Rising and Falling on the Break: A Review of Lawrence Raab's APRIL AT THE RUINS
The poems in Lawrence Raab’s most recent collection, April at the Ruins, are a kind of plainsong, or plainchant. Like plainsong, the words, the lines on every page are characterized by a singular melody, to be sung without accompaniment. Each poem’s pulse is irregular, the rhythm free, not structured under more formal constraints. They are both of and outside of time, ancient and timeless, reaching us from far away in every direction in their monophonic resonance. The poems, in language stripped of its peculiarities, weave in and out of our lives, connecting the stories and myths that tether us to emergent truths we are unable to escape, and confirm our failings of imagination the harder we try. Raab knows there are no new stories to be told, just new ways of experiencing how we know them. The poems in this collection are uncluttered by repeating refrains and unwavering in their singular devotion to acknowledge the darkness and (un)/cover our unrelenting presence in it.
Forests appear in countless works of literature. The forest is a topos, whose physical boundaries carry less literary value. Meaning, the forest is a domain of experiences and of transformation and any physical limits we may experience are essentially meaningless except for its threshold. It is in the dark forest, the darkness inside us, where we must venture to find ourselves: it is the belly of the whale; a cave of shadows. In the cedar forest, Gilgamesh defeats Humbaba in pursuit of immortality. In Little Red Riding Hood, a girl and her grandmother are swallowed whole by a wolf before being saved by the huntsman. In Raab’s “After the Sky Had Fallen” we are thrust to the forest’s threshold, just moments after Foxy Loxy (or Fox-Lox, or Raev Skraev) has lured everyone into his cave beyond the forest’s edge and devoured them, “After which the thatch / of night surrounds [us] / the lost children.” It is impossible to ignore the number of ways we encounter the trees throughout the book. Enough that we wonder at the poet’s truest reasons.
It is not just the edge of forests that the reader must concern themselves with. In “A Little Music” (dedicated to the poet Stephen Dunn) we find the speaker restless at the edge of the poetic moment, ready to be transformed, where “…all the poems / about death had been written,” and where “…all the poems of the future / had exhausted us.” The speaker realizes the transformative moment they are seeking remains unchanged whether it reaches them from “an ancient city” or is “mixing / with the murmur of the sea.” The poem is always reaching them from a recent moment in time other than this one, as a song, as “a little music [arriving] from far away.” And what they assumed was theirs to give, a gift, a chance to give their reader one more opportunity “to walk out into a meadow / of improbable beauty” was never, in fact, theirs, and has always been becoming theirs—not a thing they can impart or teach, but a thing which they have always been confirming by virtue of attempting to give it away. The thresholds are strikingly familiar, and we must wonder then what’s left of wonder, if its unattainable position at the horizon of our understanding is meant to forever elude us.
Raab further threads pasts into presents in the title poem, “April at the Ruins,” a nod to a poem by the same name by H.R. Kent (and to Kent’s nod to Wordsworth) in which we are once again (re)visited by “a little music which arrives from far away.” In Kent’s poem by the same name, we are “…pilgrims / hauling our restlessness through the marigolds,” in awe of nature’s emergence, extoling the flowers. By the time the poem reaches us through Raab’s singular melody, we are relieved of Kent’s “nostalgia / for this place . . . as we walk away from earth,” April truly at the ruins, seemingly lamenting its own annual re-emergence:
In the early morning, frost catches
hold of the new buds that dared
to open. Now, thinks the tree,
I’m going to have to do this all over,
but the leaves will be smaller,
and more vulnerable
Each of us/in each of us is an April at the ruins, never released from all manners of emergence(y), though we are expected to mistake it for anew every time.
At last, in “Stopping by Woods,” we find Raab in conversation with the ghost of Frost, “not far from those trees / that seem to be hiding something.” Here, the speaker acknowledges the trees, the moment, the as of yet experienced transformative experience like a God watching their creation discover what they’ve known will be discovered by their creation all along. But what does it matter either way? The speaker acknowledges the division between what we feel ought to be happening and whether anything ought to happen at all, shattering the illusion about a poem’s purpose, about a poem’s position as transformative experience, as forest. “But this is a poem,” the speaker says, “not life, where nothing / has to add up,” and why we find ourselves expecting we’ll “be given / at the end some useful idea / about duty or time.” And, despite his obvious objections, the irony is we are, and that is the mastery of Raab’s poetry, and of this collection, where we are “watching the snow, lovely / as it is, falling, / and continuing to fall,” and will always be falling if we ask it to.
April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab is a Neo-Romantic excursion, replete with forests, dark shadows, and ancient echoings. However, the literary ruins we revisit throughout speak of unchanging realms within us we must encounter even if darkness is the outcome and even if the artifice of the “poetic moment” can no longer transform. We are once and for all, with each plainchant, sung without accompaniment, relieved the burden of transposing wonder onto the world. And we are better armed for the task for having spent time here, each poem singular in voice, irregular and free, rising and falling on the break of the line.
