Heather Christle is a daring, riveting poet who won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award for The Trees, The Trees. Her ear and her curiousness are acute, she is not a poet to relax with, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She is always trying to define and break boundaries, and the title of her new book, Heliopause, gives a bold suggestion of what’s been on her mind as she considers these issues. Heliopause is the point that marks the start of interstellar space and the endpoint boundary of our solar system. It is 10-15 billion miles from our Sun, the place where pressure from solar winds is in balance with that of interstellar winds. This is complicated, arcane and thrilling, like so much of Christle’s work. For non-scientists, people without an interest in astronomy, or people who don’t engage intensely with poetry on a regular basis, there will be beautifully dramatic confusion when encountering what is found in Heliopause. The intellectual effort to understand these poems is helpful but not essential to gaining some pleasure. Christle always sings, as “A Perfect Catastrophe” makes beautifully clear:
To have stood midfield among the vast and livid green
and never heard the grasses take their vow of silence
is experience, not evidence, and meanwhile clouds descend
and buffer light. When did I arrive? I recall it came on
slowly as a fever as a poem is a communicable please.
What’s in charge here is the scattered light all over
and how it pulls my very blood into my hands
until they graph a fat what the sun likes holding
and some dumb mutter good and nails me to the bone.
Christle really wants to be present at the creation, and she wants our company. Since none of us can be, her twitchy, querulous music becomes a dialogue with the kind of gaping, bamboozled wonder that was experienced before science was codified.
This has devastating implications in “Disintegration Loop,” which was written in response to William Basinki’s video of Lower Manhattan recorded in the last hour of daylight on September 11, 2001. “This is the city/I can describe it/black/with power/ . It is, as she reminds us, “an electricity / forced into light,’’ forced into confronting what has never been imagined, but which the scientific facts of heliopause partially explain. The power here is extraordinary on every level imaginable. Read it and weep, which is an interesting thing for me to write a few days after learning that Christle is at work on a book about crying.
After this she nods to Frank O’Hara in “It’s an Empire Out There:”
I saw you walk
past the window box
and brush against
one flower
I saw you
readjust your jacket
saw you kiss
Long live
whatever needs our dying
Whatever feeds us
and then
tells us don’t exist
This piece has that O’Hara brittle, compassionate cheerfulness, but like the whole book, it also goes big and unanswerable.
Her “Elegy for Neil Armstrong” reminds us that humankind is ultimately fine and powdery, and she can’t possibly want readers to miss the Biblical allusion here. One man who will become fine and powdery, just like the rest of us, is millions of miles closer to where it all began than we can ever possibly be. Except in our heads. Maybe. Four pages into the poem, which is printed in white on black, she declares, ‘’ I’m standing directly in the/ shadow now ‘’ and we are there with her, without flags, small and irrevocably individual, taking those first three steps. We know that history is here and the dust makes us equal to Armstrong, or it makes him equal to us. Take your pick. It’s still breath taking in a way that compliments the finest prose contemplations about just where the hell we are. Or wish to be.
There is something magical and heartening about a book that can go over so many bumps without the ride feeling unnecessarily shaky. The space module that carried Armstrong is eerily connected the “tiny electrical god” that ‘’has cut and spliced us together.’’ This is part of an untitled poem she announces is for her husband, two days before their fourth wedding anniversary. She is sweetly about to take her place :
where I am waiting for the warm chest
of my husband
for its occasion
and if they say a word now
it would take years for me to know.
I don’t think one has to be married to appreciate the delicacy here, and though I have been married for twenty-seven years, I am glad be taken to that miraculous place where a single word can take years to know.
It almost goes without saying that if you call a book Heliopause, war will come into the picture. Because energy is a huge element in the definition of the word, even though energy is not often quoted in dictionary definitions of it. So in “Some Glamorous Country,” Christle speaks of ‘’the war’s geometry/among the many givens/the spaces of the torn/away limbs articulate.’’ By the end of the piece she arrives at a sure-footed manifesto supported by the likes of Denise Levertov and Marge Piercy:
It is that
Given the terrified world
how can I
& can resist
the things I have done
in my name
The lack of a question mark here implies complicity, and that is utterly fair, artistically, morally and politically.
The last pieces in the book are letters that all begin, “Dear Seth.” Some are more affecting than others, but together they kinetically cohere. One poem notes that ‘’Yesterday was Thanksgiving/and for you Hanukkah.’’ Hanukkah celebrates a miracle of lasting light at a time of literal and spiritual darkness. Thanksgiving, in its earliest manifestation , celebrated harvest after great struggle. Here, Christle’s ‘’very small spark’’ she’d hoped to kindle in herself went dark. Except it didn’t. And I don’t think it will. Not with what she’s done with a book that explodes with heart.
