The arrangement of Broken and Reset makes reading it something like visiting an archaeological excavation: while we don’t do the digging ourselves, we see evidence that it has been done. We stand on the rim of the dig and look down across forty years of poetry—and, as we read, we work our way to the bottom through four groups.
The first covers ten years and includes substantial selections from Myth Waking: Homeric Hymns, A Modern Sequel and Lost Gardens. The former is motivated by a sense of the “metaphoric usefulness” of things (Greek gods, in this case) thought dead. That is not a bad characterization of much of Price’s poetry, which often seems directed toward resurrections—of gods, of myths, of memories.
The second group, slightly smaller, covers a longer period, from 1994-1978. This section is dominated by a selection from Seven Deadly Sins, which Price describes (388) as “mock sermons . . . cast, irreverently, as artificial sonnets.” While the comment was originally part of the introduction, in this collection it falls at the end of the book as a note. The move is important because it is not clear from the poems themselves that they are mock sermons, and there is nothing inherently irreverent about the sonnet form in which they are presented. Though they don’t adhere to traditional meter or rhyme schemes, they are broken into fourteen lines. After the note, one is left wondering what might constitute a non-artificial sonnet.
And then comes an interesting outcropping low in the dig—a series of “Christmas” poems that covers almost the entire period of the book. These poems are dominated by the season—as much Winter as Christmas, including the association of Winter with death.
And finally, another group covering just over a decade, 1965-1977. Near the end of this final section (and thus in one of the earliest poems included in the collection, “Overworked”), Price writes that “Poems are, crudely, / fingerprints of the mind, left on a certain place / at a certain time. They are meant to remind, / not define…” (375).
The emphasis on mind perhaps explains the abstraction of many of these poems—a poetry of ideas more than a poetry of place, that often seems directed toward jogging the memory. Where that jogging paints people and places, it makes beautiful poems (as in “Laramie,” 7, which begins, “Beethoven grass / teasing and rolling /through the high alone, / surrounding us / with inner spaces /as far as we can breathe, intimate / as not being seen…”) that explode into provocative thoughts (as in the last four lines of the same poem, “money is just / ticks and lice in the beautiful / fur of the music / bounding over the hills.”) Particularly in the newer poems, Price breaks lines and scatters them across the page to make poems of the eye that seem always out of breath. Such breaks sometimes overcome the sense that these poems are sermons incognito—and may be intended to express the “uneasiness” with piety and institutional religion that Price mentions in the introduction to Seven Deadly Sins, the last word in this collection. But the fingerprints of a lingering piety too often overwhelm certain places, certain times. I would be happy with a less visible mind, more Beethoven grass “intimate / as not being seen.”
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
V. B. Price. Broken and Reset: Selected Poems, 1966-2006. University of New Mexico Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8263-4157-0.