Four from Flood Editions

Most of the pieces in William Fuller’s Sadly ($13 US; 0-9710059-7-4) are brief (one-paragraph) prose-poems; occasionally he switches to spare, evenly-paced verse stretching over several pages. The book occupies a scaled-down, pre-Copernican cosmos: sky and ground, human and celestial existences, are in neighbourly contact, separated only by a “long staircase”; heavenly bodies are merely as far away as a distant church: “All night long the stars are chiming.” The poems are preoccupied with those forms of thought and speaking characterizing human efforts to name and seek out “truth”: philosophy, religion, science. The cadences and images of parable, ancient history and myth (often drawn from Buddhist traditions) crisscross with analytic reasoning or professional philosopher’s jargon. The latter mode is sometimes pushed into surreal intellectual comedy: “The appearance of rationality is placed alongside a new perspective, essentially realistic. I know it because I’m locked inside a bird.” There are also hints of intellectual tragedy (via a rewrite of “The Great Speckle Bird”): “What a beautiful thought I am thinking, a picture of the whole world, a speckled relation, and all of us wrong from within it, sweeping up dust and choking on what’s agreed.” (Keep in mind that “eunoia,” as Christian Bök has pointed out, was the ancient Greeks’ word for “beautiful thought” . . . ) After its initial pages the book’s tone darkens, in poems like “Sadly” or the bitter “Down in the Dive” – the latter first appeared in 100 Days, an anthology of poems marking Bush’s first three months in power – and this downwards trajectory continues through the superb sequence “Low Logic” at the book’s end: “to pace / and pace through gaps in the shadows, groups / of shadows, descriptions of how it feels / to be in shade for months and years / tearing up the heart of the shade.” An excellent book.

The poems in Lisa Jarnot’s Black Dog Songs ($13 US; 0-9710059-9-0) are built from her characteristic looping repetitions, a technique with subtly different effects across the book’s four parts. At its best it neither hammers a repeated word home nor mocks it, but creates a sustained ebb and flow of meaning, turning a word inside out, evacuating and replenishing it. The sequence “They” – nine solid pages of variations on “they loved x” – verges on the exasperating but is also in some ways the book’s most effective sequence. Satire and lament blur together until it’s impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins: it’s at once a commentary on the forms of human destruction (we “love” things by eating them, by shopping for them, by using them up) and a loving celebration of the world around “them” (or is this “us”?). I also liked the “Early and Uncollected Poems”; but the book also contains a rather feeble (almost deliberately so, one feels) post-9/11 sequence, “My Terrorist Notebook” (though its final poem, which merges political destructiveness with a narrative of rainforest-clearing, usefully sets up “They”); and the arch pastoralism of “Black Dog Songs” is hard to take: “Having hearts of mammal murmurs / streams and valleys no hamburgers / only green things in the hay / only quiet day through day.”

The internal rhythm of Graham Foust’s As in Every Deafness ($13 US; 0-9710059-8-2) is in the oscillation between the poems’ titles, which directly point to their dark subject-matter – “Snow Day with Codeine,” “The Flooded Grave,” “Operation,” “Heroin,” “Blackout Drinking,” a cluster of poems dedicated to John Berryman, Kurt Cobain & Ian Curtis – & the poems themselves, which read as if the more desperately the speaker attempted to utter his desires & fears, to reach out to a “you,” the more his utterances break apart on him, become cryptic even to himself. The bareness of the prosody can suggest Creeley or Armantrout, even Celan; every stanza-break is a palpable leap across the whitespace; every phrase is held on to, extended or rephrased or negated, then abandoned. A terse sense of humour leavens the book, though its blackest joke is perhaps unintentional (at its back is an “ABOUT THE AUTHOR” notice whose narrative of a successful academic career comes almost from a different world from the rest of the book); but this is nonetheless a sobering, if rewarding book of poems.

A new book of poetry rarely attracts first-rate criticism off the bat, but Philip Jenks’ On the Cave You Live In ($10 US; 0-9710059-2-3) is an exception: there are already two very useful – and instructively divergent – discussions of it in Peter O’Leary’s Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness, and Ben Friedlander’s “Philip Jenks and the Poetry of Experience” in Chicago Review 48:4. Jenks’ lyrics are extremely spare, the phrases broken or broken-off, giving the impression of a highly intuitive writing-style. The consistency of their obsessions & the many distantly-separated echoes of images & themes mean that it’s often more fruitful to take an equally intuitive, cross-referencing path through the book than to try for line-by-line interpretation. The poems offer a sort of religious poetry, but aren’t especially concerned with questions of doctrine, belief or doubt; like conventional religious poetry they are often addressed from “I” to “you,” but distictions between these pronouns quickly collapse or shift, as each pronoun and noun stretches calmly outward across boundaries (“World comes down to earth. / stone and bug. / my flesh is over there.”) or subdivides (“when you was split apart / every bird can live in a rafter – / to circumvent, but are also flocks”) or multiplies violently: “Put 7 brainbodies / all surgical plus the cat / stealth in the / eye frontal into / ghastly lobe axes.” It’s not possible to do justice here to Jenks’ book: I can only recommend it.

Nate Dorward

Published in The Gig 16