After a hiatus, I’m back with more brief excerpts of books to be categorized as “required reading.”
The Hermit by Lucy Ives (The Song Cave, 2016)
Somehow straddling the line between etymological, theoretical, grammatological and intimate, lush, heartbreaking, this collection is sparse in language yet profoundly dense in the evocations of individual humanity.
1. A man claims he makes a choice to be unhappy, since it allows him vigilance. “I am vigilant and suffering,” he tells us. And perhaps this is the very anatomy of unhappiness: a choice to engage in a certain perception, which is to say, experience.
…
19. Necessity of finding an area in which one is not an impartial actor. Necessity of finding an area in which one desires the living of others.
…
24. Zachary talks about wanting to be with someone because he feels like he can be a better person for someone else. He says he doesn’t know what he’s doing, wishes he had someone to do things for. I tell him I think we are very different people.
…
41. Imagine that love between two people is of such parity that one has only to hear the other speak; then, in an instant, remembers years of kindness. Why won’t the other speak now? Why does he seem to become lost, as if inside his own living?
…
76. You may think, “I will always feel like this.” You may think, “I cannot change quickly enough,” or: “I cannot change ‘correctly.'”
The Wine-Dark Sea by Mathias Svalina (Sidebrow Books, 2016)
Of course the phrase “the wine-dark sea” already comes with its own lyrical context, Homerian triumph of language and yet failure to see color (indeed, why is the sea the color of wine, why dark, why not). And in this book the reader becomes stained with the darkness of the wine, drunken with the secrets that lie in the books and crannies of beings and places.
THE WINE-DARK SEA
First there is not enough water
& then too much.
The day eternal
& then asphalt spills
into the caesura.
The whole mess
fidgets there.
I live toward that.
…
THE WINE-DARK SEA
I am on the island
that speaks a language
I can only understand,
where a wish
is anything rotting,
the shore.
…
THE WINE-DARK SEA
It’s harder to tell
where the world ends,
I can’t think without Julia
so Julia is my mind.
Julia is my mind.
Robert is my mind.
Zach is my mind.
Jon is my mind.
Heather is my mind.
Josh is my mind.
Sara is my mind.
Dave is my mind.
Teal is my mind.
Sommer is my mind.
Noah is my mind.
In the sun I carry
everyone I know & I
am carried on their backs.
They are the wine-dark sea. And I
am the wine-dark sea.
The Good Dark by Annie Guthrie (Tupelo Press, 2015)
I had the great pleasure of reading with Annie this past May in Tucson and the quiet and intelligent beauty of her poetry really blew me away. Julie Carr calls The Good Dark a book of listening: “It listens to bird sound, thunder, the movement of a leaf or a cloud, the echoes and resonances of its own words — it listens even to silence which, as Guthrie tells us ‘has no edge.’ And THE GOOD DARK is a book of speaking: or shouting, whispering, confessing, and singing. In delicate and precise poems Guthrie addresses the darkness: the God gone missing or hiding in a mirror, the soul barely discerned. And this poetry, this ‘sheet music’ is so carefully rhythmic, so richly sonic, and so strong, it makes that darkness good.”
*
all birds are representative
and the scene impeccably lit
to hold the beak, stroke down,
the fabric
feel it up
feel it quit
*
what are you, crashed,
departed?
that stays around outside of heads
aloft, if not for chants
*
to discern the soul
there’d be a river in it
but by the bank, a shouter
shouting out sheet music
the chirp to wind
the shouter with mouth of blade
marking a target
*
dusk, grasses wind the hymn
silence if reverence
*
given everything
the give forms our lips
it’s only the shape of zero
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing by Brian Blanchfield (Nightboat Books, 2016)
I feel really grateful that Brian Blanchfield’s words exist in the world. He is one of the most thoughtful, sensitive, and beautiful writers I know. His poetry permits strange knowings on the borders of such recognizable emotions and the mystery of the unknown. In this book, these “essays near knowing,” approach “knowing” both from a distance, careful and exacting and lyrical and observant, but also head-on, the heart fully forward, all-in, and achingly involved. These essays are beautiful and heartbreaking and incredibly insightful.
from On Withdrawal
Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
To withdraw—when it doesn’t take an object, like: an offer, or a question, or the troops—to withdraw, as an intransitive verb, is, as it happens, always reflexive. If I withdraw, I withdraw myself. From what? From the race for city council, fro active cocaine dependency, from the relationship, from the chill night air. To withdraw is to vacate what has held or kept you, and implies movement away from that engagement. Pullback.
When I can, on a commuter rail line, I sit in a rear-facing seat. I like the illusion of being drawn from the present into the future. To sit there is to withdraw. I have my eye on what I’ve left. There’s that famous passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when she’s on the little footbridge over the rushing, swollen stream during the heavy spring spring snowmelt, when she asks what sort of idiot would rather look downstream from that bridge, at what’s already passed beneath you rather than upstream toward what’s coming. I think of this sometimes when I watch the scenery recede from a rear-facing seat, and eel a bit perverse for my predilection. Am I a withdrawn type, not as take-charge as Annie Dillard? By that comparison, almost certainly. But to so reason seems reductive, since, in effect, to choose to take the train to Natick, MA, from Back Bay Station Boston is the principal act of agency involved. The train is moving on its track no matter what which direction you point yourself within it. To face forward is redundant if you are already forward-moving.
