Book Reviews
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115 B oo k r E v i E w S Mapmaking by Megan Harlan BkMk Press, 2010 “For my living, I learned the language,” the speaker of Megan Harlan’s poem “Inhabited” tells us, and it feels right to say no less of the poet herself. Mapmaking, Harlan’s debut book and the winner of the 2010 John Ciardi Prize, is an embodiment of knowledge, inquiry, and above all, language— supple, exacting, slippery, exuberant, diaphanous, and beguiling. The collection opens with “Ex Libris,” which tells us “Here is the fossil as a perfume.” And much of Mapmaking continues this project of ventur- ing beyond walls, book covers, and giving sensuous life to the past and the means of our remembering. Whether engaged with window boxes, clubs in Alphabet City, “California,” “Atget’s Paris,” the design of cemeteries, “shards of sagas / broke from former epochs, resolutions, / pieces of my history jigsawed / from old versions of the future,” or “scar-lines deeper than their healing,” Harlan’s poems are nimble and imaginatively fleet, but never far from a beating heart, a breathing and dreaming body. No small part of the pleasures to be found in Mapmaking arise from Har- lan’s far-flung sources of curiosity and inspiration. Whether bent towards poems like “Farsickness,” “Saraab,” or “Caravansary,” and various meth- ods of expansion upon (and through) etymology, or pulled into centrifu- gal meditation in the five-part poem “Motherland,” Harlan shows us the range and territory of play possible in the “literal-minded.” In addition to the large-scale geography of imagination at work in Mapmaking, Harlan is also very much engaged in poem-level events such as line, form, and sound. The poems often unfold in regularized stanzaic 116 Book Reviews forms like quatrains and couplets, but quite a few also rush forth in one sweep down the page. Many of the poems make great use of extended syn- tax, long lines and generous syncopations, alliterations, and near-rhyme, though the landscape is also punctuated with the short, terse, and taut. Harlan’s fluid, quicksilver diction and sweeping frames of reference also render haunting, echoing mouthfuls of allusion and evocation—such as the moment in “Sierra Lake,” when “over granite stones smelling of silver and clay, / our words bright as coins thrown in a fountain,” bring echoes of say, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, or even Anne Carson or Word- sworth, without taking us out of intimacy with this moment, this lake, “winter poured free of its glacial heart.” Or “Atget’s Paris,” which brings us visions of “rag-and-bone men posed and waxen,” simultaneously evoking W.B. Yeats and his great ars poetica, while bringing us closer to the literal body of Atget’s work and photography. Attempts to sum up the work that Megan Harlan’s Mapmaking under- takes in its movement and unfolds in its lines and sounds brings much more difficulty and less satisfaction than reading the book itself. Through- out this debut book, Megan Harlan makes a sustained, varied and joyous job of singing “like figurated calligraphy / in a root, arterial language.” —Zayne Turner Wait by Alison Stine University of Wisconsin Press 2011 Alison Stine’s second collection, Wait, chosen by Cornelius Eady for the 2011 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, picks up the legacy and obsessions introduced in her first volume, Ohio Violence. Both works inhabit worlds flooded with force, ferocity, and full-blooded appetites for eros and thanatos. In both works, we find poems embodying a strong sense of language and line. But in Wait, the language and line are coupled with (or perhaps, more accurately, are governed by) a voice both steady in its imaginative movements and controlled in its lexicon—one haunted by birds, trees, wires and thread, stars, skin and the body. In the furious swirl that is “Gossip,” we learn: “I had splinters in my shoulder, / and milk paint in my veins. My back was a yarn / scratch... / Our bodies, / pale as stitched stars, made the shapes you say.” In the final moments of “Thief,” the speaker exhorts: Book Reviews 117 Let me have this: time he told; our clothes, stepping stones to the field where we lay before breaking, before bitterness, before discovery. Let me bring it to my mouth. Let me pull it from my tongue, and candle to the light. And call it mine. Or the almost fugally structured, meditative “Reelection”: Everything is sharper. Birds become birds. Spearheads crystallize into trees. Those lines? They are called branches. That sky with white? I had never seen. All the signs are signs we’ve forgotten. The wind makes mouths of them, yesterday’s names. ... Such things are worth seeing. You have to bend yourself back for them. You have to look until there is no more looking, the wingspan lost to the leaves. This winnowing, recombining language is mirrored by the book’s dramatic focus—ostensibly a single year, prior to the wedding of the young woman who is the central speaker and guide. But the poems, while operating under guise of both narrative/dramatic arc and persona, buck against the limits of this world, seeming to flash forward, in poems like “Scissors, Hammer, Hoof Pick, Awl,” which opens “When the woman threatened the son of my husband, / I went to the bank.” Or the poem “Real Estate,” where the speaker tells us “We can live in the in-between. / We can live. Gondola Tree. Married tree. / This is how our love came back: it never left.” There are also poems that refuse to be placed inside or outside of the collection’s narrative arc, like “The Flies,” in which the speaker begs an ambiguous lover: 118 Book Reviews Do you see now what I wanted? Do you think of my body winged? Fill me, as you promised. Find me trapped, and let the hundreds go, let the little ones outside. Bitter would not be bitter. My petal tongue would rise. Cloud, I drank you; you were mine. What of the flies? Poison slunk beneath the gate; I will give them halos. I will make them saints. It feels appropriate to read Wait as an exploration in the vein of Louise Glück’s Wild Iris, with the use of book-length study and concentrated personae, vivid image and death-haunted ecstatic motion. And it is when pushing against the limits of personae that Stine’s language bursts forth most powerfully. Poems such as “Velata,” which focuses on the subject of a portrait by Raphael, pushes persona through layers of ekphrasis, history (scholars speculate that the woman, long considered to have been Raphael’s mistress, may actually have been his wife), and further personae, as we watch the book’s main speaker working to embody the life of the portrait-sitter, “a baker’s daughter.../ half-naked, half-glaze, sheer / across her stomach, holding out / her breast.” But along with the fluidity of imagination required by persona, Stine also has a strong sense of the still- life, the power in the mundane moment bent strange under the weight of its own bleak passage, like Van Gogh of the Potato Eaters or, even more, Carolyn Forché of Gathering the Tribes. This flashes through in poems like “The Flood,” where we discover: That be a dollar, said the Amish at market when we lingered over their bread, said as if willing the loaf’s transformation into our arms. So at first the rain was welcome. We thought it was our doing. ... In ditches and gullies, the grass ran like cilia, and the water was not pure. No. It was full of us, flaked with rock and wood, the leavings of our bodies, which left us, floated, were lost. Book Reviews 119 Or “Impetus”: Hours before ice, you pull everything off its ropes, heirlooms hitting the plastic bucket. Life starts from the inside, bitter, compact and blooms as it softens, flushes with age. The tomatoes might pink if we wrapped them in paper— Whether in distilled meditation, a breathless push of image and imagination, hopping across couplets or rolling out in a single, sustained stanza, the poems of Wait invite readers to experience the world with more than eyes moving over lines and hands turning pages. Through the restraints imposed by recurring images, narrowed lexicon and proposed by (and in) the dramatic focus, Wait begs readers to push past the limits of these impulses, rise with innate rhythms and unstoppable imagination of the speaker into the world of song and sky. As the opening poem, “Wife,” tells us: “I am a bird / in the field and I want you to find me. / I want you to find me. Tell me wait.” —Zayne Turner Richard Yates by Tao Lin Melville House, 2010 Tao Lin has earned a slice of fame through ambitious self-promotion, a ubiquitous blogosphere presence, and small press publication, culminating in a rise to places such as the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Atlantic. Interestingly, mere literary respect has not fulfilled Tao Lin. For his latest book he solicited a blurb from James Frey, nominated himself for the Pulitzer Prize, and spoofed Jonathan Franzen in the Stranger, among other “clever” pranks. With a certain charm, though, he succeeds, especially in pushing today’s youth toward literature. When he pisses in the night, his established cult following lauds him for shining a golden stream of light into the dark. Past work exhibits substance and thoughtfulness, and his rising popularity is no fluke. An apt comparison of Tao Lin’s style 120 Book Reviews might work with early David Foster Wallace or Bret Easton Ellis, yet each writer has different objectives, motivations, and evolution.