The Gavel’s Impact: On Wayne Miller’s We the Jury

This fifth book of poetry by Wayne Miller, a catalog and career spent making deceptively small observations and connecting the personal to the broad inertias of history, is not a volume that pretends to have answers. It does not propose an argument. It merely presents what is with an atmosphere of calm acceptance. Acceptance, of course, does not constitute agreement, and the poems in We the Jury embody critiques of human violence and American violence and how those relate to the slow violence of our dystopian present. At times, Miller pilots a morbid curiosity of biology, the distinction between “dying” and “dead.” The author juxtaposes this wider, more abstract philosophizing with more intimate fare: observations of personal loss, familial failures, images of renewal in the form of curious and needy children. Miller does not use this latter to dilute his book with something so misleading as hope. Rather, these poems unfold with the same sense of acceptance and acknowledgment as the rest of We the Jury: just as there has been a past, there will be a future. Together, these not-disparate elements showcase the current state of American humanity, a decrepit decadence that we share responsibility for even as it affects us. Despite the book’s ambitious scope, its language grounds the reader, rendering the poems and their big ideas relatable, accessible, in some cases indicting visitors to the page.

The book’s short, direct sentences work well to carry the heaviness of their meaning. With most poems made of short lines and broken into short free verse stanzas of varying length, these statements are given room to breathe, letting the collection become driven by atmosphere and implication. The author does not often have his poems deliver explicit judgment on their own, but their observations and presentation lead the reader to an intended conclusion—Miller positions his lens, and we see ourselves, from a handprint on a fogged window to contemplations of how the present will manifest as future history. The book is broken into four unnamed eight-poem sections (plus a cold open), and many of the poems are themselves sectioned, but the resulting effect is less about symbolizing ideas of division than about letting the poems’ straightforward observations and phrasing resonate into the blankness. Silence is a sonic tool, and white space has visual meaning, and Miller leverages these skillfully and confidently, directing readers’ attention to the spare yet self-assured language of his work.

We the Jury is a book best enjoyed in a single, reflective sitting—and surely repeat visits later on—from the collection’s opening pair of lines, which baldly couples capitalism and death, the author is, poem by poem, section by section, compiling new and recurring fascinations, directing attentions to unexplicated juxtapositions, delivered through profound and simple formulations. Though the focus and momentary topic are constantly shifting, the pace of the collection never feels rushed, thanks to the arrangement of lines and blankness, and the book achieves a unified, cumulative effect: no matter how we perceive them, the elements throughout this book are not unconnected. This is not a book about separation—IVF and rain and racism are all things that exist alongside one another.

In “Stages on a Journey Westward,” Miller reaches a contender for the core of the book: “Here in America / we are engines // drowning out what lies / beyond our interiors.” He quickly follows this section with an anecdote about a child defecating in a hotel pool. The attention given to intimate family moments, and the attention given to any subject that appears, shows that while individual things may capture our physical brains for a short time—often out of physical necessity—that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stops moving. This accumulation, “the weight of our entire existence”, comes to a head in the collection’s title poem. Just as all these topics exist simultaneously, all of us who live exist simultaneously, and the word “We” on the cover of the book, as well as throughout this poem, points us towards collective accountability. The world weighs on us, and we weigh on the world. In the face of dystopian stagnation wrought by our own humanness, any potential solution must come from the plural.

Making Ghosts Take Flesh: A Review of Eric Pankey's CROW-WORK

The title leads palindromatically:  CROW-WORK.

Caw and walk. It is as symmetric and opaque as the wings of the bird.

But as with all good repetitions, it involves a progression. We trade a “C” for a “K”. Crispin returns from the sea as Krispin, an imperceptible and apocryphal transition. The sea in Eric Pankey’s newest collection is the palimpsest canvas of the world, where bees invade a lion’s carcass, Buddha statutes are formed from ash of Junta sticks, “mountains wear down to silt. / The silt sifts into dunes. / Things move around—A snowdrift’s grammar.”

With these objects in tow, Pankey writes a meditation on the fringes of the material world where the divine effaces the poet at his work. The collection is richly allusory, with the opening poem describing a collapsing Buddha statue made by the artist Zhang Huan. These mystical considerations are accompanied by a poem on Venetian scenery, one on a still-life by Giorgio Morandi, and many others on foxes, crows, flowers, and the worlds they inhabit.

As the speaker interrogates these objects, we are invited to consider themes constant in Pankey’s work: encounters with the divine in the ragged wilds, how art can approach the phenomenal substance of the world in its semi-ordered but inscrutable forms, how the poet claims identity in this perpetual flux.

Each theme involves frustration and disenchantment. The reader is told to strike a rock in the desert, and nothing happens. Tension builds serially. “Rain. Clouds like ravens’ coats. A brawl of water over rock.” Images build upon image, often in fragments. Even when it rains, there is no climax or denouement, just constant flux: “Empty hills. Clouds bank against evening. / Voices in the distance, but no one in sight.”

This is the world the speaker is born into – frayed at the edges and needing stitches. Change abounds – again, mountains wear down to silt – but the transformation one longs for is always deferred to a later hour, a more distant hollow.

This evasiveness – evoking the Desert Fathers and Buddhist traditions – is the major substance of the book, challenging the will of the reader as much as it challenges the will of the speaker. Some poems bear fruit, “Record[ing] the last cache of August daylight / As the dark hollow of the plucked raspberry.”

Others offer chaff and stubble. However, the voice here is consistent, startling, and carries enough authority to keep us turning pages. Pankey is nimble, even virtuoso, with the meditative mode, and his voice is well-established. The tone of Reliquaries, Cenotaph, The Late Romances, and the whole line of Pankey’s prior publications is well-preserved in this volume. It is furthered in fragments and pieced-together poems in this volume, where variety creates a multi-tonal chord of harmony and disharmony.

This facility is seen, in “Fragment,” for example, where we’re shown an

Evening river.
A ladder of fire extinguished one rung at a time:

The yellow of buckthorn berry, burry hatchings on gold leaf.
The tense of pain is the present.

From rivers to ladders of fire, buckthorn, and pain, these lines slide so fluidly from one object to another. In doing so they employ a Hopkins-like alliteration and a renga-like fluidity. I am particularly smug with the ladder of fire image, which equally applies to the river-reflected sun receding – and thereby being extinguished, as it retreats up the river – as to the early-autumnal blaze of the buckthorn berry.

In this way, the topical fluidity builds amalgams to mirror those that Pankey honors in the natural world. In doing so, they create a renga-like continuity of form spread across a patchwork of changing subjects, that is pleasing and productive in this botanical world.

Not all of the poems are so abundant with fruit, but there is a clear reason for that. This book requires a journey through the desert. Deliverance cannot come immediately if it is to be felt completely. As a result, thematic turns arrive later than the hedonistic reader would like them to. Regardless, this is a consummate work.

Consider the speaker’s dilemma in “Ash,” where we are taken to “the threshold of the divine.” The holy white noise of silence transmutes to a songbird’s habitation in a thicket, and the Buddha made of joss sticks stands before us.

With each footfall, ash shifts. The Buddha crumbles
To face it, we efface it with our presence.

And more so, we are effaced by it:

… turn[ing] away as if
Not to see is the same as not being seen.
There was fire, but God was not the fire.

This mutual effacement spans the seventy pages of this book, wherein the divine constantly retreats as the speaker advances, and the speaker grows silent, losing words and identity in the presence of the divine. In that progression, one is stupefied, for the

“blaze [is] so bright it would silhouette one who stood before it.

A blaze so bright
It would hide one who stood behind it.”

The erasure is so total that the speaker must be forgiven for thinking his body is gone. In a grocery store, he knocks “[s]omeone’s … bag from her hands” and is heard in his apology, somehow. Somehow she “[h]ears [his words] and makes sense of them. / (that is, it seems, the miracle: that I am a body, not a ghost;…).” To a writer, that is miracle enough.

We should all be so attuned to that reality, and Pankey calls us to that acknowledgment. The world is real, our bodies too, no matter how ghost-like our thoughts and aspirations may be. In that reality, Pankey also calls us to the crow-work at hand: surveying the wreckage from above, gleaning through the chaff, and piecing together our stories from mere vestiges of the original text.

Collecting Crumbs in the Poetry of Arlene Kim

There is bad in the wood

(this is where children get lost
for good)…

Morsels of dialogue appear scattered in sections of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?. A path that poet Arlene Kim marks in the undergrowth.  The echo of warnings.  Crumbs to follow when we’re lost and found and lost again in the woods.

What lies ahead are birds who cannot be trusted, “camps of teeth,” and trees who whisper to the handle of the ax, “you’re one of us.”  These woods of migration, of Korea, of war “when all the Mothers left,” of making and unmaking family.

Borrowing from Korean folktales and traditions and the work of Keats, Akhmatova and Celan, Kim tells us stories of heartache, abandonment and dismemberment.  She inhabits  the voices of Daughter, Sister, Turtle, Chorus, among others, who are, at times, one in the same.  In the woods, these voices warn and give directions.  They question lineage and mourn the echoes of its absence.  In “Season of Frogs,” the Chorus gives a dirge:

At night we sing all our questions to the trees:
Who widowed the mothers?  Who ate up the husbands? Who
left us
with just this crippling cry?
More things than hawks can steal.
Why did you leave us, Mother?  Why did you not try harder
to sew
the song of you
firmly to our tongues?

Daughter/Sister/Girl attach and cleave pieces of the dismembered body in order to remember (and forget) her family, country and history.  The “single long braid” is a “partial cutting, imperfect collection.”  From “Exhibit A: Archive”:

Mother lent us her hair for exhibit.  It grew the same on us,
her clutch, her collection.  Oh, we must not cut it,
the rope to her, the inherited line.
But that was an ancient time.  She says
we must now forget it, untie ourselves.  Only knots remain—she
ties and unties them every evening.

As we collect the remnants of family and fate, “bees and rag-winged dragonflies,” the splinters of the woods, Arlene Kim hands us a blade.  To cut ourselves “out from the belly of home.”

The City as Humanity’s Conception of Nature: David Rhodes's The Last Fair Deal Going Down

David Rhodes opens his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, by having its protagonist, Reuben Sledge, state that the book is a “chronicle of myself hidden in the grayness of a story of the people and the city itself.” The city in question is Des Moines, Iowa, and its people are as murderous, amorous, and plain as the citizens of any other. These traits are in no small part due to Reuben’s family moving to Des Moines — the Sledges are predisposed toward talents both utilitarian and chaotic. One brother is an incredible mechanic, another a Midwestern Don Juan.

I’m intrigued by the idea of cities, and have been ever since I was brave enough to live in one. A child of small-town Ohio, I’m more aware and used to nature than people. Living in a warren of them I got the feeling that a city is perhaps one of the most natural expressions of humanity we can create. They are created environments, organisms. Cities have spirits — the right ones do, anyway. Rhodes’ depiction of Des Moines is as a complex, preternatural city. There is a key idea here I’ll get to shortly.

I picked up David Rhodes’ The Last Fair Deal Going Down while on an ill-conceived excursion to San Francisco. I found the book at City Lights, was intrigued by the title — one of my favorite songs by Robert Johnson—and dug the Milkweed cover, which is a clear picture of heavy, dark mammatus, possibly over Iowa, but every bit as likely to be Nebraska. The back cover was a little vague, suggesting a very urban story, only slightly indicative of the supernatural. I quickly found the back cover to be, to put it mildly, inaccurate. Reuben’s opening statement is a much better précis. It’s an autobiography, a family history, a mystery, at times dry and others effulgent. There are cannibals. There’s a phantasmic horse. An involved diary of a stalker. Haunting the pages more than anything, though, is the “city within a city” which exists below Des Moines proper. It’s this city which exemplifies my feelings about the nature of cities, the how and why we build them.

Rhodes’ “lower city” comes as a complete surprise. The back cover does not do the idea of it justice. The reader quickly finds it is not metaphorical but literal, supernatural. It is a deep hole in the ground, streets leading into it as though it were only a warp in the cities fabric — a place of higher gravity. Covered in fog, no one has ever truly seen the city, and the people who enter it never return. Things are lost in the lower city. People, cars. The Sledges live with the hole beginning in their backyard and every so often they hear the sound of something opening in the fog. Discovering the city is part of the point of the book, and so I’ll only say a little more. What does it say about the people who built the place that it was necessary, that its pieces and parts were needed for its function? Who would build such a place? Cities are something like organisms, and that which does not make a city stronger is soon dissolved, eaten, and replaced. This lower city seems to be an organ designed to lure and contain the souls of the lost. Not to wax too poorly poetic about it.

The Last Fair Deal Going Down seems to contain as much of everything as Rhodes could fit. How he makes it work is a mystery to me — and perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps I was just charmed. But the book is charming, very much so. This was Rhodes’ first novel, and for that you may find the spine of the book buckles, that whole sections could and should be cut. I loved every ludicrous moment. Every turn was unexpected, and the book itself seemed to be evolving as I read it, becoming what it needed to be — a story somehow independent of the need for a reader, simply needing to be told. And there’s a reason for that. I found the book to be a different beast from what I had bought according to the cover, and again different from what I had read in the beginning, and on and on until I reached the end, when the book took on a final shape, or perhaps its true shape was revealed.

Thinking back on it Rhodes had, for me, captured precisely what I look for in a city and in a book; a spirit. He created for Des Moines a spirit that runs through the pages, that captures everything, the life and death of its people, and that in a way understands its own creation, is reflexive. In my head, as twisted and tangled as the book itself is, I see it — the book, somehow — complementing the city in the same way the lower city does. These three things are inextricably linked, each of them necessary to the next, each horrible and beautiful, and both of those things because they were made by us, by Rhodes, by people. The city as humanity’s conception of nature.