IN THE ACT OF FINDING: FIVE VOLUMES OF POETRY

Watching the Spring Festival. By Frank Bidart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Pp. 58. $25.00.

The New Life. By Richard Tillinghast. Providence, Rhode Island: Copper Beech Press, 2008. Pp. 56. $12.00.

a metaphorical god. By Kimberly Johnson. New York: Persea, 2008. Pp. 69. $14.00.

The Niagara River. By Kay Ryan. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Pp. 72. $13.00.

Prairie Style. By C.S. Giscombe. Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. Pp. 81. $12.95.

Each of the five poets reviewed here confronts the impasse with which several strands of post-modernism have presented poets, as each writer questions how poetry can or does make meaning, often with reference to the natural or spiritual world, often marking the endeavor as a quest more than an arrival, even while language, representation, and the self—not to mention any secure sense of place or meaning—remain problematic. The diversity of the paths taken by these poets is as notable as their shared attention to the question of what is found in poems and why that question matters. It may be that no one reader will find all these paths equally compelling, but a common passion and purpose—one could say a passion for purpose—are evident.

Watching the Spring Festival—Frank Bidart’s seventh major collection—continues in a more personal vein than in his earlier dramatic monologues his concern with dreams and desire and his dialogue with history, including popular culture. In “Valentine,” for example, he writes, “Love craved and despised and necessary / the Great American Songbook said,” suggesting the ways in which popular cultural norms are internalized and how or whether such internalized desires might be reconfigured. The book’s title image is of those watching from a distance a ceremony staged for and by those in political power in the eighth-century Chinese imperial court, yet another figuration of how cultural rituals feel to those who have no power to set or change things. Spring, of course, is traditionally a season of renewal, but it is also a season that reappears with predictable regularity—and is not subject to human control (not even by emperors). “Winter Spring Summer Fall”—a poem of changing seasons—however, also notes: “Though the body is its / genesis, a poem is the vision of a process.” The processes witnessed by these poems (like the iconic image of Tu Fu watching the courtesans watching imperial spring rituals) are sometimes natural, sometimes cultural, and in either case internal as much as external.

The book’s first poem refers to more contemporary popular cultural forms: movies and movie stars, specifically Marilyn Monroe who is said to be “bitter [that] all that releases / transformation in us is illusion,” but is also characterized as a woman drawn to power, much like the court women in the title poem who look as if they have a close relationship to power, but do not or not entirely have their own power. To quote Bidart from an “An Interview with Frank Bidart” (by Craig Morgan Teicher from Tin House): “The whole book is about watching a spring festival that one can’t entirely participate in” (like Tu Fu); Bidart adds that there’s “always a pane of glass between you and what you desire,” although he concludes that one can get beyond or at least not be at the mercy of that barrier through describing it. This, it seems, is the task or at least the hope Bidart sets poetry.

In “Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival across Serpentine Lake,” Bidart imagines Tu Fu saying while watching the court women: “These are not women but a dream of women”; it’s as “if submission to dream were submission / not only to breeding but to one’s own nature.” The ‘of’ in the phrase “dream of women” is ambiguous. Is this Tu Fu dreaming of women (seen from a distance, as if they were a kind of stage setting) or are we being told that the ritual is the women’s dream? We as readers end with reduplicated images (the women’s, Tu Fu’s, our own) of how even desire is shaped by cultural forms, as in “Valentine.” Indeed, we are further told that “Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival across Serpentine Lake”—full of lavish description (“rhinoceros-horn / chopsticks” and “camel humps [that] rise like purple hills / from green-glazed cauldrons”—is “after Tu Fu,” while the notes add that the poem draws on David Hawkes’s rendering of Tu Fu’s work. The notes—their appearance in the book as well as their content—reinforce Bidart’s insistence on necessity or deference to power (the power of ceremonies, the power of originals “after” which one writes).

The following poem, “The Old Man at the Wheel,” personalizes this sense of how lives or the meaning of lives are shaped by forces not of their own making, reading as a kind of coded confessional verse about “what as a child, you thought / too dark to be survived.” The passive—“to be survived”—is telling. The same poem continues: “You let all the parts of that thing you would / cut out of you enter your poem because / enacting there all its parts allowed you / the illusion you could cut it from your soul.” As in “Marilyn Monroe,” transformation finally seems illusory, as does freedom; culture, as much as biology, seems to be destiny. Still—while in some poems (“Like Lightning across an Open Field” or “The Old Man at the Wheel”) this sounds deplorable—in other poems (for instance, “You Cannot Rest”) we’re told “you court the world by enacting yet once / more the ecstatic rituals of enthrallment.” To be “enthralled” suggests a lack of freedom, but also suggests what is alluring and seductive; not surprisingly, the slightly later poem is in fact called “Seduction.”

The question raised most pressingly in this volume is whether writing or poetry can overcome this constant sense of rehearsing old stories, writing or living stories not one’s own. The poem “Little O” overtly asks whether writing is itself not just a rehearsal. The title and notes send us back to Henry V’s reference to the Globe Theater, and perhaps to The Tempest’s image of life as a dream, as the poem examines a disgust

The very spacing of the lines on the page “mirror” the interior argument over the adequacy of language. The poem (in fragmented sections) tends toward couplets so that the passages where single lines have no answering second line “mirror” the faltering of thought or, to quote Bidart, “the topography of a dilemma.” But of course Bidart’s language here does manage to represent the sensed failures of language.

If “Little O” plays out its questions about agency in life and poetry in a more abstract register, many of the poems again replay such questions with more personalized intimacy. For example, the sestina “If See No End in Is” ends:

“If See No End in Is” is about death as well as about socially fraught desires and the possibility or lack thereof of reinventing the self. Once more, Bidart’s ability with his craft is evident; the relentless form of the sestina counters the suggestion that the future might be different. At the same time, the repetitions in a sestina are not at first audible to a reader, which is to say the intricacy of the pattern does not allow a reader’s ear to know what sound or word will appear where. Formally, we have what might be called a figure of sneaky necessity, or perhaps quirky or mercurial necessity, finally leaving open the possibility that changes might be rung on old patterns.

The final poem of Watching the Spring Festival, “Collector,” describes “vessels” (presumably including the poems we are reading) as that “by which the voices of / the dead are alive again”—although of course like songs (counting “Hymn” three of the poems are overtly called songs) or film or anything with a preset pattern, reanimating the dead involves adhering to certain givens, to necessity. The poem concludes with “each life writhing to / elude what it has made,” although it may end with more optimism about what can be eluded: festivals may be set forms; they may be viewed by those who cannot act even in those forms; but a spring festival is nonetheless a celebration of a season of rebirth. The tone of voice at the end of the poem and the book is not ringing optimism; it sounds more like a speaker hoping against hope. Nonetheless, the final word in the book (not counting the notes, although the notes as mentioned often reinscribe the poems’ debts) is “seeds.” The hope, however tenuous, seems to be that one can break through to something worthwhile, or perhaps simply sustain the illusion—maybe a necessary illusion—that lives can be reconstructed and that poetry can be a vehicle of such transformation:

Like Bidart’s Watching the Spring Festival, Richard Tillinghast’s The New Life (also his seventh poetry collection) is about the binds of history, including literary history, about love and desire, and in the process an exploration of the possibility of renewal. The tone, however, is quite different despite the common turn to medieval courtliness (not, in Tillinghast, in China, but with reference to Dante, and with a late Victorian picture of a knight and lady on the book’s cover). Tillinghast’s title poem opens his collection with an image that is neither Bidart’s fretful exploration of necessity nor quite Dante’s celebration of a higher love:

We can tell that Tillinghast’s new life is not Dante’s because—although the first section of the volume includes a translation of a section of Dante’s La Vita Nuova—there are also poems of more contemporary, more personal memory, which hover between ­retrospect (both personal and, with the medievalism, cultural) and figures of divesting the self of old ties, as in “The New Life,” where the speaker seems to have left a marriage and home and abandoned most worldly goods, to end with an image that half bespeaks intimate connection; half, exilic desolation.

Given the references to Dante (if not to the Divine Comedy) and the volume’s three sections, one cannot help but ask whether section one is an inferno. The answer seems to be: not really, especially not given the apostrophes to lovers there, such as the tenderness of the aubade called “How the Day Began”: “And then what happened, darling? / You sidled alongside the length of my body / and we went back to sleep for a while.” There is also the exuberance of “A Saxophone Blew,” on listening to the radio play a song—admittedly and surprisingly a song about Joan of Arc’s “marriage” with martyrdom—that then changes the way the world is seen, explicitly an effect of poetry, as the speaker says he swings “round bends in the road / singing, plunging headlong into [his] new life.”

Nor is the second section all purgatorial atonement, although it includes some elegies and two poems entitled “My Guardian Angel” and “Arrival,” which briefly appear to figure some sort of ascent. Still, the angel is described not only as “real” but as “a mensch” (a lovely choice of un-Dantesque diction), and “Arrival” is decidedly domestic and secular in its setting, the speaker marveling that a lover has entrusted her future:

If the architecture of the poetic world in The New Life is not Dante’s, the book nonetheless is organized (like the physical world in which it is ultimately embedded) by seasonal cycles, beginning with the autumnal, moving through winterscapes, and ending with summer. The final poem in the second section draws our attention to this thematic highlighting of seasonality with “snowflakes / printing the book of your hours” in “Snowflakes & a Jazz Waltz,” a focus which along with the repeated images—such as fountains and water, fountain pens—makes the poetic landscapes resonate with one another. Such resonances imbue the repeated images with a gathering emotional weight and, along with the images of a yearly cycle, trace something like the transformations which Bidart hopes might be found in the process of writing, but with perhaps more optimism. To quote Tillinghast (from an essay reprinted in Poetry and What Is Real): “Witnessing the transubstantiation of place through the written word has remained for me a thrilling and almost holy experience.”

In line with this belief in poetic transubstantiation, many of the poems in The New Life present a sense of the numinous in the simple, mixing language with what language describes, conflating inner and outer, as in “Cabbage”:

And there’s a similar simplicity in “Eclogue,” as well as a similar sense that the language is trying if not to transmute at least to match—rather than simply represent­—the season on which it draws:

Etymologically, of course, stanzas are airy rooms. Thus The New Life appears to open a linguistic space in which, momentarily, to dwell or perhaps to which to retreat. The settings are not all bucolic, by any means. As in Tillinghast’s earlier volumes, there are images of and meditations on Istanbul and empire and references to urban blight. Still, for the most part—and in contrast to Bidart’s anguish over “the banality of naturalistic / representation”—Tillinghast’s voice in this collection focuses on the ways in which poetry might “take away / the marks made on the heart by treachery / and blandness and stupidity.”

Ultimately, as in “Like One Who Is New in Paradise,” Tillinghast proclaims he is “trying to speak the language I hear, / drinking from a fountain ostensibly dry.” Dante saw language as inadequate because he saw the transcendent realm as beyond human language; Tillinghast’s “pilgrimage”—and theologically as well as literally those on pilgrimage are, like Dante, in exile until they arrive at their destination—is presented as grappling with language not because it is inadequate to that which it describes but because what it seeks is “ostensibly” dry. “Ostensibly” seems to be a carefully chosen word. The poem does not suggest that what is sought is just an illusion (as Bidart’s voyeurs and moviegoers would have it); Tillinghast’s “fountain” brings to mind not only bodily sustenance and possible spiritual transcendence, but (again) poetry, like the cold water of Sappho’s knowledge (in “The Face of Sappho”) or the repeated image of the “fountain pen.” And at least on second reading, the speaker in “Like One Who Is New in Paradise” is at least “like” someone remade—new in, not just new to, “paradise.” That said, the image of dryness still intimates that outward appearances, presumably including poetic tropes, may have pull dates. Part of Tillinghast’s project, then, is making things new like “the stones of an old tower destroyed and rebuilt” to quote from “What the Gypsy Woman Told Me,” a poem that also celebrates love and life surfacing “like a spring or holy well” from which the speaker and his new love drink. In short, the poems both describe and enact giving what might otherwise seem tired a new currency—a “currency of passage”—and trying not just to live but to make a life in exile.

 
If Bidart both insists on and finds suspect his attempts at transformation (poetic, personal, and spiritual) while Tillinghast practices a legerdemain that looks like transformation against all the odds, Kimberly Johnson—a younger poet—writes poems in which transubstantiation is framed more traditionally, while the title of her book (like the cover image, from the seventeenth-century Emblemata Sacra) and her use of archaisms (she is a Renaissance scholar and translator of Virgil’s Georgics) identify her, too, as a pilgrim of sorts. Johnson’s title—a metaphorical god—might at first seem ambiguous: Is the god of the title just a metaphor? Or is Johnson’s god given to waxing metaphorical? One is reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s letter (to ‘Hetty’ Hester, in 1955) in which she replies to Mary McCarthy’s description of the Holy Ghost as a symbol, if a good one, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”

As with McCarthy and Bidart (and, more, Dante), the world and words may be at a distance from what this poet desires—the volume open with a quotation from Augustine, about dwelling “in regione dissimilitudinis” (“in a region of unlikeness”)—but neither Johnson’s nor her readers’ response would quite be to say “to hell with it.” Indeed, a second epigraph is from John Donne, about his as both “a literall God” and one who uses figures and “fetch[es] remote and precious metaphors.” Both aspects of Donne’s deity inform Johnson’s poems, although the desire for the transcendent itself and for the metaphorical do not always rest easily together.

Several of the poems in a metaphorical god suggest that one way to make a desert—the modern world, the inner life of twenty-first century citizens, and the geographical actuality of the western United States in which the poems are set—bloom is to use lush language. The book opens with an “Epilogue” that includes sackbuts and notes “we branked / the troubadours. . . . This turvied world our work,” ending with an image of the poem as (among other things) “a little tomb, but flashy while it lasts”—quite unlike Tillinghast’s airy rooms. In “Epilogue,” the play of sound (and sound or music is the poem’s central image) carries the poem, since few readers can be counted on to know that “brank” means “to bridle” or “to strut or show off on parade,” and “turvy” (from “turf”) means “buried” or “adorned.” Yet the sense of adornment is made clear by the ornate diction, even as one suspects that for most readers the darker undertones of restraining or burying are also figured in the opacity of the words. Moreover, the “little tomb” seems to come from Abraham Cowley’s 1656 preface, in which he dismisses those who think “a vast heap of Stones or Rubbish a better Monument, than a little Tomb of Marble” and goes on to talk about his urge to take his own and others’ work and “prune and lop away” all unnecessary words, self-consciously, if obliquely, raising the question of why the lushness of language in Johnson’s poem is necessary.

Most interestingly, much of Johnson’s book expresses an urge to do its own pruning and lopping, not quite, as in Tillinghast, to take pleasure in “airy spaces,” which “the mind / prunes from nature,” but rather to get rid of adornment or excess in order to find or even transcend what one poem—“Easter, Looking Westward”—calls “the unelaborated thing.” “Ash Garden,” similarly, opens: “Spring begins in a fatness of front lawns, / but not mine. I whose blowtorch urge approaches / the ascetic.” The poem continues:

The unfamiliar diction here seems a way of erasing meaning and the world, and so a way of emphasizing unlikeness. Erotic desire is also figured, but, as in Augustine, it seems primarily to gesture toward spiritual thirst (as in “Aubade,” which ends: “O desert, desert, my very dirt / parches for you”). Finally, then, the extravagance of the language works both with and against the “lenten aesthetic” to which the poems lay claim; as “Goodfriday” notes, there is both “the pleasure of unlikeness, [and] the prick / of unlikeness.”

A number of Johnson’s poems are identified as psalms (and divinations and odes) by title, all forms of voicing desire, or praise, all forms traditionally related to hymns, at the same time that the poems call attention to the mortal nature of the flesh, as in “Ode on My Belly Button,” “Ode on My Episiotomy,” “Ode on My Appendix,” and “Ode on My Cancer.” As “The Doctrine of Signatures” puts it: “the body makes monsters of us all.” Not all bodies are treated quite so literally, however. “Sweet Incendiary” draws our attention to Saint Teresa of Avila, a type of how bodies might equally (if still allegorically) figure grace; the poem voices the desire for “an obvious angel,” ending:

Johnson’s poems, it seems, display or construct their “own shimmer” in order to reach through or beyond language toward communion, what “Ortolan” calls the “flutter of a whole life / on the tongue . . . for eating utterly transformed.”

Unlike Bidart’s hope that poetry might offer some way around the barrier between desire and what is desired or Tillinghast’s journey toward the renewal of language in a world that offers few tools for renewal (fountains and fountain pens are both strikingly images out of sync with modern life), Johnson, it seems, offers poetry as vocation in the older sense of the word, as calling. There are moments of doubt throughout—as in “Easter, Looking Westward,” where she worries her language is “always the forced apotheosis, / every least sparrow a visible sign, / strong-arming water to wine,” and elsewhere the poems fret about how the physical can both embody and thwart the spirit—but doubt is itself a recognizable form of religious feeling.

 
It is easy to imagine that the poems in Kay Ryan’s The Niag­ara River (her sixth volume of poetry) sound as if she had accomplished the pruning for which Johnson calls. Ryan’s sparse lines work as insistently with sound as Johnson’s poems do, although most often the diction is not early modern but contemporary American and idiomatic. “The Best of It,” for instance, reads in its entirety:

The poem’s slant rhyme, assonance, and alliteration—“get,” “it,” “foot” or “making,” “matter,” “acre” or “flourishes” and “nourish us”—are humorous. Yet the poem also interrogates what we mean when we say, “Make the best of it.” Rejoice in what won’t do? Accept defeat? Yet of course the poem makes quite a bit—if not “making the best”—of the common expression it explores in a mere thirteen short lines.

Set against Johnson’s metaphysical conceits and elaborate diction, Ryan’s style is almost deceptively simple: “carved up / or pared down.” Moreover, instead of suspecting as Johnson does that she has “jerry-built epiphany” or is “strong-arming water to wine,” Ryan’s “Weak Forces” celebrates a “weak faith” in and of:

The modesty of what is claimed—and again the attention to sound or the humor, as in the play on “elective affinities”—makes Ryan’s “glowy spots” all the more seductive. The poems are often moving without (to quote “Shipwreck”) being “stagey,” and they move in the sense of unfolding by taking language literally—at its word—as in “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard,” which suggests that lives should leave marks on literal, material things (paths, the places one stands while doing daily chores, china knobs, light switches). By the end of the poem, hardness doesn’t mean “difficulty,” although the poem both enacts and celebrates how lives—“grand and / damaging” (emphasis added)—are intertwined with the material world, which in turn carries traces of and ultimately memorializes those lives. In the process, “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” reveals both the complexity of ordinary language and the existence of smaller, often unnoticed, modes of feeling. Other poems—such as “The Other Shoe,” “Expectations,” “Almost without Surface,” or “Hide and Seek”—similarly celebrate often-unnoticed modes of feeling, in particular small moments of anticipation.

It is not that Ryan eschews epiphany; “glowy spots” are, it seems, epiphanic, as in “The Light of Interiors,” which ends with a “sourceless texture which, / when mixed with silence, / makes of a simple / table with flowers / an island.” “The Light of Interiors” is composed of only two sentences, the second of which wends its way through nineteen lines to end with the lines just quoted (in which “silence” is made present by the punctuation, the syntax, and the line breaks); the texture, in other words, is the poem’s verbal texture; the source of this glowy island, something other than Johnson’s higher source. The poems are also quieter than Johnson’s, even as they come by a process of accrual to seem as engaged with what matters or, more accurately, with why things matter. As Ryan puts it in “Still Life, with Her Things,” there is a light (in context, clearly a natural, worldly light) that “encouraged the Dutch / to paint objects as though / they were grace—.” The poem ends with a simple list of nouns, objects, “each / the reliquary / of itself.” For Ryan, it seems, materiality, not transformation or transubstantiation, is at issue.

In a discussion sponsored by the Academy of American Poets (quoted in the Spring 2008 issue of American Poet) Ryan remarked: “To use a word is to take a step into a jungle of forking paths.” Although Frost’s roads (taken and not taken) play at the edges of Ryan’s comment (as in several of the poems in The Niag­ara River), Ryan’s “jungle” may be the more salient image. The book opens with a poem in which the Niagara—not the falls of the typical natural sublime—is domesticated, made the setting of a dinner party, suggesting finally the instability of that on which we found our domestic lives. “Backward Miracle” restates the case, offering as the miracle something

Bidart worries about the superficiality of words; Tillinghast wants stanzas carved from nature pruned, words that will equal or (to echo Ryan’s strategy of taking phrases literally) give place to the world; Johnson shakes words, as if she could force spirit to reveal itself. Ryan, while also using the language of transubstantiation, asks us to follow her as she treks through the complexities of language, along the way celebrating—or longing for—rare and perhaps miraculous moments in which the things of the world might hold (that is, be still) or be held in language as themselves.

While the complexities of language and language’s complicated and shifting embeddedness in history are, as in the other volumes discussed here, everywhere evident in C. S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style, he does not long to (or perhaps does not think one can) escape from such complications. “Vernacular Examples,” the second piece in the book, announces “I was two men”; by page fifteen, we encounter the title “Two Directions,” after which, in “Day Song,” Giscombe writes: “To me half a belief’s better by far or one broken into halves.” More often, however, Prairie Style offers far more than two directions, beliefs, voices, or selves. Indeed, it is difficult to talk briefly about Giscombe’s book since any given page reaches out not only toward other parts of the book, but also toward history, geography, speech, and (relatedly) etymology.

Although the book has at first four apparently discrete sections— “Nameless,” “Inland,” “Indianapolis, Indiana,” and “Notes on Region,” the first and last accompanied by visual images (in the last case, an image of a dictionary entry with an illustration of a cornet)—composed of what look on the page at first like prose poems, this is not a collection but a whole (although the “Inland” series was earlier published separately by Renee Gladman in the Leroy chapbook series). For example, there are six poems (not counting “Afro-Prairie”) called “Prairie Style,” which revisit or repeat, first, a reference to Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for houses for “servantless families” as well as the physical reality and flatness of midwestern prairies; as Giscombe punningly writes (twice), he is constantly questioning if also ­constantly locating himself in midwestern landscapes, and so “fielding the question” (emphasis added). But places, like repetitions—tacitly likened to covers of songs—also change both as context changes and as the speaker changes, so that finally wholeness is not quite the right image to invoke when talking about Prairie Style.

Giscombe writes in “Negromania, Negrophilia, Negrophobia”: “shape’s just patter to me,” and he says also in “Lazy Man’s Load,” “I like coherence well enough but am by nature more articulate than dependable.” A suspicion of wholeness underlies both remarks, but typically, too, we are invited to consider or reconsider every word we are given. Like wholeness, or factuality, or trains of thought (all concepts to which the book keeps returning, all finally both literal and emblematic), “coherence” is not missing from these poems; indeed, the midpoint of the volume is slyly marked by a poem called “The Story Thus Far,” suggesting a clearly charted—a coherent—shape to Prairie Style. Yet for all that coherence, the claim to be “articulate” and the distinction between being articulate and being coherent raises the specter (the word—both racial and locational—used in the book is “haunt”) of the exclusions as well as inclusion coherence entails. The claim to be “articulate,” on the other hand, calls our attention to the inflections that mark (and can change the meaning of) speech and to how things are put together, things like bodies (by joints) or stories or, for that matter, trains.

Prairie Style overtly reminds its readers that stories and trains can both be articulated; they take you from one place to another, and, as we are told in “Three Dreams,” although they have set destinations, there’s a distinction between knowing where and knowing how a trip will go. What it means to be anything, including articulate “by nature” is also turned over (if not overturned) in these meditations, or, perhaps more precisely, improvisations. As Giscombe writes in “I-70 between Dayton and East Saint Louis, Westbound Lanes,” “I’d essay,” suggesting the repeated approaches or attempts that etymologically define essays. Moreover, the song “Nature Boy,” written by eden ahbez—repeatedly covered, most famously by Nat King Cole but also by John Coltrane and Miles Davis—not only provides the title for (or is “covered” by) one poem; its lyrics appear and reappear in other poems and titles, including but not limited to “Far,” “Very Far,” “The Story So Far,” and, in the poem called “Lazy Man’s Load,” overtly in the line: “I wandered near and very far.” So, at least on a second reading, the claim to be “by nature . . . articulate” is not so simple, though it is certainly an articulate claim. The very title of “Lazy Man’s Load” is loaded, not just because laziness is a concept repeatedly revisited throughout Prairie Style, but because the title draws on a cultural commonplace. A “lazy man’s load”—as one might not expect if one did not know the term—is heavy. Lazy workers, so the phrase has it, make as few trips as possible. The analogue with how each word, including “lazy,” in Prairie Style carries a lot of weight is clear.

Finally Prairie Style visits and revisits a wide range of interrelated concerns: the erotic, love and pleasure (we are told of the lazy man, “he and pleasure share a language”), memory and dwelling, as well as place. Yet it is not so much what these poems are about as the way in which thought unfolds that may matter most. To quote “Canadian Nights,” “the transition is happiness.” Even so, the poems are firmly grounded, most often in the midwest. Early in the volume, in “Far,” we meet real animals of the prairie, or perhaps “Afro-Prairie,” as Giscombe emphasizes the “simple fact” of “Vulpes fulva,” or foxes. Typically, however, the fox is quickly aligned with “sudden appearances, big like an impulse,” and with the fox of story. “Far” ends noting: “Mistah Fox arriving avec luggage, sans luggage.” It may be undesirable, and is certainly impossible in a short review, to “unpack” all the luggage and facts, given the caution that “location is where you stop reading,” which in part implies that to locate one’s self (among other things, in this book) is to impose a shape on what is not over (and ignoring for the moment the caution’s echo of Dante’s Francesca, who speaks of the twinned relationship and distinction between reading about love and loving).

Writing sentences thick with parenthetical asides, as this review shows, is how one is invited to think with the poems in Prairie Style. This is true because instead of yearning to prune things down to essentials or seeking moments of rest, as Johnson, Tillinghast, and Ryan do, Giscombe multiplies associations, working through not only textual but extraliterary resonances. For example, the first page of “I-70 between Dayton and East Saint Louis, Westbound Lanes” (a title that suggests both being in transit and being in a quite specific and specifically detailed location) places the speaker between Little Egypt, Prairie du Chien (pronounced in the region, “prayery do sheen”) and the Robert Taylor Homes, which is to say a public housing project; the second page of “I-70 between Dayton and East Saint Louis, Westbound Lanes” reads as follows:

The first sentence above, like the arches, reaches both back to the list of places like Little Egypt and Prairie du Chien and forward to the “minor harmony” of the two arches. That is, like the earlier-mentioned foxes, these places, including the titular interstate, are all quite real. Further, the alliterated h, t, g, and f sounds, the slant rhyme (“Haute” and “forget”), and the dactylic cadences call to mind the sound of a train, just as the list of places mimes a conductor’s announcement of actual train stations. At the same time, the places are culturally suggestive: Egypt is a place of exile and the associations, bolstered by the sound of “prayer” in the vernacular pronunciation of “Prairie du Chien,” themselves are melancholic minor harmonies, like the “sheen” local pronunciation gives to the French word for dog (“chien”) and not unlike Ryan’s “glowy spots” or Tillinghast’s verbal transubstantiation.

Yet there is also a further, more historical reality to these places. Little Egypt—the southernmost tip of Illinois—by most accounts received its nickname in the Civil War era, being in a free state, but an area where slavery was practiced (among other things, because of the salt mines near the ironically named town of Equality). It is mentioned in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The meaning of the name, Little Egypt, was later recast several times, one explanation pointing to grain produced in the region and recalling Jacob’s sons going to Egypt to survive a famine (a Biblical story with its own references to slavery, although presumably this was not consciously being invoked by the local historians who reinvented the origins of the name). Similarly, Effingham (an historically important railway junction at the edge of Little Egypt) is a memorable town not just because of the way it calls to mind the euphemistic “effing”—an “effing town”—or sounds like the huffing of a locomotive’s engine—but also presumably because (despite the fact that its population is neither affluent nor ethnically diverse) it calls itself “The Crossroads of Opportunity.” What is impressive is that none of these facts shows up in the poems themselves. Nor are they underlined in appended notes. The book—moving as it is without any extraliterary knowledge—is even more affecting with such cultural knowledge, which it invites readers to find on their own. Indeed—unlike Bidart and Johnson, who include notes that point toward their sources—Giscombe has in lieu of notes an extended prefatory series of acknowledgments, in which he mentions people, places (including the fact that portions of Prairie Style “were written on Amtrak”), books (including dictionaries), and conversations. Reading the acknowledgments places what follows in conversation with multiple sources, and calls readers not only to hear the internal resonances in the book but also to turn outward, along with Giscombe, to the physical and historical world.

One of the pieces in Prairie Style is called “Palaver,” which means idle chat but also carries the connotation of chatting someone up; the word shows up as well in one of Giscombe’s earlier volumes (Giscome Road), and he surely knows its etymology, coming from the Portuguese as a traders’ term for negotiations with West Africans and more distantly related to the Latin “parabola” meaning “comparison.” In Prairie Style’s “Cry Me a River,” Giscombe writes that “value exists in relation to opportunities for exchange,” alluding in his acknowledgments also to Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, which defines metaphor as a device for seeing something in terms of something else or a carrying-over of a term from one realm into another (necessarily involving some incongruity). Poetry, then, for Giscombe seems to be a series of metaphors in Burke’s sense of the word—not Bidart’s desire to transcend or reconstruct, nor Tillinghast’s and Ryan’s related desires to carve out a temporary, single, or singular space in which to breathe, nor Johnson’s more troubled or at least differently grounded argument with metaphor, which is to say unlikeness. Giscombe’s work stands out in his willingness to place everything, including places, in more than one light or language—and to define such restlessness as pleasure; the other four writers seem to be in search of rest, not restlessness. And yet, all five of the books here reviewed make vivid the sense that poems involve negotiations with the world as well as with others who may speak different languages—or the same language differently—and the related sense that poetic exchanges, operating in an economy outside of the usual twenty-first century financial exchanges, might matter. It is difficult after reading these volumes not to believe that the crossroads of opportunity lie somewhere other than Effingham.