The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts

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Jeff Bursey reviews
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
The Mirror in the Well
Amy Eggert and Kass Fleisher review
Michael Joyce
Was: annales nomadique/
Dalkey Archive Press
“What is of value in The Mirror
in the Well are the insights
Marcom supplies about the
tremendous swings of emotions
someone experiences while
having an affair.”
a novel of internet
FC2
“Joyce as über-author: his work works
via sound, via story, via eye.”
J.D. Smith reviews
George Witte and
Steven P. Schneider
Deniability and
Unexpected Guests
Matt Briggs reviews
Carl Watson
The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts
Orchises Press and
Blue Light Press
“‘Of the making of books there is
no end.’”
Autonomedia
“Watson’s method seems suitable to
capturing an American landscape of
sewage lagoons and mini-golf courses.”
Laurel Blossom reviews
Sabra Loomis
House Held Together
by Winds
Brian Allen Carr reviews
Magdalena Zurawski
The Bruise
FC2
Harper Perennial
“This book is like a piece of
transparent Belleek porcelain
inherited from a grande
grandmother.”
“The Bruise reads a bit like a college
girl’s diary.”
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March–April 2009
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Nomadic Fiction
Was: annales nomadique/
a novel of internet
Michael Joyce
FC2
http://fc2.org
152 pages; paper, $17.95
At first the reader concludes that the nomadics
most at stake in Michael Joyce’s Was: annales
nomadique/a novel of internet is the endlessly repeated trek by the reader from armchair to Google
(or Babelfish). How else to figure out what the hell is
going on? The cause of the expeditions will vary from
reader to reader; for us, seeking lexical meaning, it
was necessary to look up Bloemfontein, which turns
out to be (perhaps you, a different reader embarking
on a different trek, know this) the capital of Free State
in South Africa; it is known as “the city of roses.”
That journey turns out to be productive for our meaning-making, since the bus that crashes there (of which
more later) leaves a girl “no longer rose powdered
in a satin lined box.” Joyce has already established,
in this echo chamber, some comfort with the region:
“he mused, already feeling foolish, vaguely longing
to see Frida who studied now in South Africa.” In our
case, we feel lucky to recall that Frida Kahlo was left
in life-long pain by a bus crash, although not, apparently, this one. But tongues, places, clash: Teresa of
Avila meets PFC Angela Louise Paolucci; “‘the scum
cunt of the world’” meets “è il gremco della terra”
meets “wabi, tabi, shibui, koko, yugen and seijaku.”
Nomads of information, we play Joyce’s game—do
the (re)search—because we are determined to find
resolution in a text that works so hard to convince us
that there is no coherence: “it doesn’t add up (do not
get it).” (N.b.: Is that last an imperative?)
But finally, this work is more (much) than an
aggregate of our journeys to the Web. Joyce keeps
us at a distance from story, yet we are seduced by an
aesthetic that tethers us to recurrent images, anchors
that connect us from one nonsequitive mini-narrativepoem to the next. For example, we want the bus on
page twenty-eight to be the same as seventeen-yearold sweetJennie’s bus revisited on page one hundred
and fifteen. On the other hand, perhaps this fateful
motorcoach earlier harbored an indecisive mercenary,
who, in his neurosis, boards and abandons a series
of buses. Are these instances of plummeting buses
referencing the same catastrophe, or are these bus accidents disparate fictional (or nonfictional) tragedies
that merely happened to happen?
The earlier bus skids “off the road margin on a
high pass, tumbling end on end, et in saecula saeculorum (no longer operant),” and provides little hint
of who rides the bus, who survives the accident, who
does not (the bus accident described later in the text
offers significantly more details). Upon translating
the Latin (capital-C Catholic) saecula saeculorum as
forever and ever, we want this to explain the replication of this image later in the novel. Just as the bus
appears to “[tumble] end on end” forever and ever,
so our desire for semantic stability persists while
the text tumbles, and we return to this eternal image
Amy Eggert and Kass Fleisher
of a plummeting bus not as a
second occurrence, but as a
re-emergence of a recognizable component of the larger
problem of the novel. We begin to latch onto something—
plot, theme, reference—until
a new scene emerges, and we
start the journey again. As
Dave Ciccoricco writes in his
review, “[I]t seems that Was
is a work that aspires to bring
us to all the places the WWW
cannot, yet with all the same
speed, discontinuity, and happenstance.”
This glorious mash-up
of references, found texts, allusions, mixed voices—plus
characters, situations, travels,
and travails—operate, as Hélène Cixous says about Joyce’s
Moral Tales and Meditations
(2001), “[a]s if writing were
recording the sparks that fly as
different states of consciousness strike against each other.
And the reading in turn is set
ablaze.” Our vast networks
of information and exchange
constitute the flint against
which these consciousnesses
strike. In Joyce’s world, we
may comprehend mathematical symbol, we may fruitfully
ponder conjectures apropos
of the human genome, but we
have difficulty understanding
one another.
Joyce as über-author: his work works
via sound, via story, via eye.
The source text underlying all of these source
texts (aside from the discourses of cyberculture,
hypertext, etc.) is perhaps Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1987), particularly “Treatise on
Nomadology.” Joyce effects a class- and nationrebellion, auguring at times Deleuze and Guattari’s
“body without organs” (more below), as these consciousnesses must be. “Assemblages,” Deleuze and
Guattari write, “are already different from strata.
They are produced in the strata, but operate in zones
where milieus become decoded: they begin by extracting a territory from the milieus.” Further, “[a]
ssemblages are complexes of lines…subordinated to
the point…[forming] a segmentary, circular, binary,
arborescent system.” If Deleuze and Guattari begin
“Nomadology” with the war machine, Joyce begins
Was with Ashtoreth, a Palestinian Philistine fertility goddess, who was considered a love and war
goddess and was often depicted wearing a “horned
headdress”—or so six different Internet sites tell us.
Horned or horny, “who can say who can say”—but
we begin this unclassifable book wandering x-genre,
x-boundary: love and hate, birth and death, prose and
poetry. And all of it in a supposed past tense, the first
being “was”: “was thought not were the yellow the
irrepressible ever who said who said ends Ashtoreth
one Wednesday, one Wednesday in June the damp
the dampness in everything (light, profusionist, no
I mean heat).”
Joyce as über-author: his work works via
sound, via story, via eye. One begins to see things
in this book. Ash Wednesday, for instance? Or, take
the subtitles: the post-virgule phrase is not a translation, as would be typical, of the first. “Annales Nomadique” is a modest enough designation, but there
is much to see in it as a harbinger of design: annual
pilgrimage; the territories a nomadic people travel
annually by season, etc. We ask, on the first page,
whether “distant machines growl” isn’t “distant war
machines growl.” Is “was” not “wars” suffering from
an apposite elision? Is “hello hallo echo” not “hello,
hallowed echo”? We may or may not be suffering
from Deleuze and Guattari’s textual schizophrenia,
but either way, we’re hallucinating text on text. Is
Joyce’s nomadics, then, an aesthetic of inexorable
obscurity, of failure—or is it one of infinite possibility and participation, of the renavigating of Empire
by those willing to wander borders in perpetuity? Is
such aesthetic and anacoluthonic wandering a repudiation of the capitalist strata and function targeted
Eggert and Fleisher continued on next page
March–April 2009
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by so many contemporary theorists, or does the point
here have more to do with taking a bearing in the
turning world?
The book itself (we will insist on calling it a
novel just to muck up the works of narrative expectation) is not, for all of that, a body without organs;
it comes with what we might have called, in days of
yore, a heart. As Cixous says of Moral Tales, “What
confers a music to all of these texts, which seem to
be quite heterogeneous, is love.” This is a neglected
aspect of the work of a writer who did not quite say
in Tales what we will have him say here: that he
has always been “a [writer]…at the edge of some
future.” One detects here, in the silences afforded
by the words, a sense of longing for what comes
next, a yearning activated and informed by what has
come before—what has been lost. And Joyce’s nods
to the lineage of poetry—he has always operated in
the proximity of Black Mountain—reveal, finally,
a profound affection for poetry, and its affective
usefulness to prose:
baby, baby, she (in English again)
sea sea sea recurs (anthroposophic she)
what is it? (she sea)
moi pentjukh pizdoi nakrylsja
what? (ch`to?)
my mind’s gone out of whack
poor baby fucked silly, tu compris?
oui (we)
below here used to be a valley, a village,
hills, lanes, wandering cattle, a whole world
under sea
to what purpose? he (in English).
But beyond the use of language, equally
compelling is Joyce’s compassion for these briefly
felt people, his people, in Joyce’s care—the
sweetJennies—and their losses: “god’s northernmost
edge a husband’s cold flank, conjugal deathbed”;
“Bridey, the boy insisted on calling her, child’s
voice raspy with blistering because the masks fail
to seal completely, Bridey help me Bridey.” Joyce’s
Blood Paint
The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts
Carl Watson
Autonomedia
http://www.autonomedia.org
258 pages; paper, $15.95
In Carl Watson’s first novel, The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts, a pair of suburban losers becomes
entangled in an existential cat-and-mouse game
played by the likes of Raskilnikov, Marc Chapman, or
John Hinkley. “Vince said it happens a lot,” Jack said,
“people see or read something and they go out and
do it.” The mix in Watson’s novel of a classic literary
figure with the all-too-real and all-too-pulpy figure of
John Hinkley is part of an underlying method in the
book. Watson is writing an allegory where language
and ideas distort the world that he is writing about
or maybe where the world is distorting the language
Watson is using to write about it. Watson depicts
the world in the way Franz Kafka does in his tale
“The Judgment.” Kafka said of his story, “The story
evolved as a true birth, covered with filth and slime.”
Watson’s style, too, is direct and kind of filthy. He
writes in an early section where childhood chapters
might normally be found in a novel, “One day the
boys found a large dead animal on the roadside. Its
eyeballs had been knocked out by the collision that
had killed it, so they scooped the eyeball up and put
it in the jar along with the condoms.”
As in Kafka’s story, there is something going
on but you don’t know what it is. Watson’s method
seems suitable to capturing an American landscape of
sewage lagoons and mini-golf courses better than the
more dedicated factual and verifiable methods employed by fussy naturalists such as Thomas Wolf.
The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts is constructed
around chapters that are loosely flowing self-contained chunks. It tells the story of Jack’s childhood
in a swampy suburb of Chicago. The Agnes Marshes
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American Book Review
observations are keen, capturing intimate details of
these people’s (peoples’) lives: “stomach muscles a
hard band where she held on at his waist.” He is a
man, finally, in love.
Was has as its antonym Is (right?). So was is not
is? That depends on what the meaning of the word
“is” is. As Joyce says elsewhere, “The past matters,
the past is matter, residue”; and “Fiction is residue.”
Finally, the primary concern of Was is summarized in
the last line—“where have we come from
where are we going”—with the understanding, finally, that “we” (oui) are all in this (then, now,
Google, Babelfish, strata, and loss) together.
Amy Eggert is currently a doctoral candidate at
Illinois State University specializing in trauma
narrative and creative writing. Her recent creative
works can be found in Bradley University’s literary
journal Broadside and in ISU’s online publication
Euphemism.
Kass Fleisher’s most recent books are Talking out of
School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (Dalkey
Archive Press) and The Adventurous (experimental
prose, Factory School).
Matt Briggs
are cut by a street power grid of the suburbs placed
over the top of the swamp like the matrix of string
forensic experts use to investigate a field. The effect
of this grid over the organic landscape permeates the
book. Each section of land is essentially disconnected
from the organic connections of ditch, stream, and
ridgeline, and becomes connected by street, sewer,
and pipeline.
The people who inhabit this disconnected/
connected land, too, have had a similar separation/
connection applied to them. Jack and the kids he
plays with are neither friends nor acquaintances.
None of the chummy connections that inform a
classic social structure inform them. Instead, they
are related through the intimate proximity of their
bodies and the massive superstructure of the suburbs
and culture with its bars and taverns and strip malls
and ATM machines. “It was a world slowly dividing
into two groups of people: those who admitted they
didn’t know anything, and those who thought they
knew everything.”
Watson’s method seems suitable to
capturing an American landscape
of sewage lagoons and mini-golf
courses.
As the book progresses, each chapter becomes
less and less pictorial and contains more and more
exposition until the last few chapters are all language.
Jack says before he and Vince murder their victim,
“There can be no images in Eden.” This dissolution
follows Jack and Vince’s gradual focus on executing their existential crime. There are some funny
misadventures in the suburbs and some nighttime
bicycle trips. They become entangled in the sinister
shenanigans of a naïve artist named Madame LittleEase who paints with blood on garbage. And then
there is, finally, the murder.
American reality has an oxymoronic, allegorical root that has been incoherently described by
Greil Marcus in Invisible Republic (1998), as “The
old, weird America.” In his book, Marcus attempts
to describe the world of the widely circulated folk
song of the murderers “Frankie and Johnny.” It is
the America that appears in Flannery O’Connor’s
and Russell Edson’s tales. Moby Dick, Marc Chapman, Leadbelly, and The Hotel Of Irrevocable Acts
do not make empirical, factual sense. The question
“is it true” is meaningless in America. These works
are concrete manifestations of the American disconnection between empirical reality and what might be
described as American reality. The broken connection between observed physical phenomena and its
meaning has been a part of the American sensibility
since people wandered across the Bering land bridge.
Herman Melville, the telephone, radio, and TV are
logical outgrowth of this friction, rather than the
cause of it. “Why just a few days ago, in the Tribune,”
Watson reports in his novel, “two hitchhiking girls
murdered an executive who thought he was gonna
get some pussy. The girls said they thought they were
in a movie—that it wasn’t quite real.”
Matt Briggs is the author of five works of fiction. The
most recent, The End is the Beginning, was released
tin 2008 by Final State Press. His first novel, Shoot
the Buffalo, was awarded an American Book Award
in 2006.
Long Journey
The Bruise
Magdalena Zurawski
FC2
http://fc2.org
176 pages; paper, $16.95
Fiction Collective has been heralded as an
innovative outfit since its inception in 1974. Championed by the late-great Ronald Sukenick, and having published authors such as Larry Fondation and
Michael Martone, FC2 has produced some of the
more interesting works of our time.
Critics of the press have discharged The University of Alabama Press imprint as something of a
vanity establishment. FC2 does not take unsolicited
manuscripts. Books must be “sponsored” by previously published FC2 authors, submitted by previous
authors, or, in the case of Magdelena Zurwaski,
win the annual Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction
Prize.
The prize is opened to all American authors,
and FC2 holds as the prize’s mission to publish
“fiction considered by America’s largest publishers
too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the
cultural milieu,” including works of “high quality and
exceptional ambition whose style, subject matter, or
form pushes the limits of American publishing and
reshapes our literary culture.”
The mission for the prize sounds brilliant.
Unfortunately, this prizewinner doesn’t live up.
That is not to say this year’s winner, The Bruise,
isn’t a bad book, but it does drag. A bildungsroman
with a likable, yet boring, narrator, who questions
her own imagination after crashing into a mirror
and bruising her face, The Bruise reads a bit like a
college girl’s diary.
Attending an undisclosed college the narrator
M— is an aspiring student of literature who floats
in and out of lesbian relationships, dream sequences,
and writing workshops, scrutinizing her reality
and the nature of relationships as she draws ever
closer to an epiphanic ending, wherein she discovers just enough of herself to write a book about her
Brian Allen Carr
experiences that helps her move on from troubling
over her bruise.
Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka,
and Virginia Woolf are all liberally borrowed from
here, but their recognizable techniques are attached
to a more sterile environment. Where Woolf waxed
on and on about boeuf de daube, Zurwaski examines
ham steak.
The ham in the dining hall was cut by
machine into steaks that were a quarter of
an inch thick and they were a light pink
but there was an iridescent purple film that
shone on the flesh. When it was put on an
institutional white plate and handed to me
by the men working in the dining hall who
wore white caps and white shirts it was
handed to me almost sideways.
When Zurwaski goes stream of conscious, she is
triggered by a drug-store comb.
But since only memories could prove to
someone that she had existed before the
present moment (site only memories in
this way could prove that she had ever
been born) a person with no memories
could also never die because in order to
die a person had to be born first. So I had
learned that although something as simple
as a plastic drug store comb could decide
whether or not a person could be born a
simple plastic drugstore comb could not
make a person die unless it let her be
born first.
Fans of Sukenick looking for a thread to the
prize’s namesake will find that Zurwaski adheres to
Sukenick’s theory of narralogue, a “narrative plus
argument” that “gives full play to the element of action that is essential to narrative” and “which is the
enemy of abstraction formalism and dialectic.” But
what Sukenick fans won’t find is any play with form
or organization. This is a linear narralogue that starts
with a bruise and ends with a book.
In terms of shucking the cultural milieu, we
only get hints.
This is a lesbian pseudo-romance, but that’s
nothing new. In fact, troublingly, Zurwaski hides
the identity of the lesbians in her story by using the
Kafkaesque technique of the character’s first name
An Affair Not Taken to Heart
The Mirror in the Well
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Dalkey Archive Press
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com
152 pages; paper, $12.95
I approached Micheline Aharonian Mar-
com’s The Mirror in the Well expecting something
new. Instead, what’s here is mostly familiar from
other books: a woman’s hysterical behaviour,
sexual enslavement glossed on the back cover as
an “awakening” that is “a tragedy,” and a metafictionalizing that firmly distances the reader from the
material.
Dalkey Archive Press’s promotional material
states this book is “[l]usher than Marguerite Duras,
more tender than Cormac McCarthy,” incomprehensibly selling Marcom’s style by using two very
different authors who they admit she’s not like. For
those put off by McCarthy, Dalkey Archive Press
qualifies the comparison by claiming The Mirror in
the Well is only “nearly as dark” as he is. Not really
close, then. It’s hard enough for a writer to live up
to her own reputation (Marcom is the author of the
acclaimed novels Three Apples Fell from Heaven
[2001] and The Daydreaming Boy [2004]), let alone
followed by the dash. So every lesbian, the narrator
M— (who could she be?), the current love interest
G—, and the would-be love interest L— get obscured
by punctuation.
The Bruise reads a bit like a college
girl’s diary.
The only real shot that The Bruise takes at
tradition is through dissecting a workshop professor’s feedback. On both occasions, the professor’s
statements uphold the traditional workshop rhetoric
and the narrator defends her non-workshop-friendly
approach to fiction by creating two students scenarios:
1. A student named Daniel who writes stories
about a writer who writes boring stories.
2. A student named L— who writes a story
about a woman who dreams about having a
baby with a wooden leg, only to wake up to
find a splinter in her belly.
In both instances, we get a professor offering
critiques to work that sounds similar to the writing
in The Bruise. That is because both students’ works
embody Zurwaski’s prose style. And she takes great
pain to defend her aesthetic.
I thought this was a great story because
I liked thinking about a baby born with
a wooden leg because I liked trying to
think about how a piece of wood could
attach itself to a baby who never had yet
been in the world to see a piece of wood
and I liked thinking about it because even
though I could imagine many different
ways for it to happen none of the things I
imagined seemed right.
Zurwaski writes boring, dreamy, student-grade
prose. But there is enough in the story to be award
winning. It is refreshing to see M— puzzle through
her existence, and some of her observations are quite
entertaining. But even at a spare 174 pages, the journey seemed a bit long.
Brian Allen Carr lives in the Rio Grande Valley of
Texas. His fiction can be found in the most recent
issue of The Texas Review.
Jeff Bursey
that of others.
Reviewers have tried to make this book sound
revolutionary. Publishers Weekly breathlessly warns
readers: “Its explicit language, an invigorating mix
of debauchery and poetic complexity, is disturbing at
times, as in episodes of sexual violence or of uncommon acts (urine-drinking, for instance).” The blog
booklit says: “While the pages that follow feature
frequent sex, any accusations of pornography can
be dispelled. Yes, the language used can be harsh,
featuring regular vulgarisms that some may blush
at, but The Mirror In The Well [sic] is not a book to
titillate, using this sexual awakening to explore layers
of identity, sexuality, power, and love.” Writing for a
Web magazine called The Front Table, Amy Kunkel
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March–April 2009
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concludes this way: “The emotional climaxes as well
as the sexual ones are intense and extremely gratifying. The end, however, does not give you that sigh of
post-coital satisfaction. Marcom’s book is so dark and
so deeply engaging that the reader is bereft on the last
page, aching for just one more literary climax.”
Evidently, our institutional memory is no longer
what it was, or else too many people spend their time
reading gentle material to be able to contextualize the
content. The sexual aspect in The Mirror in the Well
falls well short of anything found in certain works
by, for example, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Erica Jong,
Kathy Acker, or Yellow Silk: Journal of the Erotic
Arts (1981–1996), let alone pornography. Reviewers
have become easily agitated and prissy high school
counsellors. If the sexual climaxes are “extremely
gratifying” for Kunkel, then there’s nothing else she
needs to reveal.
Clearly, we learn more about what the reviewers think of sex than we do about the actual book. To
that extent, the hype has worked. What is of value
in The Mirror in the Well are the insights Marcom
supplies about the tremendous swings of emotions
someone experiences while having an affair. The
woman and her husband are having dinner out one
night when she breaks down:
and he looks at her, shocked and terrified
by the apparition in front of him, and she
doesn’t look into his eyes, sobs, chews,
and she herself is not sure why she does
it--not the phrases about loving him and
saying them to him--but why it is that she
is panic-driven in the nighttime, moves
through the world now like a madwoman;
he gets up from the table to go to the bathroom; she is becoming mad, she thinks.
When thinking of her lover, these bleak thoughts
arise:
and it is impossible that you will live and
love together: her children your children
your wife and the other impediments to
love and lovers; and why not? she thinks:
you are the soul’s mate and a beloved
from the good or bad love-poems and the
great men of poetry who write of their
muses of their Lauras….
In these and similar passages,
Marcom does an exceptional job of burrowing into the misery an illicit love affair contains as people, who aren’t quite
innocent bystanders, are blindsided by
the deeds of their loved ones who are
themselves simultaneously confused
and exhilarated.
It’s too bad Marcom didn’t stay
close to this material instead of making
avatars out of the carpenter and his lady.
Frequent references to myths, gods,
nymphs, the cosmos, and a prevalence of mystic
dreaming, squeeze the individuality out of the lovers.
They are assigned tasks—both work, both travel a
lot, both cheat—and character traits: the woman is
codependent and incapable of finding meaning in
her own thoughts and feelings (is the point here that
women’s liberation gets run over by the wheels of
sexual drive?); the carpenter is flabby, soft-bellied,
bad-breathed, and passive-aggressive (so much for
the myth of the new man formulated in the 1990s).
The affair goes on for almost two years, and the sex
is tediously the same until the very end when Marcom
belatedly realizes she needs to escalate matters, at
which time it is replaced by degradation. By then,
the woman will do whatever the man wants so that
her cunt will be satisfied and worshipped.
What is of value in The Mirror in the
Well are the insights Marcom supplies
about the tremendous swings of
emotions someone experiences while
having an affair.
(Tim Hardin’s song “If I Were A Carpenter”
(1967) contains these lines: “If I were a carpenter
and you were a lady / Would you marry me anyway,
would you have my baby? / … // If I worked my
hands in wood, would you still love me? / You answer
me quick, ‘Tim, I could, I’ll put you above me.’” The
appropriateness of this unwelcome memory, once it
came up, couldn’t be forgotten.)
Collectionism
Deniability
George Witte
Orchises Press
http://mason.gmu.edu/~lathbury
91 pages; paper, $14.95
Unexpected Guests
Steven P. Schneider
Blue Light Press
1862 - 45th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94122
92 pages; paper, $15.95
“Of the making of books there is no end” wrote
the world-weary author of the Book of Ecclesiastes
circa the second century BC, two millennia before
the invention of moveable type and 2,200 years
prior to the advent of American po-biz, which like
other American industries is increasingly globalized.
MFA programs have proliferated throughout the
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American Book Review
The Mirror in the Well is disappointing, but that doesn’t mean it’s
bad. The passages dealing with the
self-loathing the female character
feels about herself, the hatred/love
for her lover, and her feelings towards
her husband are highly recommended.
But through a miscalculation, Marcom relies on two recurring devices
that vitiate the best parts of the book:
metafictionality, and the woman’s numerous dreams. There’s nothing wrong
with a book commenting on itself—
Gilbert Sorrentino did this with puckish
humour—as Marcom does when writing, “How can
a book such as this one end,” yet this emphasis on
the artificiality of the whole business, increasing in
frequency as the novel comes to its end, prevents a
potentially meaningful emotional bonding between
reader and character. That’s not always necessary, and
certainly isn’t obligatory, but Marcom worked hard
at showing what people feel when having an affair.
What do we make of her authorial efforts, let alone
the character she presents as the vessel for them,
when she stresses that what we’re reading is not to
be taken to heart?
When it comes to the use of dreams, Marcom
knows that her dreams would interest only her inner
circle, and that the dreams of a fictional character
are of much less interest. The woman dreams prodigiously, always with significance, and we are also
presented with a dream had by one of her children.
Portentous, myth-ridden, with the prose straining
to be poetic, the dreams clog the narrative, and the
heavy reliance on them is a miscalculation.
The Mirror in the Well fails to work on the sexual, mythological, poetic, and self-reflexive levels.
Marcom has in hand a somewhat melodramatic story
of one woman’s momentary euphoria that gets buried
under material that’s not adequately controlled. It’s
regrettable this novel turns out as it does, because its
admirable parts were worth more care.
Jeff Bursey’s reviews and articles have appeared in
various publications in Canada, the UK, and the
US.
J.D. Smith
Anglosphere, and workshops have just happened
to become available in some of Europe’s foremost
tourist destinations and on at least one cruise ship.
In step with this development, the largely industrial
incentive structures of academic tenure and grant
support have led to a situation in which an estimated
1,000 poetry collections are published annually in
the US.
Any number of motivations may attend the
writing of an individual poem, or group of poems,
but once it is time to send a collection out into the
world to fend for itself, publishing is packaging. In
an age of marketing and market research, even in the
nearly nonexistent market for poetry, the pleasures
of sampling a slender volume at random to see the
dappled workings of a poet’s sensibility are not
guaranteed, as the packaging tail wags the poetical
dog. It is not enough to follow Robert Frost’s advice
that, if a book contains twenty-five poems, the book
as a whole should be the twenty-sixth. Editors and
even teaching poets who may have once known
better advise their vulnerable charges to compile
manuscripts and even write individual poems with an
eye toward an arc, or a logline, or whatever it is that
desperate “creatives” offer potential buyers of their
work and souls during an elevator pitch. Somehow
forgotten is that such an effort represents an attempt
to recover creative and commercial territory long
since ceded to the novel, as well as an abandonment
of the interiority that poetry has claimed for itself
after largely casting off the mnemonic and narrative
Smith continued on next page
Smith continued from previous page
burden of ages past.
For lack of a better term, this emphasis on the
book as product may be called “collectionism,” as
ultimately unsuccessful as—if less disastrous than—
the other “isms” that made up the last century. The
typical book produced under collectionism is likely
to contain several good or even outstanding poems,
but they are likely to be surrounded by others that
feel as if they were written as homework rather than
as a response to necessity—and that is precisely
what such poems are, methodical attempts to bridge
themes and tones. The reader is thus compelled to
pore over or at least identify those dull tracings that
connect the important dots rather than pleasurably
light upon the bright and isolated points from which
one might infer the constellation of a sensibility.
Until such time as poetry publishing ceases to
imitate the marketing of widgets and returns to being
its own best self—a time more eschatological than
imminent—there seem to exist only a few ways for
poets to sidestep the pitfalls of collectionism. One is
to ignore the spirit of the age altogether and write a
poem at a time, or longer sequences only when one
sees fit. The only poets who can reliably succeed in
this approach are celebrities in other fields, especially
those who go by only one name, or the thinning ranks
of established poets who made their careers in an
earlier era—themselves small-scale celebrities.
A second approach, hybrid of the fox that
knows many things and the hedgehog that knows
one great thing, entails making a book of several
sections. Each functions as a sort of chapbook, and
those chapbooks are pressed together into something
that is—or can pretend to be—a larger whole. Collating poems in this way can leave many fine poems
uncollected, especially at the earlier stages of a career, but it can similarly prevent poets from wasting
their time and talents on unfelt and consequently
uninteresting poems.
A third strategy—and blessed are they who
can execute it—is to conceive of a book as a larger
structure from the beginning and complete a genuine
rather contrived arc. Perhaps even luckier are those
who find that arc emerging as they write individual
poems and need only determine when they have
finished one book and feel ready to begin another.
The books considered here take the latter two
strategies in ways that present their authors’ accomplishments to their best advantage. Steven P. Schneider’s Unexpected Guests, like Gaul, is divided in
three parts that appropriately cover different aspects
of the poet’s relationship with place, and the book’s
project is not so much a narrative as a map in words.
The first section, “About Love,” traces the workings
of family life and the maintenance of Jewish identity
in what are from at least one point of view the exotic
settings of the Great Plains and South Texas. This
section includes the title poem, which doubles the
speaker’s sense of strangeness through a narration of
an outreach visit by Hasidim to his Nebraska home.
The ensuing discussion offers both comfort and complexity. While the topics include Rabbi Nachman of
Bratzlav’s assertion that everyone is destined to be
in some place at a given time to correct something,
Schneider does not take easy comfort from this statement. Instead, he finds further mystery and even an
invitation to struggle:
But what, we wondered, were they here to
correct?
Or what was it we had come here to correct?
We pondered only briefly these questions,
Dizzying and beyond our reach.
Taking a particular tradition to reach toward a
universal dilemma exemplifies a breadth of vision
that characterizes the stronger poems in this collection. A similar ability to employ themes and topics
without either undue appropriation or unearned
reverence occurs in the haiku “Longing”: “A zebra
longwing / Fluttering along the path: / Your returning
home.” This miniature wonder of a poem offers a
seemingly effortless synthesis of the haiku tradition,
North American fauna, and—again—a universal
impulse.
The collection’s second and arguably strongest
section deepens and extends the poet’s connection
with the land roughly encompassed by the Central
Time Zone without falling into a wide-eyed faux
pastoral mode. In “Walking beside Calamus Reservoir” monarch butterflies—only a few of the book’s
poems mention butterflies—are first appreciated for
their flight and then likened to
the fans
Willa Cather’s neighbors used
on their front porches,
where they dreamed of dusty roads
west and out of town.
Likewise unencumbered by sentimentality is
the section’s final poem, “Beachside,” a villanelle;
Schneider is particularly successful in formal verse.
In this poem, he dissects the cultural myth, extending from Herman Melville to the Tiki era and Corona beer commercials, of lounging on a beach as a
countercultural statement or cure for civilization’s
discontents. He notes of two sun-bathers, “They
practice the art of thinking themselves free,” which
may represent only one more opiate of the masses.
“Of the making of books
there is no end.”
The third and final section, set largely in Israel
and entirely in Jewish experience, offers both distinct
pleasures and challenges. The poem “Our Exalted
Guests” deftly contrasts historical observances of the
harvest festival of Sukkoth with “a less ecstatic time /
Of human bombs and scorched earth”—a thoughtful
summary of a bitter truth. Schneider achieves even
greater compression in “Tolstoy in Palestine,” which
apostrophizes Russian-born Zionist pioneer A.D.
Gordon for “Turning your back on the occupations
of the Pale— / Talmudic scholar, money lender, /
peddler, victim of pogroms.” The final item on the list
illuminates the relationship among all those items in
their time and place, and how unopposed historical
contingency can produce an ever-tightening confinement, even unto death.
Some of the other poems in this section, though,
are subject to a common malady of work based on
the experience of an ethnic, religious, or other affinity group, i.e., depending on the intrinsic appeal of
subject matter without earning a reader’s response
through the resources of art; this approach risks
sentimentality and/or dullness. The poem “Day on
the Dead Sea” falls into several such moments, and
the negative capability the poet displays elsewhere
goes missing in the claim, “We return to something
that has always been there. / We return to prayer
that we never knew. / We penetrate the vowels for
warmth.” These assertions are shortly followed by
the bravado declaration “We slip into the water like
porpoises. / We make loops and turns; we belong
here.” There the language goes slack or attempts
juxtapositions that hold little surprise. The relative
scarcity of these moments, though, suggests that
Schneider’s strengths will come through even more
clearly in future work.
George Witte’s Deniability represents a vastly
different approach to both the composition of individual poems and the arrangement of poems in a book.
Taking for its title a prized qualy of covert operations
(and preemptive warfare), the book’s poems read as
entries in a journal of the American psyche since the
attacks of 9/11, and the limited uses of the first person
speak primarily for an everyman or a persona rather
than the poet himself. The three sections represent
stages of a unified narrative that begins with effects
on life in New York City, examines the zeal and excesses of this country’s military response, and ends
with the militarization of domestic life.
The collection’s first poem, the terrifyingly
realized if infelicitously titled “Uh-Oh,” conveys
the initial shock of “Things ripped from their skins,
/ words from definitions.” The hypervigilance that
follows makes the actions of daily life suspect, so
that in “The Revellers,”
I see a flash and flinch as if from gunshot—
some foreign tourist’s instant camera
dangles evidence like a tongue stuck out,
developing before our eyes.
This individual reaction foreshadows the use
of force and its collateral damage to language in the
second section. “Master Plan,” among other poems,
uses meter and rhyme to address with Swiftian outrage the invasion of Iraq, as in the quatrain:
We bomb to lay a righteous cornerstone,
Elect to buy, occupy to free.
Each flea finds blood-warm fur to thrive
upon,
An opportune democracy.
The three-dimensional consequences of flat and
bureaucratic phrases are further explored in poems
with titles such as “Rendition,” “Just Cause,” “Occupation,” and “Surge” that expose rather than argue
with that language.
The inevitable blowback of those abuses of
power and language into the domestic sphere structures the third section. “Watch List” notes, “Each
night’s color coded panic level” and “the child whose
name alarms intelligence,” in short, the ordeal of
navigating an American airport. In “Failure to Comply,” Witte assesses the most pernicious aspect of that
ordeal, the security checkpoint, as where “Seduced
by legalese / we undress piece by piece.” Lest this
lull the reader into a sense of righteous victimization,
he calls the participants “complicit citizens.”
If many of the poems do not as readily lend
themselves to brief quotation, it is because of their
succeeding through tone and integrity in the etymological sense of being all of one piece, as the collection itself is more than the sum of its individual
poems. Not surprisingly, given the extremity of the
subject, the tone now and again slips into the shrill or
unoriginal; an easy reference to Chicken Little and a
title such as “Pay No Attention to That Man behind
the Curtain” do not rise to the level of the surrounding
work. Nonetheless, as known by almost anyone who
has attended an open mic or even a scheduled reading
since late 2001, the shrill and unoriginal have been
the rule in contemporary political poetry, which has
served largely as a form of preaching to the choir or
the working out of an Oedipal conflict with George
W. Bush as proxy father. Witte’s achievement rests in
maintaining his poise and applying his considerable
intelligence even in the heat of the national moment.
With art rather than art therapy in mind, this collection stands a chance of enduring as a work of witness
to a moment that may already be passing—and not
a moment too soon—but one that will continue to
demand explication.
J.D. Smith’s books include Settling for Beauty, The
Hypothetical Landscape, and the edited anthology
Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn
Gould. His poems have received three Pushcart
nominations. His children’s book The Best Mariachi
in the World was released by Raven Tree Press in
September 2008.
March–April 2009
Page 5 L
A Fragile Cloth
Laurel Blossom
to nature:
House Held Together by Winds
Sabra Loomis
Harper Perennial
http://www.harpercollins.com
84 pages; paper, $13.95
This luminous book, selected by James Tate
as one of five winners of the 2006 National Poetry
Series, is like a piece of transparent Belleek porcelain
inherited from a grande grandmother. It is, in every
sense, valuable. Its author, Sabra Loomis, author of
an earlier volume, Rosetree (1989), and two previous chapbooks, The Blue Door (1995) and The Ship
(2001), has won recognition from the Massachusetts
Artists Foundation, the Yeats Society, and the British
Council, and divides her time between New York City
and Ireland, where she taught at the Poets’ House,
Donegal, for many years.
Like Loomis herself, the book divides its observant attention between a privileged American childhood evoked in the precise and yet luxuriant terms
we are familiar with from the movies of Merchant
Ivory Productions and a present, equally evocative,
in the Irish countryside.
The first section of the book opens on the glamorous poem “Fur Coats,” the imaginative recreation
of a child’s experience: “There may have been a
jaguar. Or a leopard found its way in, from ancient
parties on the lawn.” This is the grandmother’s house,
filled with books from “the grandmother’s time”—“A
house with high-pitched roof and a side porch— //
and a light that stayed on, from an earlier generation.”
It has a silk and satin quality, this section, with its
subtly punned “boxes of pins, of old hairpins and
opinions,” and an edge of mystery and danger. The
grandmother is remote in her white bedroom or by
the fire reading a book. The servants, Delia and Mary,
go on tiptoe. The uncle, a soldier and adventurer, tells
stories of mountaineering and war that both fascinate
and frighten the child, who is caught by his imaginings. The grandfather is intimidating: “you had to
answer / all his questions at dinner.” The stepfather,
with a touch of menace, teaches her the Japanese
game of Go, how “to dissemble…How to create
a diversion— / in some other part of the world or
house— / some other ‘front’ of the Go board.” The
mother, who takes the child to see the movie Flying
Tigers (1942), wants her “to see the danger: / how
pilots were smashed against windscreens, / fell from
the half-open cockpits.” In the face of these threats,
the child asserts her own strength:
She held her keys to her own place
and she was not too delicate.
She bided her time in the storms,
as winter came and went.
House Held Together by Winds finds in Ireland
a haven from the childhood made difficult by these
characters. In the second section, we are introduced
to Loomis’s desire to “open” as she feels she may
be able to do in the “saddle on the land between
Slievemore / and Dooagh.” She feels responsible for
“My birds and lambs,” for “the dark green alphabet
of woods / …of sounda, and of arrows.” In the poem
“Small Goats,” she wants “to feel a kernel / of their
presence, the animal peace.” She finds her identity
in the landscape and the rhythms of a language close
Page 6 L
American Book Review
Outside the tiger lilies walk away.
They follow the habit of going down over
bridges,
to a café, by the harbor.
The tiger lilies walk down the road to the
hotel.
They love the hedges, heavy with rain,
and the clean scent of bridges.
The central section of the book, called “The
Trouble I Have in High Places,” contains seven
remarkable poems about the abusive stepfather who
“needed to touch the children with whatever fear
was.” This is a man who throws children off terraces
and boats, who steals their “wilderness,” “their childhood home,” who takes them “up to the high places,
windy and tall— / outside of buildings, up masts and
the tallest trees,” and who, imitating the bear he once
shot in Montana, “tried to come into the children’s
tents.” The delicacy of language Loomis maintains
prevents these poems from becoming “confessional”
in the airing-of-grievances sense of the word; her
reticence demonstrates both the damage done by this
horrifying man and the quiet fortitude of the child,
and adult, who survived him. Loomis’s surprising,
often child-like, metaphors, her unadorned syntax,
and her precise vocabulary release something simple
and true in the heart.
This book is like a piece of
transparent Belleek porcelain
inherited from a grande grandmother.
Throughout, Loomis seems to be asking what
the difference is among imagination, reality, and
memory, between living now and living then. How
do past and present weave and tug and create that
fragile cloth, a person, a life? When she inhabits a
summer house, for instance, it is impossible to tell
where the time frame lies:
You can see through hinges,
thumb-size openings in the knotted trunks
of the rhododendron bushes.
Or feel your way past
a few late, crimson petals
down to the ocean of dark at the back of the
house.
On the path which led from the house in
Michigan
down to the lake, through a hedge.
Or the path which is now,
which you follow to the last detail.
Her childhood is a house held together barely
at all by the winds of imaginative understanding
and escape, where the gravel driveway sounded
like water: it had a voice “with a someday” in it, she
says, “I stuck out my long neck like a giraffe— /
And felt myself rebuild, within the water’s voice”;
or, returning now (in reality or in imagination?)
where “the house opens” and the friendly elephant,
“whose back I rode on as a child, / carries evening
out onto the terrace,” placing “a small drink at the
grandmother’s elbow.”
The idea of opening occurs more and more
frequently as the book progresses:
(All this was taking place inside
I was finding my lost breath
the sea wind
the lambs)
Their small lives expanding
allowed time to open and pass through the
world.
Loomis follows the trail, the call, of the birds and
the lambs, the pine needles and the stream, the goats
“singing in their hides” to find her way to her own
identity and freedom. She rejoices, “The sheep, the
lambs came running to me / out of the open pen of
the years.” She finds in Ireland a rebirth, a new life:
“This stone house: a cradle / balanced on green hillwaves.”
The psychological arc of House Held Together
by Winds feels honest and unforced. Part of this is the
skillful weaving of past and present, part is the gentle
tone with its hint of sadness, like a lone daffodil in
the snow, part is the inherent moral compass of the
speaker. She never loses touch with that core:
I was keeping in touch
with zero, like the lambs.
I had trusted them with my grief,
and they spoke to me:
through the inside walls of childhood
and above, on a green headland.
Go to a quiet place in the woods or in your
heart to read House Held Together by Winds. It will
change you for the better.
Laurel Blossom is the author, most recently, of Degrees of Latitude (2007). Her work appears in two
recent anthologies: The Southern Poetry Anthology:
South Carolina and After Shocks: The Poetry of
Recovery.