I look forward to picking up copies of many new books and journals this week at the AWP conference in Boston. Since anticipation is a product of memory, and since both of the authors celebrated below are coming out with new books, I’ve also decided to review their last books. These are two of the many collections I picked up last year at AWP in Chicago:
ANNUS MIRABILIS, Sally Ball, New York: Barrow Street Press, 2005
What is the nature—including the congruencies and limits—of knowing, identity, love, and hope? In Annus Mirabilis, Sally Ball explores such central questions with continual reference to the lives and modi operandi of Leibnitz and Newton. A poet who loves great eighteen-century thinkers is one who takes interest both in the search for universal principles and in the observations that lead us there, but there is a twist. Ball, as a modern poet, also focuses on the act of comprehension itself, on observing carefully observed, as when we see the six-year old Leibnitz sorting through leaves in the poem “1652.” Here “Curiosity / and certainty collide,” right down to what we make of the look of “the love itself.” The poet is often absorbed in “the measure of wanting to see” (“Toward the Opticks”). Indeed, the speaker of “Given” wants “to see the lens itself, / the one Newton made.” In the course of this quest (and meta-quest), the poet also contemplates mythic mainstays such as the moon and cosmogony, but from multiple angles, and with a sense of irresolvable anguish that grows as the book proceeds.
Perhaps you knew that Newton engaged in certain reclusive practices, such as celibacy and alchemy. But did you know that he never saw the sea? I used to teach a little Leibnitz, but largely to dispel clichés about knee-jerk optimism unfairly attributed to him by Voltaire in the form of his parodic Pangloss. Newton and Leibnitz were not only precocious, industrious and eccentric: they were both polymaths of the highest order. Ball is a (sometimes literal) follower of Leibnitz and Newton, of the very walkways they trod, of the tropes their lives and works provide the poet, and of the ironies that, in turn, necessarily follow. In “In Hannover: Clairvoyance,” the poet appears at Leibnitz’s house with her sick child and her other ongoing concerns. She contemplates Leibnitz’s portrait and (thinking of Newton “as master of the English mint”) throws a coin (presumably stamped with a portrait) into the reflecting pool. Her pilgrimage and her wish for a magical diagnosis and solution nevertheless defy the limits that Newton would impose on “the regulated dream.” In this poem, we recall that Leibnitz was highly accomplished not only as a mathematician and a philosopher of harmony among the monads, but also as a diplomat. Could there ever be just one portrait of such a man? Indeed, didn’t and doesn’t his rivalry with Newton in itself become part of his portrait? In this book, it certainly does. We later visit Newton’s portrait as well, or at least a photograph of an imprint of it, in a poem called “Newton’s Death Mask.” As she reflects on her portraits of them and their ghosts, Ball’s fascination with these figures and their rivalry becomes ours.
In the title poem “Annus Mirabilis,” the plot thickens (and the work breaks into sections, sometimes clustering in stanzas of longish lines, sometimes falling into single-line or even single-word stanzas). We learn here and elsewhere that Newton and Leibnitz both happened to have complementary ideas about miracles, that each (though the matter was and is still debated) independently invented the differential calculus…and the list goes on. Important differences are also noted—not in a systematic way, but in one imbued with self-reflexive curiosity. The vanishing point of resemblance (its risks and redemptions) is a critical theme throughout this book—not only where Newton and Leibnitz do and do not align, but also, for instance, where work and conviction meet paralysis—“weakness? sickness? / Where’s the line?” The poem I just quoted, entitled “Function of X,” harks back stylistically to the earlier “Proofs,” but it takes on a greater problem. It is the problem at the heart of the book—that of human relations, the relation of Y to X, her to him, the solver to the irresolvable. We are made to see, in passing through a twisted logical vortex, how much more complex than logic human life and human relations are. To quote, for just one out of many examples, the poem “Candle under Glass”: “What can it possibly mean / that I am happy / when the person I love / has no capacity for happiness?”
As the collection progresses, the poet looks more and more deeply “inside the hospital”—at a father’s uncertain operation, a loved one’s persistent depression—while keeping Leibnitz and Newton and their solutions (and “Dissolution”) in the equation. Much seems to come together in the late poem “Entreaty to the Air”: the abstract mock-math meets the physical specificity of “The slightly flexing muscle”; the language of science meets that of domestic life and want. Indeed, “Any point can be one of intersection.” This poet has a very gifted and unusual mind.
OF GODS AND STRANGERS, Tina Chang, New York: Four Way Books, 2011
Tina Chang’s Of Gods and Strangers is full of sensual, heartfelt, excitingly nervy incantation: the warmth and magic of a dazzling artist. In enacting a spaciotemporal journey within and beyond the borders of America and the West, Chang also explores a long history of aspiration, adventure, and damage. The poet combines her perspectives on contemporary life with imagined visions of the Empress Dowager, Tzu Hsi, the last emperor of China, who ruled from 1861 until her death in 1908. This figure is, at different times, playful, torchlit, rebellious, lipsticked, bejeweled, distraught, perfumed, electric, magnetic. In “Empress Dowager Boogies”—the oxymoronic title is representative of the tensions in this volume—she is eager to “let” her “majesty and birthright go.” Soon, however, she displays “A face powdered so rouge it becomes an empire” (“Dowager in Matrimony”). Her feet are wrapped, and her mouth is stuffed with fog as she prepares to meet her groom. There is truth and compassion in this portrait, but this character has many other facets. Later in the volume, a century after she has ordered the deaths of the artists who failed to envision her most perfect sky, the cause of her own death is identified as suffocation by riches: “nostrils and mouth stuffed with diamonds” (“Reign”). The poet-as-dowager (one poem is explicitly entitled “The Poet as Empress Dowager”) can accordingly identify with an exotic caged creature (“The Empress Dowager Has One Bird”). It also makes sense that images of reaching for an elusive, heavenly freedom abound. The poet’s other alter egos include the more modern image of herself in youth as a furious DJ, a vixen who slowly takes off her coat “like a religion.”
These tensions—between tradition and contemporaneity, between entrapment and freedom—point toward a deep exploration of the divided self. One often senses that a speaker is grappling with a fractured identity, that she is caught between polarities, backgrounds, or modes of being. At one point, we are told that she and her lover were born between “twin lightning storms / on opposite sides of the earth. / White birds colliding into black birds that high” (“Sex Gospels”). And the very openness of the sky or road can itself define a kind of trap. The central consciousness of this book is often set adrift: “What is this force / that makes me continually lost? What is it that I want / in all these disappearing cities?” (“Baguio”). Indeed, in “Cutting It Down,” another speaker’s self-portrait can mirror that of Frida Kahlo in all her broken glory:
she held her own twin’s hand, one who was
laden down by tradition, another freed from it,
the forced embrace and cleaved tongue flicking
like a serpent’s. When God multiplied the soul,
it fractured, splintered beast wandering in the mirror,
strangeness of pleasure in tandem. What does that say
about the spirit, one’s own disaster split in two,
to halve the pain or double it?
But does such torment arise primarily from within or without? To follow these various personae is to feel threatened, at times, by “invisible bandits” (“Sex Gospels”) and shady men in the Tunisian black market (“The Evolution of Danger”), threats on the outside that mirror threats on the inside. To luxuriate in these poems is to be haunted by desert nights and moon-fear, by the split head of Trotsky, by a dying horse, a hacked-open goat, an unstable bridge over rushing water, even the blackened body of God. Are such evocations primarily personal, or are they political? Are they historical or psycho-spiritual? Are they erotic or military? Are they about love or death? Such questions are reductive in a world where a poem entitled “Patriotism” can begin with “shrapnel” and a “guilty mouth,” describe the act of digging down “below kneeling, below bowing” to the place where “you can mount the cry,” and end with “my tongue waving like a flag.”
In the third section of the volume, entitled “Territory,” what might have been an intimate journey clearly opens out onto wider territory. Here we bear witness to explicit atrocities and natural disasters in Ethiopia, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, wars between gods and devils, “history” that “you can never fix” (“A Full Life”). But even in poems such as these, we inhabit a surreal atmosphere where (for instance) a simile can almost liberate itself from its usual descriptive function, making a play for its own deadly freedom: “It is as simple as a lone man wrapping / himself like a gift with a bomb at the center” (“Substantial”).
For all its elaborate gesturing toward the definitions of fracture and trouble, Of Gods and Strangers is full of “So Much Light” and “Possibility.” The book opens with “Unfinished Book of Mortals” a long, fascinating poem which defies all spaciotemporal bounds; Chang concludes, wittily and refreshingly, with the dreamlike “Author’s Notes on Imaginary Poems.” Some pieces, such as “Wild Invention,” are so full of wild game (in multiple senses of the term) that they cast fairy tale spells. Several provide an antidote to death by riches: Chang’s linguistic and visual lushness is often balanced by restraint (as in “Lord,” “The Idea of Revelation,” and “Epilogue”). I’m a sucker for all the startling, leaping imagery and all the unexpected turns in this book. More importantly, Chang always has her finger on the pulse of the human condition. She glimpses burning buildings, suffering cities, and figures swept out to sea. It is as if she could survey the whole canvas of the human struggle on earth, while recognizing that it is the personal that provides a window onto the universal. With “birds rummaging in [her] breastbone, ” the speaker of a concluding poem has the courage to declare, “Strange God, I understand the human void.” Of Gods and Strangers is a gorgeous, unnerving, revelatory read.
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