I rather like the idea of an “infestation” of angels on which Danielle Hanson hangs her new collection, Fraying Edge of Sky. And treating the infestation in much the same way one would treat an infestation of lice – by nitpicking – is a deft touch, an insightful rejoinder to (not a rejection of) Rilke’s every angel is terrible. Nitpicking is almost always a pejorative term, but that overlooks the fact that, taken literally, it is an act of love and devotion toward the one infested, even when the one infested can think of nothing but how awful it is to live in a hell full of nits and nitpickers.
It is an act of devotion that requires painstaking attention to the most minute details. As is well known, that is where the devil dwells. And God. No wonder there are angels everywhere. And no wonder Hanson chooses to dwell on this in a collection of lyric poems.
Lyric poetry is a matter of seeing what is not there as well as what is, and that makes it a matter of light. Hanson calls attention to this throughout the collection. One of the most striking images is in her “List of Confessions,” which ends with “I forgot to take a picture of your absence. / I deleted the picture I took of your absence.” Forgetting and deleting are rather different things, beginning with their intentionality. But both result here in a paradoxical image of the absence of absence, and the act that produces that image is included at the end of a list of confessions. By what we have done and by what we have left undone, we might say. And two pages later, in “Time Lapse,” she invokes Rilke: “Rilke said, every angel is terrible, / but he is the light that lies through its teeth.”
It is a matter of light and a matter of time; but, of course, it is also a matter of matter. Hanson calls attention to this in “A Thousand White Insects,” where the poet says “I’m looking for infinity,” then invokes Riemann: “According to the mathematician Riemann, / infinity is found on a sphere, opposite zero, like boring to the South Pole.” She follows this immediately with “Saints,” which begins with “The benefit of being stone is that time / slows. Take the saints on church tops, / eternal contemplation of a jump, They / look down on the tourists, on me, the occupants / of Dante’s First Level. The saints feel superior / for their height and their depth – / the Seventh Circle is for them, the eternal / wood of suicides.” Perhaps I am nitpicking, but it seems relevant to me that “wood” (hylos) is precisely the term Aristotle turned to when he needed a way to speak of matter, of “stuff.” From light to time to matter – the benefit of being stone and the “constancy” of light that leaves one unable to breathe.
As is so often the case in lyric poetry, the collection turns on turning. The second part of the collection shifts, by way of a little creation myth in which a tailor gets carried away and “creates / a daytime field of constellations, / embroidery of a new creation” in which a small mouse “becomes progenitor / of all miniature fuzzy flying creatures – ” The next poem, “Angels as Mice,” creates a variation on the infestation in which “we must stop / being shepherds watching flocks at night.” This poem sheds light on why every angel is terrible: “angels leave grease trails / wherever they go, spreading diseases / to smite the wicked, / announcing unwanted pregnancies.” The poet advises us not to try cohabiting. Given the attention to time and matter, one wonders if there is a typo or a subtle comment about being between times in the imperative to “stop / prayers for intersession.” Perhaps both. But our attention is being directed away from here, and it is most interesting that we are instructed to stop being shepherds watching flocks – but not to stop watching for angels who are terrible not because of their power but because, more often than not, they are bearers of news the recipients do not want to hear.
The second section ends with a poem called “Exodus, Urban” in which “The plagues have grown smaller, but larger in multitude / and we have – in the vacuum – grown larger. / We are giants over the fallen.” The sequence here is a plague of rats, a plague of dead rat stench, a plague of flies, a plague of dead flies, and a plague of “decomposition-too-small-to-see, / followed by the death of those.” It is not clear who “those” refers to. Are we directed here to the death of those too small to see or the death of death? Or to the death of all those plagues, itself a plague, as the death of each has been? Perhaps this explains why being a good angel requires thinking like the devil.
When I come to the last of the “Plagues of Angels,” in Part III, Job comes to mind, as does Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” This is accentuated by the poem that immediately follows the plagues, “Metamorphosis,” part Kafka, part Ovid: “All I can remember / is the blackness of the room / and the way the incense / flicked ashes of itself onto / the bedside table. / That time is a crab.” Part Günther Grass, perhaps, “scuttling backward to move forward.”
The collection, which begins with “a guide to ridding oneself of an infestation of angels” ends with “recycling the angels.” “To waste an angel,” the poet writes, “is a terrible thing.”
Like an angel.
I come to lyric poetry with eyes shaped in part by the experience of watching spring storms roll across the high plains at night, deep darkness (especially when the power went out, as it often did) punctuated by flashes of daylight. That is what I hope for in a collection of lyric poetry – both the darkness (complete with the loss of power) and the moments of illumination. In this collection, Hanson delivers.
Reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Danielle Hanson, Fraying Edge of Sky. New Paltz, New York: Codhill Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781930337978.