THE BURNING CHAIR

Against a chronic backdrop of decay and dissolve, how do you reconcile a life actively lived, a day and night repeatedly pushed through? To this all too common existential quandary, Christina Davis, in Forth A Raven, her first collection of poems, offers readers double fisted advice. On the one hand, she stresses speech, verbal expression a way of defining the self and the surrounding world. What is named, and thereby articulated, then becomes, through the process of articulation, somehow more approachable, and therefore more manageable, if only in the life of the mind. From ‘The Primer’:

               She said, I love you.

               He said nothing.

               As if there were just one
               of each word and the one
               who used it, used it up.

               In the history of language
               the first obscenity was silence.

As one hand implies the other, the flipside of this pro-lingua logic is a recognition and near acceptance of language’s ultimate inability to capture a thing in full—its inevitable shortcomings in describing what really happens. Davis speaks to this inadequacy well in ‘The Outset’, where she writes

               Before there was a self, there were many hunches,

               many came to the cradle
               but in going began
               to define me as what-does-not-go-away.

Along with themes of defining the world and its parts by negation, & the state of language as inevitably and inescapably fragmentary, Davis stresses healthy detachment as a way of moving through the world, reminding readers, in ‘The Raven’s Book’ (pg. 31), the book’s longest poem at five-parts and five pages:

               Consider the ravens, sayeth the lord,
               for they neither sow nor reap, they keep nothing in store.

               For which god feeds them.

Just above these lines is the following passage, a further bolstering of definition by negation (mountains known as mountains via the valleys’ existence beneath them), in which Davis argues that the life of the mind—memory in all of its varied incarnations—is perhaps a more sure-footed terrain than the life we could well call the social life:

               Do you think there is such a thing as a happy memory?
               Aren’t the mountains in debt

               to the valleys? Sometimes I think only sad memories
               could truly be happy. They are final in the mind.

Any poem not only referencing a passage from the Bible, an Emily Dickinson couplet, and the life and harrowing dissolve of the poet Osip Mandelstam, but attempting to interweave meaningfully, has a great and harrowing task before itself.

In many ways, ‘The Raven’s Book’ forms the crux of Forth A Raven, in placing the raven both on the book spine and cover, and roughly at the center of the collection. Forth A Raven divines its name from Genesis 8, in which Noah sends two birds out into the world as runners to report back to him the status of the flood. The dove returns, the raven does not.

It would seem, then, that the fate of the raven is left open-ended, as are many of the poems that comprise Davis’s book. She offers readers answers to the questions she poses, knowing full well they’re only gestures, but, equally, knowing those gestures are all we’ve got to give. In this way, by acknowledging language’s shortcomings in her own poems, Davis renders herself a sort of self-conscious speaker. The effect of this rhetorical move is one part dissatisfaction, as it’s difficult not to wish the poet to overcome her—and language’s—admitted limitations. But it’s also one part deference toward Davis, and this part is the larger of the two, for her candor and subsequent tenderness in admitting these limitations, but still walking up to them and facing them vis á vis.

Forth A Raven is a collection of poems rife with questions and subsequent attempts at answering them. A quick glance at the first ten pages finds a relatively representative cross-section of the book’s pressing interrogatory theme:

               Do you love me? Will I die?

               ‘Are you sleeping? Are you beginning
               to go away?”

               Why do you say dear god,
               as if you were writing to him?

               Am I not still and hare-like?
               Don’t I give off the least reak of meat?

It is these nods at, and toward, human ephemerality and inquiry that Davis repeatedly bends. Some of her most telling moments arrive when she is offering readers an answer to the questions she’s posed, such as, and especially, in ‘The Calling’:

               We go forth in the name we lived.

               I will die of Christina.
               I was so called.

Language may not provide us with an architectural framework we would choose, as it is faulty & at most a gesture toward solidity. For all her unadorned and leaning toward simpler language, Davis sets a high bar for anyone, poet or not, who might choose to fan a set of answers before a litany of questions posed in a single 49-page book.


                                     --Review by Erin Bertram.

Poems should tempt our desires or tempt us to resist desire. If we concede that poems should help us improve ourselves, then let’s not concede that poems need to tell us how to improve. A poem that tempts us can then go on and do whatever the hell it’d like.

Zach Barocas structures his first book, Among Other Things, around a series of “Proposals,” succinct, often imagistic assertions toward a way of perceiving, and, ultimately, of living in a world of relative perspectives and revolving morals. Barocas, though almost never evasive in statement but striving for clarity of expression, manages to elude a didactic or dogmatic tone. His proposals are just that—offerings we can leave or take, as the speaker may as well. The strength of Among Other Things comes from the tension between Barocas’ attention to clarity and his distrustfulness of conclusive statements (though he attempts them again and again).

What’s radical about Barocas’ book, in a time when emerging poets have rightfully taken all liberties with language, is the essay-like precision of his sentencing, which is no less musical than any above-average avant-garde lyricist. His ethos, though does not align him with stodgy formalists: “Better to keep an eye to the banks,/transformative areas.” Though mostly the poems find centering around images presented as examples, Barocas is adept with abstract language play:

Immaculate of certainty or

immaculate from certainty,

I want to move

as the shallows move.

But Barocas is careful not to represent absolutes in statement or image:

It is possible

to live with distrust,

to fear metaphors

& images, too.

The poet’s task that Barocas asserts in his poems is not to be “any kind/of photographer,” amplifier of philosophical stances, or lyricist, but to explore arrangements of language with a cautious positivism:

Vivid-

ness is key, clarity

is key, exactitude,

like purity is key.

The irony of employing a simile to define exactitude resembles the contradictory ironies of other emerging poets who rebel against the dull, plain-spoken literal minds of the recent past. Barocas’ irony is not meant to befuddle, but to point out the hazy spots encountered whenever we attempt to articulate transcendent experiences.

In “An Uncertain and Derivative Mood,” Barocas asserts more doubts: “I’m distrustful of our flair for heartbreak.” He says, though, “I crave/the knowledge that we will lift each other so.” Though I like this poem, Barocas treads on a treacherous surface. As seen in many poems by James Wright, the poet evoked in the poem, sentimental indulgence, even when masterfully handled, can cause a reader to cringe:

Ambivalent? I want most of all to fit,

& to not betray & also not be trite.

I’ve lied. I’m begging you to spend the night.

I am spelling out this sin as means, not end.

Surely sentiment is what sends poets to find truth in rhyme. What I find endearing in even the clang (slight in this case, and rare in Barocas’ poems) is the unapologetic have-at-it.

Not surprisingly, Barocas is strongest in his essay-like poems on music. In “Two Distinctions,” Barocas explains defines “chord” and “harmony” and claims

This dis-

tinction is small, & not

always important. Here,

however, it is.

As comfortable as Barocas is with both elegy and meditation, and, weirdly, a sort of synthesis of both, subtleties of precision befit the movement of the book through the poems. In “Tenth Proposal,” he echoes himself:

Epiphanies are

sometimes delicate

& volatile &

should be treated so.

The four lines offer Barocas at his best: the boldness approaching audacity in the first line followed by the under-cuttingly cautious turn on “delicate” in the second line lead in to the rhapsodic “volatile” and conclude in direct advice that nevertheless seems to tentatively state the almost-obvious. The poem resolves in a blanketing conclusion:

one

must at all times act

graciously with one’s

realizations.

The repetition of “one” enforces a focus on one as the self reflecting on the self while allowing the phrase to resonate ambiguously between the first, second, and third person. “Fifteenth Proposal” offers a similar thought redirected to the outer world, among other things: “let each/form sustain our grace/& humility.” Sentiment holds together when it’s revelatory.

Poetry needs evidence that there is o dichotomy of styles. I am not certain how to offer an example of the perceived halves of American poetry, but certainly that halving is familiar to everyone. Barocas’ adherence to rhetoric and music at once, without relying on narrative or indulging in the literal, seems to point, as tentatively as his proposals do to improved living, to mending a gap that probably never was.

--Review by Matthew Henriksen.