Three Reviews
Elizabeth Robinson

What follows are paragraph-long reviews of three pamphlets which I've enjoyed in recent months. By way of warning: because I have little time for reading, I have focussed on chapbooks, have often (of necessity) read rapidly, and so my reviews may be correspondingly impressionistic.

Spectral Angel by Gale Nelson Duration Press, 1999.

This is, prima facie, a formal book. Poems on the left hand pages make use of the page as a visual field, often in a striking and witty way. Poems on the right hand pages have their own "meticulous order", constructed as they are of rather dense stanzas of three lines, followed by deeply indented fragments or phrases. The tone of these right hand poems, too, has a formal quality, a sense of reserve and control. A pseudo-scientific language of measurement, atomic behavior, of seemingly objective reflection marks these poems. But that tone proceeds awkwardly. The sharp humor and the openness of the left side pages foreground the tensions first against and then within the right side pages. The left hand text moves airily about the page, punching holes in the self-contained, tidy neighboring text. And note the 'self-awareness of a right side poem in this process:

The components are ignored by the playful ones,
tweaked by the angry one, but followed in the slavish
manner by the humbled majority

                                                   nothing of the matter (p.3)

The right side texts start to pull themselves apart as emotional, sometimes political subtexts exert pressure on their orders. There are disquieting murmurs: "social problems", "could find no work", "recalled happier times", "having disappeared". The poems access their power in their submerged and emerging tensions. A spectral angel breaks through the skin of the words, insisting:

The damage occurring today
limits the anxiety that we are
bound to display.

                                                   his inside connections (p. 5)

Or no angel manifests at all. The grace of this work is that it purveys unease.

**********

Anatomies, by Dan Featherson, Potes & Poets Press, 1998.

To say you in fin, feather & hoof--

not true or untrue

but these amplitudes

both of and beyond you.

Like the anatomies he constructs, Dan Featherston's body of work has a quality of useful (and, if it's not too much an oxymoron, considered) injudiciousness. From the odd, sometimes discomfitting lists that comprise "Objects Found in the Body" to the insistent repetitions that make up the various bodies of "Pink", "Odors", "The Hand" or "Soap", Featherston addresses "amplitudes" in relation their parts. The whole suggested in his constructs becomes less a thing or entity than a moving landscape through which one, in turn, moves. As Steven Marks has commented elsewhere (of Featherston's chapbook 26 Islands), his work "expose[s] the working out of the relationships between language and the reality of perception, conception, and power."

Featherston's poems call into question by just what a body (of any sort) is constituted. By the random force of a list? By the rhythmic accretions that attend repetition? By the clatter of alliteration? For this poet does use these modes to build or birth in poems that are unself-consciously sensual and smart.

And their pungeance is also their transparency, their movement toward invisibility. For all the crackling specificity of Featherston's language, his poems are willfully inconclusive. In "The Hand" for instance, he deconstructs the skeleture of the hand, translating the terms he finds into a sort of riddle:

A man sits in a boat at a great, trapezoidal table under the moon.

On the table there is a wedge, a pea & a hook.

How will he handle these things?

The question of how "things" are to be handled remains, after all, the most compelling one. Returning to certain subject words almost obsessively, the poems struggle to enhance meanings in such a way as to underline them, defamiliarize them, reconstruct them anew by subtlely defiant terms. The ruminative urgency of the work lives in a productive tension with the humor and almost erotic authority of its language, "How the skin forgets the world." How Featherston will handle these anatomies is not really a matter for resolution. The reader comes instead to trust that he is adept. And at what: (re)membering:

Memory slides like oil over the world. Palpable & elusive.

**********

The Book of Tendons, by Eleni Sikelianos, The Post-Apollo Press, 1997.

Eleni Sikelianos' poems have a blessedly untidy, headlong quality. They race recklessly into the gorgeousness of language and there intention takes a backseat to impulse (or, perhaps, intuition). In some senses, therefore, the attempt to form a critical response to the work is not only difficult, it may be misguided. I've tried and tried again to read the two sequences in this selection slowly and with an eye to form and content. Each time, I am carried off on the flow of the work and find I'm later washed ashore in a pleasant delirium. What may be most relevant is that I'm perpetually ready to go back and read again. Sample:

Slipping between atoms
on the walkable air

because the best attitude
to take is not

always one
of falling

the material's heat
animal and un-

a kind of sexiness
in the way numbers add up

(one sliding
into another one)

rocks, reptiles, thunders & wings
even the ideas in my heads

& distance from one point to the next
in all as part

of everything
I can

comprehend (p. 14)

Sikelianos has acknowledged that her poetic concerns may not be exactly "fashionable", but it's her concern to interact with the sublime that gives her work wonder and energy. In "Gold Trout", the second sequence in this book, the unreserved sexuality of the poem takes on a sort of visionary quality. It's as though the material and the transcendent were the serpent with its tail in its mouth: and off the ourobouros rolls. As Brenda Hillman said in a discussion of this poem, "What she does is dismantle her subject, this beloved, and then . . . re-mantle him." It's an apt description. The lover, the poem, is pulled to pieces in passion, is remade, and in so doing embued with an aura it had not previously known.