To be a poet-critic in the 21^st century, especially one espousing the values of the western intellectual tradition, is to be in the line of an apostolic succession that has run out of heirs.  The line last thrived in the mid-20^th century when figures like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell reigned as the English-speaking world’s last fully-fledged men of letters.  They handed down their literary encyclicals to a sympathetic congregation, a house of true believers who by and large shared the same faith as the critic’s.  If the line has thinned in the meantime, blame it on the breakdown of the old hegemony.  Poets have increasingly eschewed traditional poetics and critics have become enchanted with abstruse postmodern theories.  It seems that the two sensibilities can no longer coexist in the same person.

Occasionally, though, this force-field is breached by an anomalous figure like Eric Ormsby, whose extraordinary new collection of essays, Fine Incisions, is his bid to bind himself to the old role.  Ormsby brings the requisite broad learning to the task, as well as an ear tuned to the fine musics of many languages, and a comprehensive gift of sympathy for the great variety of the human experience.  Having long established his bona fides in one genre, Ormsby here adjusts his sights and goes out to explore the weather as a critic, a role that permits him longer and deeper looks into subject matter, and more time to ponder than the poem’s usual brevity tends to allow.  Time after time, he brings back eloquent evidence that the universe is still full of mystery, and that it demands illumination by minds like his, minds tuned to the subtlest melodies.

He begins in the climate with which he is most familiar, poetry.  He addresses the work of figures ranging from William Butler Yeats to Elizabeth Bishop, staying within the canon of 20^th century literature, and applying the whetted tools of close textual reading. Orsmby looks for what he calls “shadow language,” a species separate and more numinous than the common speech of William Carlos Williams, a speech combining music and the echoes of foreign languages with material that has “the solidity of physical objects,” in which “a complex and tensile music prevail(s),” so as to release the “magic” that “lies in the deftly burnished illusion of actual speech.”  The best poetry inevitably involves artifice, Ormsby believes, but an artifice that disappears when the poet’s gifts are brought to bear on his materials.  He writes that language is “in incessant need of revival,” and that it is “at once inviolable and immutable but also malleable and expansive.”  Ormsby calls for a fidelity to the written word that is almost priestly in its sense of the sacred.  The poet’s task is to perform rites that must be reinvented and improvised upon as the urgency of a given occasion demands.  He locates the apotheosis of his requirements in the work of poets like James Merrill and Geoffrey Hill, both canonical, one Apollonian, the other Dionysian.  In Merrill he finds a poet with whom he has perhaps the greatest affinity, reading in his work an “unassailable elegance,” calling him the Proust of verse.  Indeed, Ormsby revels in the hothouse effulgence of Merrill’s language, a tendency he sometimes indulges in himself.  Both writers share a gift for lacquered surfaces and architectural structures.  Merrill’s only flaw, writes Ormsby, is his flawlessness.  At the other extreme is Geoffrey Hill, the aging English bard whose gnarled and tightly coiled stanzas Ormsby describes as having an “austere opulence.”  Ormsby approves of Hill’s unfashionable devotion to tradition and craft, finding him passionately engaged with it “in a way that makes plain that for him it is a living thing—to be contested as much as upheld—and not some genteel legacy.”  The fact that he finds much to praise in each of these very different poets is indicative of Ormsby’s catholicity.  His criticism is not a search for doctrine, but a quest for faith.  In all his readings of poetry, his method is to proceed in line-by-line exegesis, searching for leitmotifs and congruences, seeking to open the mechanics of the poet’s own inner navigations. Ormsby always exemplifies his own strict critical standards, especially in his essays on poetry, which often startle with insight even as his prose sheds lustre across the printed page.

But Ormsby doesn’t restrict his attentions to poetry in this collection.  He ranges into the fiction of writers like Katherine Ann Porter, Richard Yates, and J. K. Huysmans, and writes lovingly and knowingly of cities like Prague and Rabat, refreshing the genre of travel writing with his brisk intelligence.  Two essays, “Shadow Language” and “Fine Incisions,” qualify as touchstones; they should be required reading for anyone who would call themselves knowledgeable about the written word.  Particularly delicious is his review of Christopher Ricks’s Byzantine volume on Bob Dylan, which Ormsby describes as an “almost comically inflated gloss.”  Written in a tone of restrained mockery, the essay is a much needed corrective to the work of academics who forsake sanity as they pant after the approval of the young.

A review like this one can only brush the surface of a collection so rich.  And it’s simply impossible to praise it sufficiently.  Its rare erudition and worldliness provide perfect ballast for the chiseled sentences of the essays, which flicker and snap with the energy of live wires. Ormsby borrows his title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, and does her honor in these essays that have the penetration of literal incisions, openings that cut deep into mystery, opening it to reveal all its shining interior.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

If there is a theology of poetry, it holds that the poem transcends the poet, that the poem retains its central qualities regardless of the poet’s human flaws.  The poet concerned with theology, however, is required to produce work that is less forgiving of deviation.  In general, it must see subject matter through a narrow ethos, one that involves a fallen creation in need of redemption and a humanity that exists as an emanation of divine dramaturgy.  Few late 20^th century poets, who tended to openly confess their flaws, accepted the demands of working within such confines.  They preferred instead the freedom of the antinomian wild blue yonder.

The late Margaret Avison was a rare exception to this tendency.  In the beginning, she was a talented practitioner of academic verse, her work filled with the formal apparatus and personal symbolism that marked the poetry of the late ’50s and early ’60s.  Then she had an experience of religious conversion, and her newfound Christianity increasingly became the lens through which she reported the subject matter of her work.  She became known as a Christian poet, and her reputation suffered from what was seen as an influence that limited her as an artist.  In some ways, though, her poetry sustained a continuous fidelity to a particular vision.  It was her means of invoking that vision that changed, even more than the changes wrought by her faith.  Here are some lines from a 1960 poem in which she’s describing snow:

“…All ways through the electric air
Trundle candy-bright discs; they are desolate
Toys if the soul’s gates seal, and cannot bear,
Must shudder under, creation’s unseen freight.”

Even with its off-rhyme and loose pentameter, the formal air of these lines is what’s most conspicuous.  She obviously took pleasure in the harmony achieved by the formal poem, possibly relishing its anticipation of the triumph of order over the confusions of unbelief.  Compare them with these lines from a poem almost 20 years later:

“But Goodness broke in, as the sea
satins in shoreward sun
washing the clutter wide away:
all my inventeds gone.”

Nature is still the fundament of creativity here, the nexus that leads to the illumination of mystery.  Rhyme and meter are utilized, but it’s ragged rather than regular.  Everything has been tightened, braided into a lash, her language reinvented and made more urgent.  Avison’s obscure and private early vision had apparently awaited a strong influence to give it a burst of clarity and definition.  It’s easy to see her conversion as the source of that light, as well as the influence of reading that other great Christian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, from whom she obviously assimilated a new tendency for inverted speech and daring word play.

In a secular culture, there can be no more insurgent a figure than that of a professing Christian.  Avison abided with her faith to the end, and kept it central to her poems, even as they grew more and more spare, her thought paradoxically deepened by increasing simplicity.  In the end, she was indisputably the paraclete of a sophisticated poetry, and always eloquent in the articulation of her longing:

“You open your eyes to a lonely light.
Something not there you’d dreamed would be.
Utterly lost from all company you
yield to an absence from long ago
looking for pencil-tracings out on the
waiting wash of the lonely light.”

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

When poetry’s relation to consciousness was configured as a linear construct, a concurrent understanding of the poem was that it embodied a concordance between the language of the creative impulse and the real world into which the poetry was cast.  The aim was to achieve a harmony of results between the two arenas. Over time, though, an extraordinary evolution has occurred in this idea. The poet is no longer seen as a mediating figure, but as someone engaged in actually overthrowing the poem through subversive acts against language and against the linear paradigm of consciousness itself.

In his new collection of poems, Indexical Elegies, Jon Paul Fiorentino joins this struggle. He has gone so far as to cleanse his work of almost all poetic effect, though he continues to bang on the cracked kettle that Flaubert likened to human speech.  He seems to like the echo of clangor. His poetry is a collage of syntactical disjunctions that are the beginning symptoms of a collapse of serial logic.  Fiorentino takes the occasion of loss as his “subject” in this book, and develops it according to Derrida’s notion of the archive, or index, as a structure on which to create variations of the elegiac memory.  He busies himself undermining the tropes of what E. M. Cioran called “a winded civilization.”

But Fiorentino’s true tutelary god is the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who articulated his ideas in lapidary aphorisms.  “A serious philosophical work,” he remarked somewhere, “could be written entirely of jokes.”  In this book, Fiorentino attempts to be Wittgenstein’s model student.  Following what he thinks are the master’s instructions, his work embodies its subject’s deterioration rather than describes it.  Everything lyric has been stripped away. Metaphysics has been banished in favor of harsher thinking. In the end, though, he’s a bad student. Wittgenstein’s own work took up the best tools of language to construct his mordantly paradoxical attacks.  He gave the intellect a punch in the ribs. More often than not, it’s the option to refuse that Fiorentino exercises most powerfully — refusing responsibility, refusing consequence, refusing consolation.  Even the most avid reader will find no memorable or quotable lines in this book.  That would be too retrograde.  Instead, it qualifies as an example of art that will ultimately lead poetry into an arid silence.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

In Federico Fellini’s early Realist film, La Strada, he uses a provincial carnival troupe as a vehicle to explore the performer’s mask, especially what he shows as the contradictions inherent in the lives of those who assume false faces for the amusement of strangers.  The strong man of the troupe, played with great sensitivity by Anthony Quinn, is a confused and violent man, as much a victim of his strength as the beneficiary of it.  His inept forays into tenderness are overwhelmed by the mysterious depths of a simple-minded woman he attempts to pursue. 

The results are subtly tragicomic, a demonstration of the disruptive power of contradiction.  It’s an easy enough dynamic to set up, but one that finds its artistry in nuance, the crosshatching found at the edges of a masterful artist’s broad strokes.

Michael Harris sets up the props for a similar exercise in his new book, Circus.  The first dozen or so of its poems take the form of monologues in which the inner lives of various members of a circus troupe are revealed—the Bearded Lady, the Trapeze Artist, the Dog Trainer… you get the idea.  Harris does little to explore the psyches he opens in this way beyond the all too familiar—these people are laughing on the outside and crying on the inside.  Harris chooses to make comedy of these confessions, a comedy that comes off as bitter, the kind of humor that turns human pathos into farce.  “Everybody sees me / …but if they could get / inside my head they’d see that sideways / I am just trying to keep my balance / like one of those rats in a treadmill.”  As hackneyed as this speech is, with its tired similes and predictable conclusions, it’s unfortunately typical of Harris’s effort to capture the double-edged nature of lives lived behind masks.  Instead of describing the existential disappointment at the heart of a divided life, he settles for simplistic psychological clichés.

Harris soon gives up this unproductive trope, and turns his hand to other subject matter.  This move produces the kind of poetry characteristic of 1950s-era American writing workshops, where working class students wrote blank verse poems that alternated classical references with macho vulgarisms.  In a poem about James Joyce, for instance, Harris writes, “Ah Jim, you addlepated / well-hung stud, how thin the wire / you wobbled along.”  Apparently, Harris feels he must eschew high-mindedness when dealing with a figure like Joyce.  It would be simply too square to deal with him with respect.  Though he gives a nod to the Irish master’s high-wire act, he insists on doing so in terms of venery, and by borrowing Joyce’s own demotic language.  But he lacks linguistic inventiveness of his own, and the poem ultimately fails the Joycean test of being effortlessly polymathic.  Later on, however, in the same poem, he strikes an uncharacteristicly somber note when he observes that “(God) collected you from your troubles and took you up / as soon as the river stopped running…”

What is often missing from Harris’s poems is the essential mystery whose emanation in language must suffuse the heart of any poem.  Harris’s poems disclose too much, and withhold too little.  They’re beaten until every detail has been flailed from them—hide, bone, and hoof.  Certain prose writers, like Michael Ondaatje, are called poets by virtue of the glittering language of their sentences.  Michael Harris is a poet who is more precisely a prose writer.  The meter of his poems notwithstanding, they can seem arbitrarily shaped to the form of poetry, the page’s far edge containing their energy too tightly when a less constricting form might set them free.  Harris is at his best when he searches his own heart for what’s gathered there.  When the circus has left town, when all the stereotypes are swept away, it’s then that Harris finds his true voice, at home, beside water, when he writes of going fishing with his son:

…not much here.  Except this one
snapshot of concentration; this distillation
of persistence and—may his father
say it?—the very image
of what is lovely in the world.
My shining little boy.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

John Steffler is the kind of poet who likes to burrow into a landscape’s least beautiful recesses. Once inside, he’s an unusual tenant, his impulses anything but those of a mystic. When he’s in the kind of terrain that inspires his poems—the rock-strewn topography of Newfoundland, say, or the coasts of the Maritime Provinces—he inhabits them with detachment, lingering only momentarily over wind-carved knobs of wood and lichen-covered stone.

Nature, to him, is nothing more than a mixture of minerals and chemicals duplicated ad infinitum by indifferent science. With a secularist’s empathy, he’ll turn over a stone and admire its riddled underside, seeing nothing more than the artifacts that will be made of it: “Hooks, tongs, helmets, mallets, cleavers, awls…”—the tools used by big-handed men.

Nature for him is a kind of assembly line, dully and dutifully providing the common objects of daily life. “Tell me how else to deal with the world!” For Steffler, it’s not a question, but an irrefutable exclamation. When he describes nature’s processes, he sees them in purely mechanical terms:

Frost causes rock to boil—wedging ice into cracks, it
splits stones, then slips its water blades deeper in,
levers them, spades the gravel up in rolling domes.

His descriptions have a somber felicity, and are the more penetrating for their precision, their refusal of anything less than their own integrity. Steffler sees himself as having a job to do, which is to meticulously dismember Pantheism’s withered body.

Steffler saves his real sympathies for the living, for the humans he’s loved, for those whose hold on life has begun to slip away. In a moving sequence titled “Once,” he evokes the sorrow and confusion of his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. He structures the sequence with a sonata-like form of repetition, overlap, modulations of pace, and moods that range from pathos to humor. The result is a stark testimony that honors the unavoidable suffering that comes with old age.  Observing the tides of his mother’s consciousness lapping to near stillness, he writes:

She never grieves for herself, never
stands apart disowning or lamenting
the ruin, but sometimes terrors sweep
through her, weightless spinning and inner
sleets, and she sits shaking, calling out that
she’s falling, and my father or I hold her
trying to save her from deep space.

The struggle for this kind of dignity is not nature’s to fight, Steffler implies. For the human, though, it’s the test that continuously defines one’s progress in the search for grace, the courage that ultimately vindicates the claim that to be human is to possess a soul. His own preference is to reject the romantic in favor of the more difficult emotions, especially the ones required to warrant the dignity of deep love.

Lookout is a long book, perhaps too long for a book of poetry that isn’t the collected work of its author. Readers of Lookout should persevere, though; arguably, its best section is its last.  Prosaically titled “Colonial Building Archives,” it has some of Steffler’s strongest writing, and stands as one of his most imaginative forays. The sequence begins with the poet sifting through boxes of photographs taken in late 19th-century Newfoundland. As the poet takes up individual photographs, he simultaneously evokes them and reinvents them. Like a painter using a photograph as a palimpsest for a new creation in a different medium, Steffler uses language to coat these photographs with additional layers of meaning that alter their fundamental reality. He angles himself from the photographs so as to make each one a piece of a turning kaleidoscope. The reader hears the pieces of crystal slide over each other as the pages turn, and sees a different world with every view. The sequence doesn’t lend itself to excerpting, unfortunately. It must be read as a whole to appreciate its panoramic magic.

Steffler’s power as a poet comes as much from what he rejects as what he embraces. Readers will find few concessions to sentiment in this book. His faithfulness to place often forces him into austerities, but he enriches them with the sharpness of an unsparing eye. Most of all, he knows where he must stand in order to see things most clearly:

From my unwinding whorl I’m looking
through your night sky at forming stars.
Inside these I can almost see smaller stars.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

According to Chekhov, the listening ear of a horse is receptive to confession, even to the most woebegone among us — especially in cases where humans won’t listen.  In his story “Misery,” a cabby, grief-stricken by the death of his son, can’t find sympathy among his passengers; he finds his waiting mare the only open ear.  As he talks, the mare listens, flakes of wet snow falling around them. In her remarkable new book of poems, I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being, Johanna Skibsrud has a confession.

She trusts that human ears will listen to her, regardless of the woe of her tale, and that her tone, so conversational it belies the urgency of what she’s saying, will be irresistible.  Indeed, her conversational style is one of Skibsrud’s signature traits.  Her poems tend to commence quietly, and they slowly wade into deep water before the reader notices that his feet no longer touch the ground.

Skibsrud begins her story on a boat with friends, where her sailor’s instincts teach her about nearness and distance, trust and mistrust, the need to listen to voices heard across water.  She has had an epiphany, the exact nature of which is just out of reach, at least for the reader.  Her poems don’t resolve the epiphany—it’s too ambiguous— but the numinous image informs, or infuses, her life, a process she chronicles in her poems.

I want always to

live as I lived on board that boat.

To be, always, like this:  tired when I sleep,

hungry when I sit to eat, and when I love I want to love

as recklessly as this:  when I’ve been,

in my loneliness, desiring,

I want to recollect my moments in their wholeness,

without neglecting to possess them, truly, first.

Skibsrud then circles around and above this event, following the ripples it sends through her consciousness.  She meanders into her mind and into her life, going back to the beginning and beyond, laying down the entelechy she so finely imbeds in her story.

It is so intricate, all of it; there are so many parts,

and each one is so separate and so

beautiful that it is startling

to find it out again, and then over again…

Skibsrud’s poetics are, in large part, predicated on the revelations of phenomenology.  She understands that naming is a creative act, and that poetry is the establishment of being by means of the word.  Her intelligence thus permits her to search for this notion in the language of experience, though she knows that much of what she needs to say is unsayable.  But she persists in pursuing “that further extension of the self where the line of thought is at once / pulled taut and left to buzz at the end of its wire….”  The brightness of being, Heidegger wrote, “drives the poet into the dark.”  Skibsrud understands that the self contains an animal, too; that a bear, for instance, is one of the multiplicity of selves with which she can test herself, emotionally and physically.  In the book’s title poem, she assumes a bear-self, knowing she would then be superior to the pain, say, of losing a lover.  “I would be a great bear.  I would / go rumbling through. // I would try to eat you.  I would stand alone, / in the quiet centre of you, and roar.”  But she’s felt the pain of lost love—its scar adorns her—and knows in her heart that she’s not an animal, but a vulnerable human.

This book is not one long poem; neither is it a collection of separate poems.  It’s the graph of a sensibility, and as such it utilizes unconventional principles of organization.  Skibsrud tells her story in such a way that the reader is left to collect its parts as a bundle, like sticks for kindling.  She tells us everything, dark and light, but even then we never know enough to reduce her story to its component parts.  While the shifting and open-ended nature of this book makes it resistant to final interpretation, there is one thing that can definitively be said of Johanna Skibsrud:  her confession is worth the ear of man, woman, child — and horse.

I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being  will be launched at the Arts Café, 201 Fairmount Ave. W., on April 15th at 7:30 p.m.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

The American poet George Oppen liked to cite the carpenter’s art as a useful model for the construction of a poem. He argued that a poem’s parts, when properly connected, constitute a structure of both shapeliness and utility–a ladderback chair, say.  The beauty of Oppen’s simile is that it places the poem in the broad context of hand-made objects, and the poet in the real world of people involved in the labors of making. The result relocates poetry, removing it from the world of ether to the world of oxygen.

The work in Robyn Sarah’s new collection, “Pause for Breath,” is obviously the product of a careful shaper, a carpenter of words. She’s a poet who takes the materials at her hand and confers grace on them. Sarah is not happy with the postmodern world, this age when “every ante has been upped / past every paradigm of decency.”  Without apology, she chooses her means of response with the tools of another age. She favors measure and the discipline of rhyme, and is entirely able to satisfy the demands of formality. Regrettably, this is often in the service of a morality that is too tidy. Sarah makes glancing acknowledgement of the catastrophes of the 21^st century, for instance, but too many of her poems on these themes are facile. She’s a good poet whose craft sometimes disguises the fact that she has little to say about that hasn’t been said before. But even her craft fails her sometimes, her meters turning to doggerel, her language mawkish. She writes of “thoughts that wing / out of dream,” about how “Gay it is in the sun,” announcing that “Time creeps, time flies.”

Sarah’s real gifts shine through in her more tensile, more personal poems. Often, she takes the principle of mortise and tenon and enacts her own version of literary joinery, producing poems snugly locked in style and content.  At their best, there is no loose play in these constructs. When she admits “I do not like what life has scribbled / in my blank book,” the reader takes notice, relieved that the tone of complacency has finally shifted into doubt, and that the poem is an exploration rather than a conclusion. We take joy when she writes of an afternoon with a companion when a flicker runs through her and she says “still I hear, / like summer signing off, that faint / whirr in the grass: / crickets, or our bodies / talking to each other.”  The most completely realized example of this density is a poem called “Blowing the Fluff Away,” which is worth reproducing in its entirety:

Blowing the Fluff Away

The sprig of unknown blossom you sent last fall

spent the long winter drying on my wall,

mounted on black.  But it had turned to fluff

some months ago.  Tonight I took it down

because I thought that I had had enough

of staring at it.  Brittle, dry and brown,

it seemed to speak too plainly of a waste

of friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste.

So, after months of fearing to walk past

in case the stir should shatter it to bits,

I took it out to scatter it at last

with my own breath, and so to call us quits.

–Fooled! for the fluff was nothing but a sheath,

with tiny, perfect flowers underneath.

If Sarah had only blown more of the fluff away in this collection, we would see even more “tiny, perfect flowers.”

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

The long and short of the prose poem is that it’s a product of deep inner contradictions. Its prose wants the freedom to wander, while its poetry wants the brevity of a few luminous words. It rejects the primacy of either of its parents in favor of a synthesis of both. It delights in frustrating the expectations of the readers of poetry and the readers of prose. In the end, its perfect realization is a construct of awkward grace that conceals as much as it reveals, that darkens the blank page with justified lines that are jagged with revelations.
What better genre, then, to utilize for a project like the one Brian Campbell proposes for his new book of prose poems, Passenger Flight. Situating himself as a “pilot,” his ambition is to send his readers, or “passengers,” on a voyage across the psychic landscape of the twenty-first century. He wildly navigates his craft (in both senses of the word) on an audacious exploration. The resulting record is a document of random indeterminateness that is decidedly postmodern. It does not respect consistency or continuity. It migrates across the stylistic spectrum with promiscuous abandon. The work it produces is of groaning inelegance and touching sensitivity, with the poems roughly divided about equally between these extremes.

Campbell’s method is to embody his subject matter rather than to describe it. The result can be difficult to assess. At its most puzzling, his work resembles the nonsense prose of Noam Chomsky’s exercises in deep grammar:

 ”Flick flick. Chuffle chuffle. Yes. In concupiscent caverns of hermetics, abstractions condense into moist tactilities. While the tongue goes slurp, teeth go crunch, and my crotch itches…   “Gallimaufry”
At the other extreme, it sees the world as a place enchanted with intimations of mortality:

“Everything under a thin skin of dust. In the stillness it falls like snow. Beautiful, this falling. Soon I will be a part of it: accumulate on other bodies; as they move, they’ll shed my presence. We are all shedding presences of the dead.  “Slough”

By conventional standards, the latter poem is superior in its writing, in its nuances, and in its claim on the observant mind. But Campbell presents all his poems as equal. There is no difference, to him, between the sacred and the profane. Everything is slightly absurd, everything has its own lurid charm. Whether or not the reader is willing to grant Campbell the aesthetic he expects, that reader will nevertheless find an intelligent sensibility at work in these poems, and a skillful use of a slightly incongruous angle of vision.

The reader of Passenger Flight will hear the faint laughter of the author on nearly every page. He laughs because he knows it’s the only intelligent response to looking into the abyss. He even sees a ray of hope on a winter day that’s a scene right out of Munch:
“The day is a creased grey brain… Wind howls through a funnel of nightmare. Leather collars are turned up against the cold… Smudged, bent figures in the rain walk head down… But beyond the brooding masses in the sky—canyons of light, brilliant rays under a blinding white disc.  “Brainpan”

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

The figure of the traveler, wind-bent and plowing bravely forward, is a useful trope for a poet whose work explores strange terrain, both inner and outer. Travel demands agility in unfamiliar places — improvisation, adaptation to the flux of experience — traits a poet must bring to bear on the blank page. In This Way Out, Carmine Starnino is a traveler, though his poems are often homebound. He discovers directions within himself, a personal, inward itinerary.

The title of the collection establishes the motif. This way out, the helpful pointer deployed at airports and train stations, tells the traveler he’s arrived, at home or a far-off destination. The implication that arrival is a kind of answer is his assurance that motion is required to advance the spirit. In a central sequence of epistolary poems titled “Nine from Rome,” Starnino describes his impressions of this most spiritual of cities. He’s determined not to fall into the insipidities of tourism or to feel the awe expected of those who gaze on the objects of antiquity. “This rubble-gawking feels like duty,” he writes. He doesn’t want to “join the droves…following in the footsteps of all those who chased the latest thing.” He and his companion, “crave a thrill too quick for art.” Still, the city has a power over him:

Picture us: hand in hand along cobbled streets
that drink the dusk neat, thousand year old cul-de-sacs
and the smell of bosk.

By the end of his stay, adamant in his world-weariness, he writes:

What I believe in now are doldrum days,
days of kicking back on one of Christendom’s rooftops.

This sequence shows Starnino at his best—his gift for fluent language and rhythm, the ability to conjure the physical within the historical, all in a pitch perfect conversational tone. Starnino knows a thing or two about the western intellectual tradition, and unlike many of his contemporaries, he’s not afraid to show it, though he is jocular rather than reverent. The “Nine from Rome” recall in their brilliant loquacity the 14-line poems of Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin.

But Starnino’s best poem in This Way Out requires the reader to travel only next door, where a butcher’s shop is the site of an extraordinary extended metaphor, a marbled psalm of praise to a side of beef and the butcher who makes art of it. “Our Butcher,” is a vertiginous invocation of carnality that brings to mind Chaim Soutine’s great paintings of flayed carcasses.

Striated and plush,

crewelworked with fat and grosgrained with gristle,
meat is not semblance, meat is baroque.  That said,
I’d like to break back the pages of a shank and read all day.
Tales about the flex and kick, the squawk and gack
of things in pens.

The poem is Whitmanesque in its appetite. Vegetarians will view it with alarm.
Starnino’s facility with words constitutes his greatest strength, and greatest potential weakness. It makes him believe he can write a poem about anything, and this is false. There is dross in this over-long book, but its best work has the strength of one who climbs to the top of the mountain, where the fog can part on scenes no traveler can be prepared for. That’s where a poet is necessary. Carmine Starnino finds a world behind that fog.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His most recent book of poems is The Hierarchies of Rue from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

THE ELEVATION OF THE FRAGMENT, as a writer’s means of portraying his or her world, has become the literary verification of the 20th century’s recognition of the broken nature of perception. It’s a technique not only for bringing the written word in line with the phenomenal, but also for forcing the reader into the same world as the writer. At its best, it produces work of cognitive immediacy that jars expectation. At its worst, it produces a scrap pile of debris under which poets attempt to hide their deficiencies.

In Carolyn Marie Souaid’s new collection, Paper Oranges, she uses the fragment as a strategy to slow down what is otherwise a remarkably fluid style, and to give her poems a fractal, hesitant edge. Billed as the poet’s response to the blunted spiritual quest of characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Souaid commences by invoking a sere Beckett landscape in fragmented Beckett-like language. The first poem begins, “Darkness. A tree. Dry grass husks.” And then the single word “until” constitutes the entire next stanza. Souaid leads us into her poems and then drops us off a precipice. The reader quickly realizes that the mimetic world of conventional perception does not exist in these meditations, and that her demand, which conscripts us in her quest to find the source of her longing, does not include taking us by the hand. Souaid’s poems demonstrate that the ease of standing upright is not the same thing as possessing grace.

This is from “L’Intensite de L’Instant”:

What binds you, of course,
not the logical universe
or the reliable moon
but a common lemon desire:

Tang & verve.
The exuberant, pumped-up heart.

The fragments here force us to fill in the blanks. As in many of Souaid’s poems, the words aren’t always where we expect them, but they’re impossible not to see. When she needs the savour of a sour kiss to provide a little sting, she miraculously finds a lemon to do the trick.

Despite the sustained note of restrained despair in Beckett’s play, Souaid’s response to it is glittering. She’s still responsive to the dazzle of creation and language, but cognizant of the shadows that loiter in the understory, threatening catastrophe. Alternately, she gives us stanzas like this, from “Dada Landscape”:

Look, it beckons: tambourine dawn.
A cold, queer dance.
Glaze on the naked field
where the moon slid down….

And follows them with lines like these, from “Improviso”:

First things first: we averted life.
Then we averted death, spinning

into & out, mostly out, of control.

Ultimately she knows, like Beckett, that much of existence is a conflict between inertia and attentiveness. But she knows, too, that inertia is easily mistaken for a spiritual state by the inattentive, that its duration can be the record of a mind slowed to the point that the infinitesimal can be examined for evidence of the monumental. She’s prepared to see everything, even if it’s through eyes dimmed by error. The imperative of self-examination through poetry compels her to an inwardness that she constantly revises.

Her poems rock back and forth, between light and dark, on a fulcrum that never permits them rest. The poems are her way out. She writes, “On the runway, a plane will be waiting.”

Souaid’s poems work best as starbursts, sudden illuminations on the rim of our
consciousness. At 106 pages, unfortunately, this book violates these limits and risks the hazard of surfeit. Its claim to be a meditation on Beckett, which seems more important to Souaid than to the reader of her poems, begins to feel strained. The last section, “Flight,” which itself runs to almost 40 pages, strikes one as complete in itself, taking up its own complex set of themes-renewal, decline, place, the vertigo of travel, and “the chemistry of leaf & leaf / rubbing up against love.” It’s easy to see “Flight” as a book in itself, or the beginning of a new book. Regardless, Carolyn Marie Souaid writes like an angel, and honours her art, both in its fragments and in its whole.

Roger Sauls lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His most recent book of poems is “The Hierarchies of Rue” from Carnegie Mellon University Press.