May 13, 2010
C'mon Papa by Ryan Knighton
There is no better metaphor than blindness to describe new parenthood. Nobody knows what they’re getting into, nobody ever really sees the baby properly in the ultrasound, nobody expects what will happen when the baby arrives. Even those of us blessed with good vision have had trouble recognizing our newborns once they’re out in the world. And, um, even those of us with good vision have stuffed soothers into eye sockets and smashed fragile skulls into door frames. Parenthood is the kind of thing you have to pick up on the job, and there’s plenty of stumbling along the way.
All this is to underline the universality of Ryan Knighton’s experience as outlined in his memoir C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark. But of course to consider blindness as a metaphor is only part of the story. Knighton has been losing his vision since being diagnosed with a dengerative eye condition at 18, and he is now blind. What vision he has left has enabled him to see his daughter only in glimpses, as a blur. His story of fatherhood and blindness considers little details the rest of us take for granted– venturing out with the baby carrier when you can’t see where you’re going (though he should know that many of us have also walked around with our children facing out and covered in puke, and not realized it), how to find a silent toddler who has toddled away, how to change a diaper when you’re guided by touch, how to move around in the dark so the light doesn’t wake the baby (and it is perhaps here only that Knighton would have an advantage).
Knighton writes about life with a newborn better than any other parent-memoirist I’ve encountered. (The horror! The horror! Fear of colic! Fact of gas!) This might be because he’s the first father parent-memoirist I’ve ever encountered– I think most mothers get too lost in the murky swim of things to remember it all as pointedly as Knighton does, and even if they do, those memories fall victim to amnesia. What he gets really well, however, is how sound factors into early parenthood: the incessant newborn cries, the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car with a shrieking infant, that eerie silence once the baby is asleep and all ears are tuned listening to… nothing. Or was that a rustle? And oh shit, the baby’s up again. You go.
And did you know that baby monitors were invented out of the paranoia of the Lindbergh baby case? Um, and that if your baby woke up you’d probably hear it anyway, even without an electronic device?
Knighton’s book has a bit of the “There are the notes./ Now where is the money?” about it, which is refreshingly honest and illuminating. He describes the pressure to write, to produce, in order to support his family, which is probably common of most fathers and not something mothers would experience to the same extent. Because “Provider” is the one role that is defined for a father, the one job for which he’s not just a bystander. Knighton’s helplessness in supporting his wife in other tasks would not be limited just to a blind man– during pregnancy, labour and the newborn days, fathers are very much outside of the experience no matter how much they’re supportive, and Knighton does a fine job of describing what that helplessness feels like. So he does what he can do– he writes and writes.
Ryan Knighton belongs to that generation that believes it invented parenting (though it kind of did, grammatically speaking. was “parent” even a verb before that?) but as a father and as a blind man, he has a unique perspective to add to the mommy/daddy canon. His book is hilarious and beautiful, and a testament to love and to family.
May 9, 2010
Patient Frame by Steven Heighton and Joy is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook
Amazing, I think, that the range of a single volume of poetry by Steven Heighton can put me in mind of a book like The Essential P.K. Page, which encompassed an entire career. Patient Frame is quite different from other poetry collections I’ve been reading lately, lacking an essential narrative. And while I do find narrative-driven collections immensely appealing, the various nature of Heighton’s book is fascinating to consider, a poetic lumber room packed with corners to explore.
It’s a room that’s remarkably well-organized however, complete with a key as an appendix that places these poems within their wider contexts. Placing Officer Hugh Thompson, an American helicopter pilot whose heroic actions ended the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam; Roy Bryant, one of the men convicted for the murder of 14 year-old Emmet Till; Toussaint Laverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution. The poems reference music by Alison Krauss, the Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones, and other figures including poet Richard Outram, and Edith Swan-Neck, mistress of a Saxon king. (This poem is followed by another called “Reading The Saxon Chronicles in a Field Hospital, Kandahar”.)
Some of the poems are personal, addresses to family and friends (most of these contained in the section Elegies & Other Love Songs). “Home Movies, 8mm” finishes with the wonderful line, “If I could start over, I would stare and stare”. Fourteen Approximations comprises Heighton’s translations, including “Fragments of a Voyage”, constructed of pieces from five sea-faring texts. This is a fitting collection by a man whose other works include novels, short stories and other poetry collections. His range seems unlimited– everything he touches turns to story.
***
Susan Holbrook’s collection Joy is So Exhausting is bursting, exuberant. Holbrook engages with the stuff of the world as Heighton does, but in a way that is more immediate, or perhaps just more akin to his translations. Because her work is very often also translation– her poem “Insert” takes directions for inserting a tampon, playing with the language to make clear the banal ridiculousness of the original source, and also to invest ordinary words with unexpected meaning– “Get into a comfortable Poseidon. Most wimples either sit on the Toyota/ with knick-knacks apart, squat slightly with knitting needles bent, or/ stand with one football on the town clerk seep.”
“Poetsmart” translates a pet training manual: “Using positive reinforcement methods, you’ll learn how to prevent/ unwanted behaviour and establish a bond with your poet.” A poem called “Constance Rooke, Author of The Clear Path: A Guide to Writing Essays, and Home-Inspection Consultant Brad Labute Converse, with Rude Interruptions by Walt Whitman” is exactly what it says on the tin. Holbrook has made sudoko with words. She writes a love letter to chocolate. “Textbook Case: Questions to Consider Regarding Our Last Phone Call” contains the line “11. Do you think that I will ever forgive you? Cite evidence from the conversation to support your answer.”
Holbrook’s poetry is bounding, raucous and fun(ny). Ending on an incredibly touching note with the twelve page poem “Nursery”, which traces a mother’s train of thought as she feeds from side to side. This epic poem is a microcosm (can an epic be a microcosm though? But Holbrook has made me think that anything is possible) of the entire book, bending words and perspectives, irreverent and wonderful.
“Left: Now that you’ve started solids, applesauce in your eyebrows, I’ve become a course. Right: Spider on the plastic space mobile, walking the perimeter of the yellow crescent moon. Left: Dollop. Right: Now it’s on Saturn’s rights; if it fell off, it would drop right into my mouth. Left: I take 2%, you take hindmilk. Right: Fingers shrimp their way through the afghan holes. Left: I have hindmilk.”
***
It is worth nothing that both these collections’ bottom right-hand corners have been well-chewed. Initially, this annoyed me, but I decided it shows that they’ve been lived in.
May 5, 2010
House Post 3: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum
Meghan Daum is Joan Didion, if Joan Didion had grown up in New Jersey instead of Sacramento, and was self-deprecating instead of self-effacing. Daum writes with Didion’s rhythm, with her cadences, and she is similarly preoccupied with nostalgia. She is also a bit David Sedaris, if he were Joan Didion. I picked up her essay collection My Misspent Life last year, and bunked off work to read it in a day (true story), and this week I devoured her latest book with just as much relish.
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the story of Daum’s relationship with domiciles, beginning with her childhood home, to too many trips with a futon up long flights of stairs in university, the New York apartment of her dreams, when she became too old for roommates, her famous flight to Lincoln, Nebraska (which was mostly due to a lifelong obsession with Little House on the Prairie). In Nebraska, Daum flirted with the idea of buying a farm, cohabited with her boyfriend, became too fond of screen-door slams, and then ran away to California. Once she was there, living in an apartment at the top of a canyon, she decided to once again buy a farm in Nebraska. This very nearly happened, except it didn’t, and then she came back to Los Angeles and finally bought a house there. The house was not without its quirks. And proved crowded once Daum had the “supreme good fortune” of finding “a good, smart, sane man”, and they decided to opt out of “nohabitation” (a Daum neologism, when a couple lives proper at neither one person’s abode nor the other’s).
I have missed a few cottages and apartments. Daum was epically of no fixed address during her twenties and early-thirties, perpetually read to pull up stakes and move on. Eternally seeking the perfect place to live, she was able to avoid properly committing to anything. Moreover, her relationship to where she lived was tied up with her sense of self; she would have to learn how to be at home, which would require her to learn how to be.
In many ways, Daum’s experience is a hyperbolic version of what happens to everyone– how the places we’ve lived are the stories of who we’ve been. There is much familiar here for anyone who has lived with roommates, who has lived in dodgy apartments, who has house-sat and been a a stand-in in somebody else’s unfortunate life. Daum’s relationship with buying real-estate in particular will strike a pretty universal chord– realtor relationships, the house that got away, the heartbreak of wanting and not getting, the pressure, how you start boring friends with real-estate talk, and eventually finding and buying a house (with all its compromises) and the adventure of home-ownership begins.
A book about such first-world problems is the kind some readers will love to hate, citing its solipsism, but Daum is an engaging prose stylist and writes with admirable candour. Her book avoids quarter-life-crisis-y angst by looking back from far-away enough that such angst appears appropriately idiotic, and she has honed a fine sense of the ridiculous. As Joan Didion wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and (as I wrote) in order to make something else of the messes we’ve made. So it’s a book like this, and it’s laughter, and an ending that is bittersweet.
May 2, 2010
Girl Crazy by Russell Smith
Russell Smith’s latest novel 
Girl Crazy is an exercise in downward spiral, beginning with Justin Harrison arriving at a park that’s a pit in an attempt to go swimming in a pool that’s closed. Weaving in and out of traffic reminds him of rickshaws and Bombay, except now it’s Mumbai, and Justin experiments with the sound of his voice: “Mumbai”. And then he says it again, because he’s fascinated by the unfamiliar syllables and by the sound of his voice, and he’s fascinated by the latter because he’s unsure of it.
Justin is connected to nothing, except the internet, though he also maintains a steady relationship with a video game called Sandstorm III (Shiek Assassin). From these two, he’s provided with outlets for sex and violence, respectively, and otherwise his life is empty. His ex-girlfriend Genevieve purports to care about him, though these days she’s just a voice on the phone and her intentions are questionable. He no longer relates to his friends from university, who are obsessed with their careers, status, and restaurants Justin can’t afford to eat at. He’s the victim of a liberal-arts education: entitled, ubiquitous and underemployed. He teaches at a community c0llege, classes like “Business English” and “Email Etiquette”, with students who are only there to get their qualification and not actually to learn. The only thing he knows how to cook is pasta, with sauce from a jar. He is 32 years old, he’s been drinking in the same bars for a decade, and there’s no sign of change on the horizon.
On the Mumbai day, however, he meets a girl in the park who’s wearing sexy sweatpants. This is significant for two reasons, the first that we actually do live in an age where sweatpants are sexy, raising the possibility that nothing is sacred. The second reason being that Justin Harrison would find any item of clothing sexy, actually. If the girl in the park had been wearing a barrel, he would have fantisized about the way the rim dug into the flesh on her upper arms, and then gone home to masturbate.
The girl is wearing sexy sweatpants though, and very little else, and she’s swearing into a payphone in a state of distress. Justin goes out of his way to help her out, she takes his number, and a few days later they meet up for a drink.
Jenna comes from a different background than Justin, which is a polite way of saying her clothes are cheap, she looks like a stripper and hasn’t got to and too straight. Justin, of course, finds all this quite a turn-on, and Jenna is happy to play along– turns out she needs a place to stay, anyway, and there are some people she owes some money to, and any chance Justin could spot her the cash in the meantime?
The downward spiral is irreversible by this point, and Justin finds himself experimenting with a new life the same way he’d once tried out “Mumbai”. The results are illuminating– the respect he garners by walking a pit-bull, by walking down the street beside a girl who looked like Jenna. He becomes involved with drug dealers, illegal gambling, and becomes invested in a definition of manhood that he’d only ever been bystander to before. The spiral perhaps goes on too long, but the book is funny, smart, and devourable.
Justin’s objectification of women was surprisingly tolerable to me, even interesting. It made sense within the context of the novel and of his character, as opposed to seeming like an extension of a lecherous writer’s fantasies (which is all too common). As a feminst reader, it made me uncomfortable, but its gratuitousness was not gratitutious. The point is that Justin is not at all empowered by these experiences, that he’s even disempowered (though the argument goes that the women he watches are the ones that hold the power, and though I’m not convinced by this, it’s worth considering).
The best thing about the novel for me was Jenna though, and not just because she bore an uncanny likeness to my former basement-neighbour who used to beat up her boyfriend because he didn’t “have her back” and because his mother judged her. Jenna is the kind of girl who doesn’t get along with girls because girls are catty. Smith pulls no punches with her character, she’s completely psycho, and it’s almost refreshing not have to feel sympathy for her, that Smith hasn’t concocted some sobby backstory– sympathy is not the point. Jenna is manipulative, amoral, dishonest and awful, and she makes for a wonderous explosion on the page.
Justin is transformed by his experience with Jenna, his own narrative by the end of the novel taking on “the perspective in a video game”. The novel’s ending is ambiguous, suggesting that Justin has finally taken his experiment in hypermasculinity too far, but also offering the possibility of redemption.
April 28, 2010
One Crow Sorrow by Lisa Martin-DeMoor
Lisa Martin-DeMoor’s One Crow Sorrow, poetry winner of the 2009 Alberta Literary Awards, is an intensely personal collection. Each piece seems rooted in experience, focused on immediate details rather than zooming out to capture their wider, more universal implications. There is no place carved out for the reader here, in the intimate address between the poet and who she refers to as just “Mom”, and so the reader is interloper, a position by turns privileged and disquieting.
“I am almost never home, now,/ no matter where I am” writes Martin-DeMoor in “One last time, in our old kitchen.” The collection deals with her mother’s illness and death from cancer, also touching upon her father’s early death many years before, and the cycle and rituals of grief. And other stories, family reference points: “Colleen, I can still hear the stranger at the door…” The tales that bind us.
These poems are prime territory for birdwatching– we get magnificent glimpses of magpies, crows, sparrows, herons, “songbirds are secrets/ substantiated at dawn and knowing”. The wide living world turns around this small story of death and dying– gardens tended and untended, boreal forests and prairie fields: “Admitting the season is over is one way/ of facing up to grief.” The natural references stitch the poems to the earth, but with stitches so loose that some words fly like spirit, and the rest is contained in the space in between.
The poems resonated for me in particular on second reading– first was a bit like wandering in a dimly lit room, but then the shapes became familiar and I could make out the details around me enough to know what I was seeing. To find my away through the spaces in between the poems as well, to consider the white space and line breaks and the weight of these things. To consider the quiet. Because these are delicate poems, I think, to be looked at before they touched, and then their solidity becomes unmistakable.
April 25, 2010
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
So what is it about these stories, about outsiders coming up the drive toward the stately home that’s past its prime? Daphne Du Maurier, and the Brontes, and even more recently in The Private Patient by PD James. It’s the romance, yes, and the world’s colliding that is so fascinating to watch, the pervasiveness of the British class system too, and the way in which these homes are universes onto themselves, complete with their own rules, what happens when the rules start to change. And yes, there is no better backdrop for a mystery– so many places to hide, stuff to steal, secrets to reveal, skeletons in the closet.
The same elements are at work in literary mysteries (whether they be detective stories or ghost stories) as in any literary novel. The driving force of plot, the withholding, the twists, the reveal, the unreliable narrator, the atmosphere– these are the reasons we’re taken by any kind of story, but in mysteries there’s nothing subtle about the way we’re being handled. So mysteries are remarkable in being novels pared down to their bones, but even more remarkable is their power to leave their readers paralyzed with fear. Mysteries make clear what a powerful object a simple stack of printed page can be.
Sarah Waters’ latest novel The Little Stranger is the least historical of her acclaimed historical fiction, taking place post-WW2 in Warwickshire. Her narrator is Dr. Faraday, called out to the isolated Hundreds Hall to attend to one of the maids. “One of the maids! I like that,” says the young master of the house, Roderick Ayres, when he receives the doctor. “There’s only the one– our girl Betty.”
Ayres himself had come through the war with considerable damage, and the same can be said of Hundreds Hall– most of the house is shut up, the land is being sold off, the house’s contents being sold as well to raise capital. Throughout England, the age-old aristocracy is faring badly by the mid-twentieth century, particularly under the heavy hand of a tax-grabbing Labour government. For Faraday, such decline is an awkward paradox– his mother had been a servant at Hundreds years ago, and he remains conscious of the immutability of his class, though circumstances have changed so considerably.
Circumstances have changed so much that he has quite a bit to offer the Ayres’– Roderick, his widowed mother, and his sister Caroline. Faraday begins to perform a medical treatment on Roderick’s damaged leg, visiting the house regularly in the process. He becomes so close to the family that he is invited to a small party at the hall– the party itself an anachronism– though his conspicuous presence does not go unremarked upon by the guests (“No one’s unwell, I hope?”). His presence is a blessing, however, when tragedy strikes and he is able to save the life of a young guest. And as a series of bizarre events begin to unfold, Faraday finds himself more and more non-expendable until his relationship to the family begins to consume his personal and professional life.
Is Hundreds Hall haunted by a poltergeist, or have its inhabitants been driven to mental illness by their surroundings? Is it the ghost of the Ayres’ first daughter Susan, who’d died as a child of diphtheria or is the house possessed by an even more malevolent spirit? Is Faraday’s ability to find rational explanations for what occurs at the house a sign of his own sound mind, or is he simply unwilling to acknowledge forces against which he is powerless? In fact, might his continued insistence upon those rational explanations be a sign that he might not be of such sound mind after all?
Faraday is a fascinating narrator, seemingly unconscious of his own role in shaping the narrative (both literally and circumstantially). The real story takes place beneath the one that Faraday tells, this made clear by Waters’ clever ending, underlining his complicitness in the story. Though the real story throws up far more questions than it answers, of course, Waters never entirely alleviating her book’s decidedly creepy and sinister atmosphere. There is no comfort there, no assurance, and the mystery never goes away, because nothing is fully explained. And it takes a masterful writer to create a narrative that so convincingly hangs like that.
April 21, 2010
Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller
K.D. Miller’s novel Brown Dwarf is a delicious secret. A slim volume, gorgeous to behold (and to hold! that cover. those thick pages. such an elegant typeface, perfect leading), it knows far more than it is telling. Rae Brand, a successful mystery novelist, turns to her own personal narrative in order to confront a pivotal event from her childhood. Though she’d been Brenda Bray then, lumpen outcast, daughter of a depressive, the character Rae Brand has been escaping ever since.
The novel alternates between Brenda’s story in third person, and Rae’s voice, addressing her childhood friend Jori. Though their relationship had not been a friendship exactly, the power dynamic far too unequal. Jori had been an outcast as much as Brenda, though for different reasons, and had seized onto the other girl, dominating her. Brenda had followed along with Jori’s scheme to catch an escaped serial killer hiding in the wilderness of the Niagara Escarpment, th0ugh what had gone on between the girls exactly is never entirely clear. Something sexual, other things even more complicated than that, and one day after Brenda leaves her in the woods, Jori is never seen again.
A brown dwarf, writes Rae Brand, is a character in crime fiction, the villain. Ugly, understated, far from the prime suspect because just too dull to be noticed, but this stigma is the brown dwarf’s ulterior motive. Particularly dangerous, because this character blends so well into the background, and Brenda Bray is such a character. Miller provides a particularly strong perspective of her personality but using the present-tense, second-person address, and showing us young Brenda in third person (this even more interesting when we understand that this is also filtered through Brenda/Rae’s point of view). The gap between these two presentations wide enough that Rae/Brenda still remains somewhat elusive, which is probably as intended.
Are we to trust Rae’s rendition of events? So much is going on between the lines here (and hence that leading, amazing!). Even the book’s main weakness could be deliberate– I didn’t find Jori altogether convincing as a character. She wasn’t meant to be authentic either, more of an Eddie Haskell type (and is there a more modern reference point than Eddie. Anyone?)– but Jori read like a substandard version of Cordelia from Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. But then mightn’t Brenda want us to see her that way? To block any light that Jori might have shone?
Brenda’s character turns out to be the real driver of the narrative, in a way that’s so subtle we don’t even notice until the climax. But is Rae Brand a better writer than we realize? Has she pulled the wool over our eyes altogether? Such gaps and ambiguity make Miller’s novel an engaging and absorbing read.
April 21, 2010
The Essential P.K. Page
I’ve been reading such beautifully-made books this last while, The Essential P.K. Page among them. The poems have been selected from the span of Page’s career and are here placed in alphabetical order, for (as the editors remark) “There is not a ‘young’ voice and a ‘mature’ voice. For [Page], time is not linear and she places little value on such distinctions”. The effect of this is fascinating, something like a catalogue, something vaguely like taxonomy. The structure of this collection and Page’s work itself called to mind what poet Michael Lista referred to as poetry that is “set within the strict—and ancient— clockwork of the world”.
In fact, Lista’s approach seems less original (or less unoriginal?) when viewed in light of Page’s oeuvre. In her work, she engages with works of art (unsurprising, as she was a painter), other works of literature– with her glosa poems in particular. She plays with language (and not only English) for the sake of itself. Some of the poems are challenging, because they refer to ideas outside my familiar realm (what is an arras?) but that is my problem, and not the poems’. Page’s approach seems to be to take the concrete stuff of the universe, and spin it into something golden. The breadth of her vision is truly amazing.
Read the incredible “soft travellers” here. “that there is worth/ in orthography and there is worth/ in geography as well — for words, that is/ words correctly spelled have, in truth, /destinations…”
“Stargazer”
The very stars are justified.
The galaxy
italicized.
I have proofread
and proofread
the beautiful script.
There are no
errors.
P.K. Page
April 17, 2010
Short Cuts: Poetry by Dani Couture and Laisha Rosnau
If book design was the best thing about Dani Couture’s first collection Good Meat, this would still be a collection worth reading, and happily, the poetry is even better than it looks. Couture’s collection has an unabashedly carnivorous theme– butchers, hunters, pumping hearts, frying bacon, fleshy girls, beef on a platter, and an exploding whale. Gaping wounds, gutted fish, Taiwanese mystery meat and the powers of e. coli. Couture is working with concrete, fundamental matter that refers back to home, to nostalgia, to childhood and stories from the past, “lessons learned from the country”. Her work is not raw (which I use here not as a pun, but raw is a reflex when discussing gutsy work like this) as much as medium rare– these poems are sculpted, worked-on, crafted. The imagery is as sharp as the knives that flash through them. “my ordinary words fall/ around my feet like tired poets/ tumbling from open windows.” “she says good meat comes/ from the sky– pulled down with lead/ shot aimed just right”
****
Laisha Rosnau’s wonderful second collection Lousy Explorers takes as its epigraph the final stanza of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water”: “But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper/ And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper/In an elementary world;/There is something down there and you want it told.” Her poems are about women who are sinking, who have left one place for another, who have embarked upon new journeys and new lives in ways that are subtle or otherwise. The 1970s suburban mother who “sent a few things flying in the kitchen”; the girl who leaves at eighteen, “foam mattress tied with rope, box of books”; girls on the frontiers of suburban childhood– creeks, the clotheslines, and hedgerows; the woman who loses her husband after sixty-years of marriage; women turning into wives, going from one place to another, and the things they take with them. Turning into mothers too, burgeoning life beneath the surface, and this is connected to nature as well in ways that are affirming and alarming (“Winter Driving, Third Trimester”). The places these women go to in their minds: “Lousy explorers, we make a mess/ of things, strip and exploit, squint blindly at stars”. And the amazing ways that they move forward all the same.
***
Dani Couture reads from her new collection Sweet at Seen Reading.
Laisha Rosnau’s Lousy Explorers shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
April 13, 2010
The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley
Does poetry have the same male/female divide that fiction may or may not have (and how you feel about this depends how you feel about ghettos)? Can I also confess here that I’ve not approached any male poets to take part in Poetic April because I’m afraid of male poets? In the blogosphere at least, male poets always seem to be having public feuds whose origins I can never decipher, but it’s usually something theoretical. And maybe it’s just the poets I gravitate to who, like most writers I gravitate to, are usually female, but their work is largely accessible in a way that Kyle Buckley’s (or Michael Lista’s too) is not. This is all just a sweeping generalization based upon a tiny sample group, but I will be expanding the sample group over the next few weeks and I’ll see how it goes. (I’m also going to be reading Erín Moure soon, which I expect will change my mind about everything).
Anyway, my way of access into Kyle Buckley’s The Laundromat Essay was by having heard him read last year as part of the Pivot series, and his work was so fresh, jarring, funny and absurd that I bought the book. Reading the book, however, did not come with the same ease that listening to it had. The work is still fresh, jarring, funny and absurd, but it’s hard. The key, I think, is to read as you would listen– pay attention to the sounds of the words, let the poems float over you, to let the atoms fall where they may. Like any poet, Buckley paints a picture, but his is abstract, its meaning subject to interpretation, and neither meaning nor interpretation is really quite the point (so perhaps I should stop trying to wrap my head around the idea of a book as “a blindfolded staircase”).
But in a way, wrapping my head aroud that idea is the point, that Buckley uses imagery and language in ways that challenge expectations. That the imagery and language aren’t more than the sum of their parts, or rather than they needn’t be. Here is a surface worth skimming for a long while before contemplating what’s going on underneath it, and in places (I think?) the surface might just be impenetrable. It put me in mind of John Ashbery meets Samuel Beckett.
The work itself is not impenetrable though. Buckley’s book is built around a narrative essay about a young man arguing for after-hours access to the laundromat to fetch his clothes. The laundromat owner is more interested in the whereabouts of his son, who is called Hoopy. Their conversation goes in circles, and the young man is recounting all of this to the person he is waiting for, the person he requires clothes for. His narrative is footnoted by references to poetic fragments that go some way toward illuminating his situation. “By this point, I very nearly love you. Which means that I love you with, I don’t know, all of the intensity of a thousand brilliant suburban porch lights.” And some times the fragmants don’t illuminate much at all, but the recurring words and ideas serve to drive the work forward, and I’m fasinated, however baffled.
And just writing all this here has been somewhat terrifying, because I don’t really understand what Buckley is up to, and I probably don’t understand many of the references that would explain it. It is intimidating to write about something that seems so beyond me, but I’ve written anyway (ever careful to profess no authority) because this is a book worth writing about (as it’s worth reading, and worthy of discussion). Poetry really does need to be brought into the wider world, which is from where (the reading) I found this book in the first place, and now that I’ve read it, I am very glad I did.
