my beloved,” and again in “Interruptus,” she’s accused of “composing a new verse” during a brief respite from rapturous sex. Her insistence in both poems is on the joy and abandon of the sex, but she can’t help framing it inside the structure of her profession, just as the book of ruins works as her means to introspection.
Finally though, stripped of all self-imposed form, style, or subject, it’s the poems that make up the final third of the book, “The Tennis Courts at Stuyvesant Town,” that seem the most revealing, original, and worthwhile of this collection.
In “Year Zero,” the speaker attempts to erase a lifetime of embarrassments through the destruction of their physical manifestations; in one particular stanza, her letters:
Pile high the letters sent and received,
then strike a match and cackle wildly
as pleas and feints and imprecations
melt into what you’d have known they were
if you’d only kept your head on: laughable ash.
She realizes that her hope to start again, with a clean slate, is only left to “amnesiacs and empty classrooms / a purge that cannot prove how far you’ve come.” This moment of despair, that chilling phrase “laughable ash,” is a far cry from the poet who finds relief in histories and meter. However, she is not unlike the woman resembling Chaplin’s friend in City Lights, who seeks solace in her glass. These two personae, the devouring optimist and the resigned Dionysian, appear throughout these poems, and when Wetzsteon lets loose with the latter we find some of her most striking images, and memorable verses.
Silver Roses, though an uneven collection, includes some of the most charming and inspiring poetry of the year. Wetzsteon’s formal style mixed with her populist vernacular is unmistakable and unforgettable.
