Steven Schroeder – Page 2

May 27, 2010

Faith Run begins with “a poem of one hundred tongues” that “realigns the saxophone / until two hundred eardrums respond, // the music building into a text that wants to spill / the wine out of the conches” (3). From those opening verses, the music builds without a single false note all the way to the poem digging for secrets at the end.

Ray Gonzalez moves from specifics of memory and place — “I was born seven years after / the first atomic bomb, not Hiroshima, // but the one from July 1945 — / Trinity Site, New Mexico, // 200 miles from where / my mother gave birth to her only son” (4) — to haunting insights that change the way we see the world — “Not all my ancestors are dead” (6). In lines of remarkable economy, not one word more than is needed, Gonzalez places himself in space and time and shows us living ancestors by recalling the bomb that is almost always forgotten and the people almost always forgotten with it.

“Not all my ancestors are dead,” and Pablo Neruda “going into exile to see how the snow peaks // got in the way of Federico Garcia / Lorca’s ascent to heaven” is among them — even as poets awaken in a hail storm “to start counting the dead” (41), counting the dead among poets in a way that honors ancestors by acknowledging their presence — but also counting the dead in senseless wars, in the voice of his 20 year old nephew saying on the phone from Iraq “There is too much death” — “Suddenly, he spits, ‘It is so bad here, / they are going to kill me any day!'” (62). Regarding the conversation his nephew has with his mother, Gonzalez notes “At 18, he claimed he was serving his country / and used to say the Iraqis needed our help. // At 21, he says he doesn’t know why he is there / and all his buddies want to come home” (63). The poet picks up an old refrain here, but he does it in a text that has been built of music that cannot wait to spill wine out of the conches.

Gonzalez points to omens like the dragonfly of death, certain they are omens, but says with total honesty “Yet, as I write this, I am wrong because I do / not know what the dragonfly means” (63). No more an oracle than his nephew who does not know why he is there, Gonzalez embraces a music driven to explode through the poem in the world.

These poems move with the world and move the world, and they move in a world of words that is also a world of music: “Wallace Stevens did everything to keep / from seeing how the dime glistened / in the air before landing in the grass. / When his wife appeared on the coin, it was / the image he chased for years, the lantern of / his mind caught on rice paper by Tu Fu / before his discovery of the path” (71). “On Many Readings,” near the middle of the book, turns on “something needing to be said — a distant / knocking converging in the head, an image / of the Himalayas not depth of field, but / the moment tracing syntax as a passage / read after the sound comes back” (71).

Something needing to be said, “the future ascending the canyon / as if ice can’t keep up with / yesterday’s light,” snow in New Mexico “hidden in clouds as if thinking / about loss is turning your back / on what is gained” (79). The great preface to the Shijing says the poem is where mind goes, and this beautiful collection, dancing music through silence to words, demonstrates that time and time again, in every single poem.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Ray Gonzalez. Faith Run. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8165-2769-4.

February 4, 2010

china suite and other poems

Gillian Bickley is at her best when she lets the everyday surprises of multicultural, multilingual Hong Kong speak for themselves — as in the “prophet’s message” on a lamp-post “where usually the police affix notices / seeking witnesses of fatal accidents” (“You can be like God,” 71). In English and in Chinese, the message reads: “We are all in danger. Blameworthy / are the dangerous drivers, who do not / stop at the lights. If you drive carefully, / you can save a thousand lives. / You can be like God.”

This is a found poem, and Bickley makes something of it with a question after her own judgment: “Such an exhortation to huge ego, / spiritual ambition and eschatological power!” she writes, then asks “– Could it work more / than the now standard, / stern, finger-wagging command, // ‘Do not drink and drive!'”

Roughly halfway through the book, in “Waving Goodbye” (69), the writer panics “for a moment” at the realization that “they are moving further away / into the separateness / that death brings.” “They” remain unnamed, but we flash back to the first poem and see the whole collection as a list of things here to share with those (including the parents who visited only once) who are elsewhere.

Readers who know Hong Kong will recognize the juxtapositions in the list — and may suspect that “being like God” resides in the ability to stop long enough to be surprised by them. Readers who don’t will get a sense of the place from these matter-of-fact observations that linger right on the edge of prose.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Gillian Bickley. China Suite and other Poems. (with a reading by the author of all poems on 2 CDs). Hong Kong: Proverse Hong Kong, 2009. ISBN 978-988-17724-9-7.

May 26, 2009May 10, 2013

the gita within walden

At the end of The Gita Within Walden, Paul Friedrich writes, “In the most general and abstract terms as well as many specifics of image and trope…, the Gita is indeed ‘within’ Walden; someone familiar with both texts can open the latter at random to any page and find or at least have intimations of the underlying, discursive presence of the Gita within” (148). One could say the same of Friedrich’s work, with respect to both the Bhagavadgita and Walden, both of which are present in every page — books within books in “a world of words to the end of it,” each instance illuminating all the others. Friedrich speaks of a reader who brings familiarity with both texts to Walden, and he is certainly such a reader. The effect for readers of his work, whether we come to it with familiarity of either or both, is a marvelous encounter with three interrelated worlds — the world of the anonymous poet of the Gita, the world of Henry David Thoreau, and the world of Paul Friedrich.

Thoreau is undeniably at the center, and that is partly a reflection of Friedrich’s intimate connection with the poet of Walden. Their New England biographies connect them with Walden Pond and with the place in which it is located; and both read their places with care, inhabiting them in ways that carry them through particular “locals” to global vision. Both are exemplars of the science of close observation, and this little book is as much an introduction to Friedrich’s anthropological method as to Walden and the Gita. He notes early on in his enumeration of goals for the book that anthropology is comparative or it is nothing; but he does more than simply place two objects side by side. One of Friedrich’s great gifts is his ability to stop a reader or hearer cold with a juxtaposition of ideas (a practice of metaphor, in a broad sense, of which he is a master), often embodied in cultural artifacts such as texts. He does this in his lectures; he does this in his poems; and he does this in this book. He doesn’t simply compare. Reading through Walden, he reads the Gita with Thoreau. Reading with Friedrich, we read both. Walden is a glass through which Friedrich reads the Gita again and again; and, in the reading, he brings us back to read Walden with new eyes. Those eyes turn in turn to reading the worlds the poets of the books inhabit and to reading the worlds we inhabit — reading being, in each case, a kind of dwelling.

The purpose of anthropology, Clifford Geertz wrote, is to enlarge the universe of human discourse — to grow worlds of words. This work serves that purpose well. And all of this provides some insight into why Friedrich, a poet as well as a linguist and an anthropologist, reads both the Gita and Walden as poems.

There is no denying (and no reason to deny) the sonic dimension of poetry, and the music of the Gita, which is explicitly a song (or a collection of songs), is evident. But sound is intertwined with sense — the sense of the poem and the senses with which we know the worlds in which we live. Friedrich writes, “For both authors the poet-seer is semi-sacred and produces work in a poetic form entangled in the poetry of sacred texts… Both poets eclectically cycle vast systems of ideas into rigorously poetic form” (5). Friedrich speaks of “the phonically dense poetic textures of both books” and of the interplay of oral and written dimensions in both. But it is the cycling of vast systems of ideas into rigorously poetic forms that is most striking. The richness of the sound (and whether the text is read or heard, its sound is present) is inextricably connected with the constellations of ideas within which the texts take form. In each case, the poet is a seer, and “seeing” is a matter not just of the eyes but of the whole body, the whole body of the text, the whole body of a world embodied in text that is self-consciously “scriptural,” marked, as Friedrich puts it, by the interplay of uniqueness and antecedent sources.

The book consists of nine chapters, beginning with “God” and an historical retrospect, moving through twenty-two underlying absolutes, four shared complex metaphors, social-ethical absolutes, purity, reality and being, three ways to God, and a poetics for activism. Circling from “God” and the shared conviction that God is “really real” and should be striven toward (7) to three ways to God emphasizes a “persuasive thrust” toward “God” that Friedrich shares. But it is important to bear in mind that the circle is informed by texts that figure “God” as Krishna (in the case of the Gita) and Nature (in the case of Thoreau). Friedrich speaks of Thoreau’s “complex supernatural,” a monotheistic God in “a variously pantheistic, pluralistic, or henotheistic context” (15), a complexity that is common to the poets of these books. God is “really real,” but this really real “God” is (as John Lennon, summarizing Marx, famously put it) “a concept by which we measure our pain,” among other things. Friedrich’s insistence on the embrace of paradox, particularly in Thoreau, is a critical factor in preventing a merely fundamentalist reading of the persuasive thrust toward God. After the circle from “God” to “ways” to God is “a poetics for activism” that is, arguably, the heart of the book. Friedrich does not forget that both Thoreau and the Gita informed the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., two of the most important activists of the twentieth century — but also two activists whose work, far from being collections of ad hoc reactions to particular injustices, embodied an articulate and consistent philosophy of social justice. The convergence on “absolutes” Friedrich notes in the Gita and Walden underwrites the committed activism Gandhi and King embodied. But the embrace of paradox, particularly in the interplay of Brahmanical elitism and anarchic egalitarianism, shatters even the absolutes that fuel active engagement. Paradox insures that (as one of Thoreau’s main sources, Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggested, in Leonard Cohen’s elegant paraphrase) “there is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Friedrich “finds it irritating that the Gita is stereotyped as a charter for asceticism (often seen as a perversion), the Indian caste system (which by any other name would smell as foul), and other negative things.” And he is “outraged… by the way many persons stereotype Thoreau as a lifelong recluse who lived in a hut hermit-style and… was ‘self-serving and asocial.’” Thoreau, Friedrich insists, was an engaged citizen, deeply concerned with the shape of the city in which he lived — a consummately political writer who “seems relevant now, even prescient” (134). Thoreau’s writing, informed by the Gita, was one of the ways in which his social action was embodied — and that makes him one of the most interesting and instructive exemplars for a politically engaged poetics. That Gandhi and King both took him up as a model reinforces this point, and Friedrich makes it forcefully.

Thoreau is a consummately political writer precisely because he does not subordinate writing to an ideological agenda: writing is a political act, not simply a means by which to support or instigate political action. And his model for this political act is the narrative of the Gita, which moves Arjuna from paralysis to engagement. Both the poet of the Gita and Thoreau effect this move by close and consistent reading of their sources (including, for both, Buddhism) and by a critical engagement with time that underwrites action here, now. “The most striking thing about time in Thoreau… is his radical philosophy of the here-and-now, which for many readers resonates with modern phenomenology or existentialism” (115, 116). Friedrich cites two examples of “the ultimate reality of the now” that “run throughout Walden”: Thoreau’s statement that “God himself culminates in the present moment” and his characterization of the present moment as “the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future.” The present moment is the meeting of two eternities, a moment of truth, a “drenching of reality” indebted both to the Gita and to the Buddhist texts on which it drew. That moment of truth underwrites Thoreau’s activism at the same time that it informs his “complex supernatural.” As Friedrich notes, “Thoreau goes beyond the Gita… in his vision of how unimaginable stretches of time can collapse into one blinding moment of total beauty” (116), a vision that is at once aesthetic and ethical. That moment is the encounter with “God” that grounds engagement in the world, and that is a remarkably powerful model for lyric poetry. Nowhere is that model more clearly articulated than in Thoreau’s impassioned defense of John Brown, the message of which Friedrich characterizes as “consistent with the Gita: violence is bad, but social evil is worse” (137). More properly, I think, as Gandhi and King would both insist — and as Dom Hélder Câmara explicitly argued, social evil is violence. It is radical violence in the sense that it penetrates to the root, so that social vision will have to attend to the violence of that evil without — as Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, would all agree — simply succumbing to it.

By attending to the complexity and beauty of Thoreau’s argument — a persuasive wandering, as he so clearly understood — and reading through it to a dazzling array of sources that includes the Gita, Friedrich not only illuminates the two books under consideration but also sheds some light for writers and others engaged in seeking to envision a social reality that is not permeated by violence.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Paul Friedrich. The Gita within Walden. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7914-7617-8.

January 22, 2009January 30, 2013

the comic flaw

In Alan Berecka’s poetry, the presence of God in common people, everyday acts, and ordinary things mostly goes without saying. No need to preach a presence so palpable — only to say “look!” and to say it with a charm and grace that can take your breath away (as in the beautiful poem “For My Daughter,” which begins with a skeptical glance at two legends in which a host in the hands of a priest in despair is transformed into human flesh and ends without a shadow of doubt that there is miraculous love always present always here, always now: “Still, once you have moved on from here, / should you lose faith in your own worth / or in the fact that you are loved, I pray / that this cheap piece of paper on which I / have labored with my simple art might / become a sliver of my own certain heart.” 74)

More often than not, it is laughter that leaves us breathless — and Berecka is a masterful celebrant of that most holy sacrament. In “The Elk” (34), he begins with three words from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” and, before we know it, we are on a cross-country bus trip with a screaming baby, a broken bathroom door “banging out some Satanic lullaby,” an obese Elk, and a poet who tells himself “this is not the bus poem / I had hoped to live or write.” The fleeting thought that “mystical moose” may “appear to hush quiet / conversations only on Canadian buses / on which Elizabeth Bishop rode and wrote. . . . / vanishes as the door slams, / the baby screams, the Elk’s drooling head / kneads my shoulder. The hell-bound bus / swerves and fails to miss a suicidal skunk. / The cabin fills with a sickening odor. / Another mile toward our destination is gained,” and we arrive with a twist at the phrase uttered in resignation in the middle of Bishop’s poem, now a mystical insight, “for even at its most absurd, life’s like that.” (34-35)

At the mystical heart of Berecka’s blue collar poetics — as in all mysticism — is a relentless commitment to telling it (as the poet’s father says) “like it is,” because telling it is the only thing we have that can make it possible to see it. And seeing it, dying and absurd, there is nothing to do with it but laugh (as suggested in the title poem) — whether “it” is one’s childhood, life more generally, or death. In “Blue Collar Poetics,” laughter shared is the moment of redemption. And in “Punxsutawney Phil Forecasts the End of the Romantic Period,” there is laughter between the lines that describe a professor (who has just been reminded of the limited vision of Romantic poets who spent so much time in the woods but — as far as a reader can tell from their poems — never stumbled “across a dead and half-rotten woodchuck”) staring past the poet, a student in his class, “well out into space, / as if he were searching for the home planet of my alien / tongue” (37). We laugh. The professor shrugs and moves on. Life’s like that.

Berecka, like Flannery O’Connor, has little patience for “sublime” vision that closes eyes to the grotesque. Like O’Connor, he is a teller of tales because he believes deeply in the redemptive power of stories that make us look — that witness rather than theorize — and that moves him, as she predicted story tellers would move, to poetry rather than the novel. O’Connor’s description of “a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking” fits the sensibility of Berecka’s poems. And this, as she says, “is the beginning of vision. . .”

The Comic Flaw begins and ends with poems that make past present in persons — great-grandfather Piusus Antonavage in the first poem, who has come from Lithuania. “He pours a glass, drinks / deeply and grins. In a thinning accent he tells me, / Boy, it is not so good to think so much. / What is there to know? Each man has one life. / What does it matter where he breeds or drinks?” (1) And in the last poem, an old Lithuanian priest, a Franciscan, thirty years dead: “Uneasy, I turn to find / my old priest holding two gold cups / which he fills with the tide at our feet. / He smiles, hands me a chalice, / and says, There’s plenty. Let’s drink.” (80)

Yes, plenty. The collection is a Eucharist from beginning to end. Bread and wine have their place, but the sacramental elements might just as well be baseball, popcorn, t-shirts, a puzzled Pope responding to a phrasebook reference to lost luggage, a woodchuck dead and half-decayed — or the poet’s old man flipping a bird. This is holy ground. Take off your shoes. Get comfortable. Enjoy.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Alan Berecka. The Comic Flaw. Houston: NeoNuma Arts, 2009. ISBN 978-0-974-1623-6-2.

January 17, 2009May 10, 2013

classical chinese poetry: an anthology

David Hinton has done a remarkable job of assembling a single-volume anthology that will give readers a sense of the breadth and depth of three millennia of classical Chinese poetry, a rich sampling that covers the period from 1500 BCE to 1200 CE. Hinton moves from the oral tradition that feeds the Book of Songs and the Tao Te Ching; through early distillations of folk song in the Songs of Ch’u, the Music Bureau Songs, and the Lady Midnight Songs; to T’ang poets such as Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Han Shan with whom many readers in the West are already familiar as well as less familiar T’ang experimentalists such as Meng Chiao and the “mainstream” of Sung Dynasty poets concluding with Yang Wan-Li.

Hinton opts for a chronological order and nonobtrusive introductions to each poet and each of the five larger sections into which he divides the book. The result is a clear historical framework with enough philosophy and politics to give readers new to the material a coherent sense of a tradition that develops across time through a wide variety of voices and styles. Hinton has an ear for the voices and music that makes his translations work as poetry, and he is careful to let the poetry sing. He is, as he notes, working with the mainstream; so other translations of these pieces are available. But this is not an attempt to supersede those other translations with a “definitive” one: it is an important addition to the chorus of voices that has introduced Chinese poetry to English readers and has, in the process, transformed English poetry.

One of the most useful aspects of the book is the supplemental material that has been assembled online at http://us.macmillan.com/classicalchinesepoetry. This includes a version of the spectacular pattern poem Su Hui composed some 1600 years ago — a grid of 29 x 29 characters that contains more than three thousand possible poems (though “contains” seems hardly appropriate for a work of art that explodes in so many directions beyond the media of its own production).

The book includes a section of key terms, an essay on women’s poetry (including a little more on Su Hui), a finding list that will help readers reconcile Wade-Giles and pinyin systems of transliteration, a finding list for Chinese texts, and suggestions for further reading. All of these are amplified by the online resources that make this an especially useful starting point for students at all levels who are coming to Chinese poetry for the first time.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. Translated and Edited by David Hinton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ISBN 978-0-374-10536-5.

December 7, 2008May 10, 2013

two tables over

these things do matter
for Nathan Brown, after reading Two Tables Over

the secret

is painting halfway
between irony
and compassion,
beautifully

lost so locals
with real jobs
who never forget
where they are

will have reason
to love

and if you hear a voice

say you’ve gone too far
if you get to religion
pass on

mysteries of love
that made a friend
die twice

empty another museum
of fear with some old story
or other

write it in a poem

of Yeatsian architecture
lyrically poignant
posturing

leave the house

see who happens to be
next to you

play words
by ear

leave trails of them
for birds still
learning to make love

Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Nathan Brown. Two Tables Over. Cheyenne, OK: Village Books Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9791510-9-5.

December 6, 2008May 10, 2013

cambridge introduction to sylvia plath

Jo Gill sets out two aims for The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath: “to offer new readers an accessible, authoritative, and comprehensive guide to Plath’s writing” and “to provide an incisive and insightful overview of key tendencies and developments in Plath criticism” (ix). She accomplishes both aims in an accessible introduction that will prove invaluable to students.

The first section, “Life,” is only thirteen pages long; but it is a useful overview of biographical details, and it clearly establishes, to Gill’s credit, that she will resist any temptation to posit a biographical “truth” against which to measure either Plath’s writing or critical assessments of it. From the beginning, her focus is on the writing; she is intent on turning the attention of students to the body of Plath’s work. The second section, “Contexts,” is perhaps the weakest in the book. While it points to important issues in Plath’s social-political context, including the cold war and McCarthyism, struggles for racial justice, and the emergence of “second-wave” feminism, there is a regrettable tendency to fragment the issues in ways that could render contexts incoherent. The most useful aspect of this section is Gill’s focus on Plath’s “double vision,” which she first defines as a conflict between “confessional” and “academic” poetry (21). As Gill rightly points out in subsequent chapters, the doubleness (or multiplicity) of Plath’s vision is one of the great strengths of her writing, enabling her to write in different genres and voices with different audiences in mind and guiding her attempt to bridge the presumed gap between “high” and “low” culture. Given Gill’s recognition of Plath’s engagement with social and political issues and her recognition (following a number of theorists of “containment culture”) that this engagement was enabled at least in part by the doubleness of vision necessitated by containment, it is interesting that no connection is made with W.E.B. DuBois’s recognition at the beginning of the twentieth century of such doubleness as characteristic of the experience of oppressed people, particularly people of color, in the United States. That recognition might have enabled her to more critically probe the motivation for the white flight that partly shaped Plath’s adolescent experience. Gill, surprisingly, appears to take “cheaper rates and good schools” in the suburbs at face value (26). That Plath doesn’t is evidenced in her growing recognition of the danger of “tidiness” (28), which can be partly traced to the interrelated experiences of the suburbs, the Cold War, and patriarchy, and which gives her writing a critical edge that is sharper than is often supposed when her poetry is dismissed as merely “confessional.” In Plath’s work, the personal is political and the confessional is social — metaphors, not similes, analogies, or simple means to an end. The remaining sections are most valuable for their introduction of the range of critical responses to Plath — grounded in biography, confession, mythology, feminism, psychoanalysis — and for their careful articulation of the constructions of Plath that have emerged over the years not only in struggles among critical and ideological perspectives, but also in struggles between her mother and Ted Hughes to control the narrative of her life after her suicide. That struggle, as Gill notes, had a direct impact on the availability of primary material, and critical approaches have already undergone some transformation as that impact fades (128).

Thorough notes and suggestions for further reading make this introduction particularly valuable as a supplement for students who are just getting acquainted with Plath’s writing.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Jo Gill. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-86726-9.

November 7, 2008May 10, 2013

cambridge introduction to robert frost

Robert Faggen’s Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost is an excellent overview that will be useful to students at all levels. Short sections on Frost’s life and contexts provide historical perspective and insight into influences, including the philosophical influences of William James and Henri Bergson. Faggen has played an important role as a critic in making readers aware of Frost’s engagement with science, particularly Darwin and evolutionary theory. That work shines through here in summary form, with many pointers to further reading for students so inclined. Faggen’s discussion of Frost’s poetics should prove useful in guiding students beyond surface readings to engagement with his “sound of sense” and an often revolutionary versification “breaking rhythm across established meter” (29). The formal quality of so much of Frost’s poetry and his lifelong attention to established meter can make him look deceptively conservative. But his fascination with the complexity of ordinary language, the rhythm and sound of gossip, carried him beyond Wordsworth in attention to everyday speech and made him a master of its music. And his attention to the complexity of ordinary lives carried him beyond New England pastoral narrowly defined to serious engagement with an evolving America in which “being versed in country things” is an aid to understanding new “urban” realities.

Much of the book is devoted to close readings of particular poems, for which students tasked with such readings will be grateful. But the strength of the introduction lies in its ability to turn readers to the poems themselves. Students and others who make that turn will be equipped to engage the discussion with which Faggen ends the book in a short section on “reception.” Frost’s poems, which remain vibrantly alive, are still being received. This book will contribute to a community of appreciative and critical readers equipped to continue writing the reception of Frost’s work.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Robert Faggen. The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-67006-7.

October 27, 2008May 10, 2013

wearing the river

It is most appropriate that Jim Hoggard begins by correcting Plato – and that he does it with an oblique reference to myths that begin both “testaments” of the religious tradition that, with Plato, has come to be inextricably identified with “the West.” For a poet, as for a philosopher, it goes without saying that the word is in the beginning. But for a poet who sings the music of pumpjacks and rivers we wear in layers on clothes and skin, it is essential to begin with a “God from the first / being partial to things” (3). Thunder is the first word, “a celebrative / explosion of noise / echoing off / newly made matter” (3).

There is a philosophical sweep to this collection that makes the whole a response to Plato in four movements – a direction Ion might have taken had he been a poet as well as a performer of poetry (and had he not come to us as a character formed entirely by Plato with an end in mind). The movements are named “Graven Imagery,” “Different Kinds of Wilderness,” “Distant Homes,” and “Wind Bursts.” Hoggard’s take on graven imagery is an ongoing play with form – especially the sonnet, which flows through the entire collection, but also the pantoum, which gets the last word. The play with form is in the aniconic tradition of Hebrew prophecy – shaping things to see through them, finding words to speak silence: “the drama / of the voice / is the meaning / of the voice” (3). And the drama of the voice, like the thunder of the first poem, is notable for being partial to things – or, perhaps more to the point, being face to face with them.

In “Caught in the Drought,” one line stands on its own as a stanza in the familiar form of a fourteen line poem: “There’s nothing to do this year but wait” (10). Not to wait for, but simply to wait. And that carries us through a variety of wildernesses – the Louisiana bayou Jack Kerouac described as a manuscript of night we could not read, rattlesnakes, lovers, sycamore leaves that don’t decompose. Still correcting Plato: the world is a world of words, and in it there is a world of ideas; but there is no world of ideas above or beyond the world of things. This is it.

This “thatness” of things, the celebration of being immersed in them, makes Hoggard a nomad in the Deleuzian sense, at home on the road in the variety of places he sings in the book’s third movement – Vienna, Florence, London, Seville, Mycenae, Chihuahua, Cuba, Mosul. And in the end, the wind, like a spirit moving on the face of water: “We should stop getting lost in ourselves / We should know how to read the world / yet we look at it blindly or indifferently / Listen: the wind here blows insistently” (76).

Read the world, Hoggard says. Divide at the joints, Socrates might add. A world of words to the end of it, yes – an explosion of noise still echoing off matter still newly made – a music in the wind’s insistence that gives us something to sing, for which we as poets, as readers of poetry, as listeners are grateful.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

James Hoggard. Wearing the River. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-916-72717-8.

Tag: Steven Schroeder

everybody has a pet

faith run

china suite and other poems

the gita within walden

the comic flaw

classical chinese poetry: an anthology

two tables over

cambridge introduction to sylvia plath

cambridge introduction to robert frost

wearing the river