Have Grief, Will Travel: A Review of 2 A.M. WITH KEATS by Eileen Cleary

2 a.m. with Keats records Eileen Cleary’s earthbound efforts to communicate with her beloved/mentor, deceased poet Lucie Brock-Broido. This thin body of lyric poems unveils themes of grief, loss, and loneliness. Cleary’s prominent use of silence, achieved in part by superimposing inky language against a blanched-out landscape, gives voice to, if you will, an already established sense of unworldliness through the performance of listening. In this way, Cleary creates a two-fold dimensionality in her poems. This landscape does not stop at itself; in fact, the silence it creates necessarily transcends the limitations of convention and thought. It becomes the space that holds the erased: Cleary’s beloved. In this liminal space, the poet yearns, hurts, and presses for the retrieval of her beloved. At the mouth of this portal to the afterlife, (which we learn is unboundaried, is everywhere) the author dialogues, listens, and waits. Cleary is both witness and interlocutor, a player in her own play. We, too, are invited to participate in this performance. As a result, we directly experience Cleary’s emotions with an immediacy as if they are our own. These interstitial spaces are arguably most exciting when Cleary utilizes call and response, a form that recedes and expands our unconscious, where we can neither be singular or indifferent. When John Keats pirates the space that Cleary opens, the expectation of both speaker and reader are subverted. The spirit of Keats acts as veil: he is an obstruction to Cleary’s purpose (to reach Brock-Broido). Although the poetry of Keats bridges the two on earth, the character of Keats’ ghost, contaminates Cleary’s objective. To be sure, the process of connecting with the dead is easily fraught with distractions and detours. John Keats, oddly comforting to Cleary, serves as both Cleary’s and Brock-Broido’s stand-in or wingman. He is  revelator of otherwise personal information about their relationship because Cleary cannot speak it, and Brock-Broido is erased:

(        )

I’m not your first
platonic lover.
You’re not mine.

(         )

During winter, mine read
to me—her Harvard
sweats awkwardly tied,
and she wanted to last
like the Eucharist—
and be preserved in vellum. 

Although the next stanza intentionally shifts, “Let’s think of something else,” Cleary knows that the process continues, and that she must rip through the veil.

“2 a.m. with Keats” is the table piece of the eponymous collection. There is an otherworldly feel to its 53 brief stanzas, each marked by open and closed parenthesis—no numerals—creating a hollowness that amplifies Keats’ visitation:

Your apparition sings
in the corner of my room—
then listens, your ear warm
and veined, trained toward me.

(      )

Cleary suggests that there is no need for numbers, or flesh for that matter. The speaker is surprised by the ghost of Keats. After all, it is not this poet but the poet-mentor for whom Cleary yearns:

(      )

How is that you made
your way to me? Are you
interplanetary? Have you
cut through elderberry?

(      )

Keats is the wrong one and Cleary asks the wrong questions: She is silenced by the trauma of loss. Keats has a message from Brock-Broido. Why does Cleary interrupt him?

(      )

Lucie said she—
I thought you might be her.
Which makes this the first night of peace.
The cattle at the fence, breach—
chew the same grasses
while I absorb what consumes you.

(      )

Here, the language shifts to rhyme which disturbs the poem’s tone. Is this caused by the deteriorating energy of the spirit? Cleary’s inaccurate translation of the ghost? Or is it simply form and content marrying? Here, dialogue ownership blurs. There is beauty and truth in the collapse of internal structure: Singular becomes both, or delightfully many. Throughout 2 a.m. with Keats, Cleary erases the boundaries of both voice and body while giving shape to the overlapping realities that are at play. The author’s dialogue echoes similar metaphysical questions in Hamlet as exemplified in this ghost scene:

Enter Ghost

Marcellus
Peace, break thee off! Look where it come again.
Barnardo
In the same figure like the King that’s dead.
Marcellus
Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio.
Barnardo
Looks he not like the King?  Mark it, Horatio.
Horatio
Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.
Barnardo
It would be spoke to.
Marcellus
Speak to it, Horatio.

Hamlet I.1. 47-53.

Like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, and as the dead who visit earth, Cleary has tremendous energy which is required of her to discern between that which she hears as herself and that which she hears as spirit. Sadly, like so many of us, Cleary does not yet trust the dead or herself, “I can’t convince myself that it’s you.”

By engaging Keats, who is Brock-Broido’s gatekeeper of sorts, Cleary will see her Beloved. The beauty of Cleary’s art is that she trusts the process of writing, of poetry, and of getting through to the one she loves. 2 a.m. with Keats subverts the conventional paradigm of death-after-death by addressing the imaginary wall that separates us from the “undiscovered country.” Cleary teaches the reader that the undiscovered country exists, and we can access it to gain comfort from those we loved who live there now.  

In “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Carl Jung writes about his experiments with the anima:

“The psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis is found in the insane…But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.”

Cleary, like Jung, bypasses psychosis through the force of her “mythopoeic imagination.” Imagination does not cause Cleary to see falsely, it is a vehicle to communicate with her beloved. William Blake teaches us to “look through it, not at it,” and Cleary does. Her imagination is fierce as her desire.

Jung continues:

“Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious” (my italics).

Jung’s statement clarifies the significance of Cleary’s work which reminds us that the imagination is omnipresent and cannot be compromised.

Two a.m. with Keats is an interactive five-dimensional roadmap that may save our lives. Cleary’s fierce grief-journey is medicine not just for those who grieve;  it is for those who are oppressed by the byproducts of hyper-capitalism, namely fear, isolation and dispossession. Indeed, we are all on an uncertain path, and Cleary, through example, reminds us to trust ourselves and life.