The
silence seemed delicious. No one would have thought
the
streets could be so still.
The
whiplash hum of the cables,
slapping
and whining in the slots
or
clashing, electrically, above the streets,
the
moaning and whimper of the busses,
the
gnarled complaints of cars,
the
arthritic squeal of a truck,
vanished,
like the crumpled quiet of barroom talk.
The
barroom talk, too, silenced,
with
the garrulous, loud Pandora,
the
restaurant ramage quietened
to a
held breath by the cashiers.
The
tap-tap of a single pedestrian.
The
whisper of the wind in your ear.
The
buzzing of a heavy bumble bee.
The
full-throated aria of a mockingbird,
blithely ignoring
sheltering in place,
singing
his heart out at the top of a tree.
Under
the silence, a trembling,
the
lifting of a finger
turning
in the wind,
like
a cock on a weather vane.
West.
South. East. North. East.
South.
East. South. West. North.
_____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His
third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated
to appear later this year.
Eunice
Odio (sculpture by Marisel Jiménez; image from Oregon Arts Watch)
AT JOURNEY’S END
The Fire’s Journey
Part IV: The Return
Eunice Odio
Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P.
Ticas and Mauricio Espinosa
Tavern Books
A review by Christopher Bernard
“2ND
MAN
Where,
where is the house of your words?
ION
Behind your
heart.”
—The
Fire’s Journey, Part IV: The Return
Eunice Odio, considered
by many the greatest Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century, wrote what we
can now see is one of that century’s most remarkable poems – her complex,
elusive, deeply imagined epic of creation, The Fire’s Journey. It has
taken several generations for Anglophones to be introduced to this extraordinary
poem; with the publication of this translation of the epic’s concluding
section, we are finally able to get a sense of the full magnitude of Odio’s
accomplishment.
To briefly recap: the
first three parts of this epic depict, and in some ways enact, the creation of
the world from primordial chaos, and of both the poet narrating the epic
(introduced in part two) and of the world’s poet-creator, Ion, named after a
central character in Plato’s dialogue of the same name in which the philosopher
presents his understanding of poetry as a kind of inspired madness and the role
of the poet as a necromantic artificer and a tutor, wise in his madness and mad
in his wisdom, of the ways of the gods.
The third, hitherto
longest, section depicted the heroic making and remaking by Ion and his
faithful servant, Dedalus, with the help of a host of gods, of a great
cathedral, an edifice against the void that threatens creation at every instant
of its existence.
The fourth part depicts
the return of Ion and Dedalus and the other creator gods and goddesses (Om,
Tiara, Thauma, Efrit, Demon) to the city of humanity to celebrate the creation
of the world after a great victory has been achieved (it is not entirely clear
what this “victory” is of, or against what, though it may be the victory of
creation itself against chaos and nothingess). On their way to the city, they
meet a group of men carrying an angel who seems, somewhat ominously, to have
been killed by the masters of the city. In a Lazarus-like act, or an allusion
to Jesus, they resurrect him:
He is a crippled
angel, he is a man;
not a whole man,
but broken in pieces;
half a man that
rage spun cut by cut,
large in wounds
and small in hope . . .
Ion, returning to his
human form, hopes to be recognized by his mother, his uncle, and his brothers
(curiously, Ion’s father is never referred to directly, though an ultimate
being irregularly appearing, called “The Guardian,” may be him), but even his
family does not see him for what and who he is (the second brother speaks):
You’re
left, mother, with the son
who
disturbs you piece by piece;
you’re
left with your recovered son
in
whom you never rest
the
one you love in secret
without
joy and without pause;
in
whom you whirl, crying in pain.
In consequence, Ion, who,
as a creator of the universe, is also the creator of himself, must now reject his
family:
Mother, . . .
. . .
Stay in your place,
Stay there, living, besieged by the dead.
Stay there, kissing me from within.
A new word annihilates me,
another sets me free
another one is born in me, allowing a new birthing;
I am become birth-light once again.
I emerge.
. . .
I keep on until the end,
journeying in rapture.
But on their way to the
city, the creators make a harsh discovery: though those they meet are eagerly
awaiting the coming of the creators to celebrate them and all of creation, Ion
and Dedalus are not recognized; they are spurned, laughed at, denied. They then
discover the harshest reality of all. The city of men where they hoped to
celebrate, and justly be celebrated, has been conquered by an oligarchy of
demons: god of the dead Erebos, three-headed Cerberus, Syriac devil Beherit,
and Hybris, named not coincidentally for the Greek word for the overweening
arrogance that leads to catastrophe. Humanity has been corrupted, and the euphoria
of creation is poisoned by the reign of evil.
Ion and Dedalus are cast
out of the city. After their long labor creating the universe, they are stripped
of joy and pride, mocked, and left destitute in the wilderness:
DEDALUS
Lord,
you are sad. You have nothing left
nothing
but
your solitude.
. . .
ION
You, my populous solitude
my
soul’s pluranimous movement,
the
thirst that sustains me,
mother,
child, my brother pulse,
the
bread’s skeleton,
an
unbroken visitor
. . .
Guarding
keeping
watch
at
the gates of the earth.
“The return” of the title
means different things: Ion’s return to the city of men, his return to human
form from his time as spiritual creator, the return to “reality” from the
inspired insanity of the rhapsode, a return to darkness after the blazing light
of creation. It is also a kind of return
to the primordial questions of existence, to void and chaos confronting the
painful articulations of reality, to the adventure of being that is always
about to begin.
Thanks to Keith Ekiss and
his associates, Anglophone readers now have a chance to be enriched by this strange
and challenging poem, Blakean (as the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz
recognized) in its range and originality, a myth of origin of endlessly
ramifying depth, a spiritual and verbal journey rich with promises of discovery,
and a look into human and ahuman reality depicted in a masterpiece that
deserves a wide readership in any language. One can only wonder why it has
taken so long for us to learn about it. But surely it has been worth the wait,
since the result is this masterly translation.
____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third
collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to
appear later this year.
When
is a hotel like a circus? And when is a circus like a hotel?
Both
are dreamy places of encounter and chaos where strangers tangle in embrace and
flight and our fates are in our hands briefly before they journey on to other
lands, and everything is apparently controlled but anything can happen at any
time; where lovers meet and lovers part, fortunes are made and fortunes are
lost, but only Fortune rules; where the daring young man on the flying trapeze
is suddenly an ancient porter bowing for a tip, or the master of ceremonies
becomes a harassed maître d’, or a junior maid suddenly saves the show.
They
are little worlds both, where we can be whatever we pretend to be, put on
glamour and tinsel when we make our entrance to the grand lobby or the big tent,
and for a beguiling moment take on the substance of a dream.
In
Berkeley over a recent weekend, Montreal’s Cirque Éloize revealed just how much
poetry, humor, fantasy, imagination and grace can be mined from these parallels,
in Hotel, brought to the Bay Area by Cal Performances, and the company’s
15th original creation, premiered in 2018 to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
Cirque
Éloize has been called Cirque de Soleil’s (also headquartered in Montreal)
“slimmer, sexier sister,” which is not far off. But what Cirque Éloize is in
itself is what counts here: a compact, inventive, multi-talented troupe (they are
all, at one point or other, equally skilled acrobats and dancers, actors and impressionists,
contortionists and musicians) who can give the impression of a small army of véritables
artistes with a distinctly French Canadian aesthetic: alternately sadly tender,
old worldly nostalgic, sharply witty, bravely romantic, and robustly pratfally,
sometimes within the same few gestures.
I’ll
admit that, at the afternoon show I attended, there was a moment near the beginning
when I wasn’t sure if there was a bit of scene that wasn’t working out, or a
technical glitch, and a couple of minutes passed (an eternity on stage) when
the troupe seemed to flounder as bits of pumped-in music whispered and died
several times before sounding with complete security. But this was the sole hitch
in an otherwise tight performance.
The
setting was a hotel lobby with a peripatetic entrance door (moved about on
wheels and proving a prop of many uses) and a long bar cum counter at
the back under a diamond-shaped alcove and triangles of neon tracing bright
lines above the stage. The lobby morphed through a collection of glittering identities:
from a 1920s Grand Hotel, to a 1940s lounge for a Gilda-like torch singer, to a
disco-fever ballroom from the 70s, to an 80s Jane Fonda gymnasium, before
flipping back to its Art Deco roots, with, trooping through it, a cavalcade of
archetypes of the modern caravanserai: the swooning lovers, the attentive groom
and his glamorous bride, the hotel’s jack-of-all-trades handyman, the
mischievous maid, the shady, “chameleon” figure who lurks in all such places
where strangers mingle, a pair of twins who confuse everyone, and a maître d’
who imagines himself in control of things no matter how often fate instructs
him otherwise.
The
meat of the show was series of acts, by turns acrobatically controlled and comically
chaotic, building to a series of climaxes, each bettering the last, until the
audience was heated to a compound of clapping, whistling, hooting, stamping celebration.
Several
moments bear special mention: Cory Marsh’s work on the Cyr wheel (a large hoop,
like an over-sized hula hoop, worked from the inside; an act not strictly
original, but I haven’t seen it quite so imaginatively choreographed and
performed); Vanessa Aviles’ graceful work on “tissu tension,” long rope-like
scarves hung from the flies; Jérémy Vitupier’s death-defying (and
head-endangering) acrobatics and miming with a piece of luggage at least one person
in the audience won’t soon forget; Una Bennett’s wittily risqué work on aerial
rope, inspired (and well-timed) trumpet riffs, and a Metropolis-reminding
spinning of multiple hula hoops from neck down to shins, commanding a scene
where hula hoops reigned, indeed rained; and, helping bind the whole, sizzling
vocals by Éléonore Lagacé, especially near the rapturous conclusion, when she
commanded as much with guitar as with a voice that surprised the house with an unpredictable
(unless one remembers the old phrase: “chaotic, like a Spanish inn”), highly
theatrical, deep voiced, and deeply satisfying, swathe of flamenco vocals, sung
con mucho duende.
The
creative team was led by Cirque Éloize’s president and creative director
Jeannot Painchaud and director Emmanual Guillaume, and the atmospheric musical
accompaniment, both live and piped in, was composed, arranged, and compiled
(including a magical performance, by Antonin Wicky, of one of Chopin’s most
exquisite and moving nocturnes) by Éloi Painchaud.
____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
Celebrity,
“cultural attention,” fame (“that last infirmity of noble mind,” as Milton said
in “Lycidas,” another elegy), is fickle, often very strange, sometimes
preposterous. Andy Warhol may have been an optimist: in the future everyone
will be famous for no more than fifteen seconds, with anyone famous for longer
than that in serious danger of being trolled by the envious until they wish
they had never been heard of.
Yet
there was, at one time, a point to fame: the holding in memory by a culture, a
nation, a people, of exemplary beings whose deeds inspired the rest of us to
strive to shape ourselves into something truer, nobler, finer—proofs of what a
person is capable of for good. We have examples enough of the contrary, their
“fame” one more proof of our eternal human folly.
The
noble spirits among us go almost unseen, unregarded; condescended to with a nod
here, an award there, but taken for granted for the sake of the mad men, the
mirrors of our weakness, who genuinely fascinate us. We are of course free
either way—but, born ignorant, needy and weak, and needing as we do to learn
everything from the darkness of our beginning, we require examples to teach us
which to choose: nobility, infamy, indifference, golden mediocrity? Or?
One
criticism of democracy has always been that it pretends the ordinary person,
the “common man,” capable of few or no superlative acts, nor claiming to be so,
is an ideal. And yet perhaps it is one, an ideal worthy of respect and value:
the basic decency of the ordinary person—once the adolescent manias have been
seared off via an acid bath in reality, leaving a rooted awareness of vulnerability,
our ultimate powerlessness—is surely closer to the reality of the human
condition than the brief exhilarations of conqueror, genius and saint.
The
exceptional person inspires us to demand more from ourselves, sometimes more
than is possible—they can be as cruel to those around them who are less able to
endure it, as toward themselves. The ordinary person reminds us that our limits
are as absolute as our promise; that the greatest of all human beings will be
never more than human: that all of us live in bodies that are born, are
vulnerable to vicissitudes we can neither prevent nor even know the existence
of till they strike us, and that perish as completely as if they had never
been.
Which
makes it all the more revelatory of our painfully contradictory position—as
vulnerable, mortal, and limited beings of flesh, blood and bone who at the same
time have the minds and spirits, the gifts of gods, demons and angels, and the
will, in our small way, to use them—when we see a direct expression of the
nobility of our spirits meeting the nothingness and cruelty of our bodies, and
the meeting does not end in stalemate, but in an eloquence that, while only a
partial victory, is nevertheless a sign of the holiness of existence, of life
and mind, of humanity and the world.
Such
a revelation I believe can be found in this book. For the poet Ivan Argüelles
has given us a book of great beauty and emotional power, heart rending and
moving, because we see enacted in it a human nobility in stark confrontation
with ultimate human weakness—in woe and wonder, bafflement, grief, and a
strange and grateful joy.
Early
in 2018, the poet and his wife lost their son Max. Max had suffered for almost
four decades from encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain contracted when he
was ten years old. He spent most of his life with his parents, moving from
crisis to crisis, in and out of hospitals, severely challenged in mind and body
if not in spirit. In recent years, the poet had also lost his brother and
identical twin, José Argüelles, about whom he has written eloquently. But this
new death, though long expected, clearly wounded at an even deeper level,
calling up an anguish not only over the loss of what was, from all accounts, a
loving and gentle soul, but over the mystery, the apparent cruelty and
senselessness of his son’s fate.
The
result has been an anguished outpouring of poetry, a despairingly eloquent
questioning of life, the universe and the emptiness suffusing it, of himself,
the world, and the void; of “the Unknown,” as he puts it—a hopeless yet
determined quest for an answer he knows, believes, suspects, and fears cannot
be found. The poems have been collected into this, his most focused and moving
book – “HOIL” was a word of unknown meaning that (according to the poet) Max
wrote on various drawings in his early childhood, and thus especially
appropriate for this book.
In
these poems Argüelles displays what anyone who knows his work would expect: a
seemingly limitless inventiveness of startling imagery, a gift for paradox
seducing assent, surrealist elisions of logic that seem as natural as
breathing, and a near perfect ear—coupled with a mastery of condensed statement
that demands, and rewards, close attention, to say nothing of a depth of personal
feeling and illumination, vulnerability, in some ways unique to his poems here.
There
are poems “spoken” by Max:
I
can’t tie my shoe strings
my
pulse is fluttering madly
black
spots devour my left eye
and
people randomly assembled
all
with someone else’s hands
what
are they doing and saying
where
is the illuminated globe
and
the scissors that cut the wind
—from SHORT CIRCUIT
And
poems spoken to him:
tell
me you’ve just gone
to
a temporary Elysium
where
flowers are made of paper
in
colors that last a day
a
place where they burn water
because
death does not exist
tell
me that on the other shore
your
hands are still making
shadows
that the blind can feel
—from MAGIC MAX
There
are poems about Max:
great
and splendid the mornings when
in
your magic chair you greeted the first light
.
. .
and
with joy bush herb grass tree leaf
beloved
of bug and bird alike you blessed
.
. .
and
when you reached your happy hand forth
to
greet and bless the homeless and hungry
who
in their morning passage came to you
a
benediction in their grateful smiles
—from SAINT MAX
And
about his child’s game of traveling through outer space, powered by a favorite
toy:
. . . I was a miconaut
in
my plastic toy sailing the galaxies
—from MAX: A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY
There
are poems about the basic mystery of being:
all
the schools of thought
fit
into a blade of grass
the
heat and magma of the past
the
very turbulence of the cosmos
a
dew drop a petal in the wind
all
expressions of the seen and felt
are
nothing in the sweep of time
.
. .
. . . the rapacious gods
flash
their gaudy crowns
parading
magnificent see-through
bodies
like shadows of alabaster
they
too are nothing but absence
—from IN PERPETUITY
.
. . and the mystery of death:
where
does one go when the door shuts
are
there windows inside or a trap-hole
hidden
in the ceiling or secret words
to
transport the soul to its next destiny
.
. .
does
it feel like an ancient ruined temple
the
feel of moss the scent of damp grass
blind
statues representing the gods
of
futility and longing . . .
.
. .
is
it easier to sleep again to forget what
it
was that was being sought—a hand?
—from AVERNUS
There
are poems made up, partly or all, of questions with no answers:
how
many is number? who talks to the comb?
who
are the zero? what letter comes second?
who
counts the echoes? who sets light in the glass?
who
emerges in the cloud? who sleeps with the child?
who
wakes in the well? who pronounces the moon?
—from THE PURVEYOR OF SOUND
And
poems about the anguish of this death:
the
discarded comb
the
useless shaving brush
and
what the mirror no longer holds
distance
of immeasurable hours
nowhere
now in the spent landscape
of
discarded talismans
—from THE REMAINS
you
have become sleek a streaking flash
in
the night heavens which we scour looking
for
the brilliant dust of your swift passage
into
eternity a micronaut at last
—from MICRONAUT II
And
there are poems about the responsive questioning and questionable responses of
poetry:
when
they wrote that page
who
was at the window watching?
who
could restrain the hands of the wind?
it
came from a chasm of ink
illegible
words of a rotating night
errors
in punctuation and syntax
what
could be the one way forward
if
not opening the side door
and
going directly into the woods
—from FATE
Above
all, there is the embrace of mind, spirit and heart of a noble soul (when will
fame come?) speaking from the depths of sorrow and grace:
you
reached out for a handful of air
to
define your true being the essential inner you
great
internal blossoming of sand and rock
imprinted
with the hearsay of the archaic
enormous
unfolding waves of letters
missives
from secret gods hidden in liquid gold
what
their mouths were telling you in a language
of
fever and ancient fingerprints HOIL
which you wrote in your mysterious passage
to
the underworld riding the enigmatic thunder
—from CHILD-OF-MY-HEART
____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear in 2020.
Illustration from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Gustave Dorè
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Word for Word Performing Arts Company
And Z Space
San Francisco
A review by Christopher Bernard
“ ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look’st thou so?’ With my crossbow,
I shot the ALBATROSS.”
The new theatrical adaptation of Coleridge’s haunting poem by San Francisco’s Word for Word and Z Space could hardly be more timely. It opened on the day of the mass global Climate Strike of September 20; some in the audience still carried dust from local marches on their shoes.
The famous poem tells, in the form of an extended ballad, the tale of an old seaman who stops a young man on his way to a family wedding to tell him a story he is compelled to tell over and over again, of a mysterious and tragic voyage he made in his younger days south to the Antarctic wastes, where he shot and killed an albatross, despite the bird having led the ship back into open sea, thus sparing it wreck in frost and ice, and about the terrible punishments thereupon visited upon himself and the crew for this crime against nature.
Word for Word’s beautiful, sometimes harrowing, adaptation underscores the many prophetic aspects of the poem; not only for its, and our, terrifying future, but also those deeply rooted in our civilization: the humanism of the Greco-Roman world and the special creation of man and his role as master of nature claimed for him in the Old Testament; the humanism that has long defined Western civilization and that, turbocharged by the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, and the multiple industrial revolutions of the last two and a half centuries, has made us world-conquering and now world-destroying.
There is one question that anyone who has read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has asked. The question has nagged for the more than two centuries since the poem first appeared. Students, teachers, critics, lay readers of all kinds ask: why on earth did he do it?
Why did the Ancient Mariner shoot the albatross?
It is not explained in the poem—indeed, the idea of motive is never raised. It seems an act of wanton thoughtlessness, boredom, whim. Yet, to a brutal fate, to avenging spirits and “a rotting sea,” to mass death and, for those who survive, a life worse than death, leads (in director Delia MacDougall’s memorable phrase) this “thoughtless act of dreadful consequence.” A seemingly random, unfortunate, but surely trivial deed has results beyond anything that seems morally or even practically explicable.
There is, perhaps, only one humanly understandable, if not respectable, reason. He did it, not because he thought that it was right or necessary, from superstition or fanatical zeal, or even from sheer malevolence—out of pride, cruelty; what we might call “malignant narcissism” or “toxic masculinity.” It was an act neither of misguided virtue nor of willful evil. He did it for one reason alone: because he could.
Our world of relentless disruption has come about for reasons not far different: the Mark Zuckerbergs, Steven Jobs’, Travis Kalanicks of the world have upended our existence time and again because they could. Some young man working in a midnight bedroom may yet find a way to blow up the world just because he discovers that, with this little thread of code populating every computer in the world with a single click of his mouse, he can.
Word for Word follows its customary method of dramatizing texts by presenting them literally “word for word”; in this instance, enacting the entire poem on a stage representing a minimalist skeleton of the Mariner’s ship, and flanked by sweeping ramps, like two arms embracing the vessel, that rise to a shrine-like alcove where figures of transcendence briefly appear—the “spirits” that inhabit the poem, including that of the albatross. The stage is a bit like a schematic image of a woman’s body, with head, arms, and womb: mother nature from which all things come and to which all things must in the end return.
Among the most notable performers of this evening were Lucas Brandt as both the Wedding Guest to whom the Ancient Mariner tells his inescapable tale, and the young mariner of the awful deed and spectral sea tragedy (most of the cast take double roles); a splendid Darryl V. Jones who takes the part of the Sun (who has indeed a defining role in the poem, as bringer equally of life and death) and also as the Hermit who shrives the mariner at the end of his long journey (Jones also wrote the idiomatic music for the Hermit’s song); and the lovely Leontyne Mbele-Mbong as a crew member and second of two disembodied spirit voices. Charles Shaw Robinson presented the Ancient Mariner with mournful authority.
The two directors, MacDougall and Jim Cave provide, in the program, particularly eloquent “director’s statements,” demonstrating an unexpectedly comprehensive understanding of Coleridge, who in later years became an influential philosopher some of whose ideas left traces on American transcendentalism, existentialism, and ecological philosophies. The directors, performers, and production team braid together their skills like good hemp cable to help the poet’s words, ideas, and warnings cross the generations to reach us with as much urgency as theatrical power.
It is well accepted that we are in the midst of destroying much of living nature that has thrived for tens of millions of years on planet earth, like the mariner’s shooting of the albatross, just because we can. Before our time no matter how much we were able to destroy each other, cities, cultures, entire civilizations, we could not, in effect, destroy everything. But now the world has become our toy; like many a child, we have been busy taking it apart to see how it works. And, like many a child, we are now crying because we don’t know how to put it back together again.
At the very beginning of this adaptation, in a brief prologue, the “spirits” that are as vital to the story as the benighted humans, and acting together as a benignant chorus made up of everyone except the tragic protagonists, present a short speech not to be found in the poem; it is repeated, word for word, at the poem’s conclusion. Who invented it? No one is saying. It is modest, kindly, ingenuous, and deeply moving, ending the performance on a note both questioning and hopeful. One can only be grateful, as we have never been more in need of hope.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His novel Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear in 2020; his third collection of poetry, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will also appear in 2020.
One of the peculiar benefits of “postmodernism” (a misleading term, as we never left modernity; if anything, are deeper in it than ever) has been that the modernist wars between “free” and “closed” verse have become increasingly irrelevant. “Closed verse” took a beating under the onslaughts of the Poundians, “projective” versifiers, Beats, confessional poets, “language” poets, etc., till the inevitable conservative backlash. Now there seems to be an uneasy truce between ageing surrealists, the conversational poets of the Midwest (enshrined in Iowa), and the classicists of the East, with an archipelago of individualists, eccentrics, and eclectics, who like to pretend, at least, that, by picking and choosing at poetry’s magnanimous banquet, and disdaining purity and puritanism, they enjoy the best of all poetries.
There has been a resurgence of interest, among practitioners at least, in the classical forms of English verse: sonnet, villanelle, sestina, blank verse, and the like, wed to grammatical exactness, logical complexity, strict metrics, and deep metaphor. The younger generation works in the tradition of the late Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and X. J. Kennedy; some of their better known modern-day exponents include Dana Gioia and Marion Montgomery.
Ernest Hilbert is rapidly becoming, for this reader, one of the most accomplished of these poets, with a wealth of imagination wedded to honesty of insight, integrity of vision, respect for form, and delight in the harmonies of language (including a strong appreciation for the Anglo-Saxon roots of English prosody that subtly inflects his own practices) that is second to none. His latest book, his fourth major collection, establishes him, I believe, as one of our leading poets. Reading him is not a little like the following lines about a hot summer day in downtown Philadelphia:
Stores prop open doors to lure in buyers:
Banks of icy air waft out in columns,
And I cross through one and nearly shiver.
As I emerge again to warmth,
I remember swimming in cedar lakes
That flashed like dirty tin in summer.
His new book is deeply retrospective. It begins with poems about himself as son and grandson, with a poem (titled, only half ironically, “Welcome to all the Pleasures”) about his grandfather “teaching” him to swim:
He hoisted me in summer air,
Spun me out over
The sluggish murk and let go.
I swear the river had no bottom.
This surge of terror and pleasure enwrapped ecstatically, with just enough of a gap between them for perception to piece through, as one is tossed into being out of oblivion, is captured more than once in these poems.
From Grandpa’s brutal lesson in confronting life, we are soon in the bright presence of Hilbert’s father practicing on the local church organ:
His eyeglasses lit from the bulb,
Bearded, he eased his bulk onto the bench,
Rifling folders of music in manuscript.
The huge organ rumbled in chorales,
Roared enormous chords, stopping midway
Through a passage, consigning a long resonance
From transept into the beamed vault of the nave . . .
while the young Ernest:
. . . explored while he scribbled notes on the sheets,
At times a subtle oath or cheerful “ha!”
While working on his Bach transcriptions.
. . .
Never before would I have been so low
To the floor and childlike, not at services
With the adults. It felt like a discovery.
The discoveries open into a lifetime.
One of the book’s finest poems is the climactic one in this deeply personal visit to his past contained in the book’s earliest section: “Great Bay Estuary,” set in the present but reliving similar boat trips with his father decades before:
Chuckling gulls luft up to swipe and hang
In muggy air over the riverside’s
Deadfall—jagged white as a splintered ice-flow.
A tern goes and returns like a boomerang
Across the scene.
In the poems that follow, we engage with neighborhoods in the poet’s home city and visits to the Chelsea Hotel in New York City:
We made love here,
Face down in summer
River for hours,
Pulled toward
Softening surf
Of a warmer ocean.
Snow-rigged galleons
Of cloud curl apart
Far above the city.
They perish and astound.
Then onward to the jazzing streets of New Orleans; to a glacier he bracingly clambers up; to the Sinai peninsula and a graveyard of blasted military vehicles, where:
The tank’s heavy as a dune,
Its patina matured to match the neighboring rocks . . .
Another has lost its turtle-like turret,
A hollow half-shell, dish for rare rainfall,
And one last, at an angle to the rest,
Its glacis plate sunk in sand, probing smoothbore
Angled down, as if to acknowledge
A long-ago blow and loss, and bows forever.
To Leningrad, and Shostakovich’s browbeating Seventh Symphony; to London and an antiquarian bookseller’s meeting, where:
Lord Markham appears to doze, looks drowsily
From his marble recess to Bayswater
And the Serpentine, undaunted, ignored.
And a man’s:
. . . voice ebbs in the breeze. Cell phones chirp.
Woven through these journeys outward are those inward, wayward visits of memory from a squeezed tube of sunscreen (“It dreams like a bay in the humid light / Still promising summers already gone”), to visits of a commonly felt dread, a paranoia of the double-bind that has an uncomfortable basis in contemporary reality many reading this passage are likely to recognize:
You feel as if you’re being stalked
Today and don’t know who to trust.
. . .
“The system cannot be unlocked.
Your password has expired and must
Be changed.” “You must log in with your
Password in order to make a change.”
To the sheer sensuous joys of living, blazons to beer and martinis, and ocean floating:
I float for years, it seems, toes out
Small planes drone down the coast
To tow out ads for bars and bands or beer
As proud sea birds screech loud and strut . . .
To the oldest avatars of the inescapable past:
In the house, at night, I wait for a ghost
To present itself in the creaking halls.
. . .
But no ghost, not yet. When I rise at night
For the bathroom, past the empty spare rooms,
I feel a boy’s fingers, faint as snow, on my wrist.
Having begun with memories from childhood, of his father and grandfather, the collection ends with the poet as father, beginning with a gentle paean to his wife and ending with celebrations of his young infant son. And son meets son.
I always expect rich, fine gifts from Hilbert, and always get more than I expected. There are few weaknesses: perhaps a tendency to the portentous (there are perhaps one or two too many references to “darkness” and “kings”), and sometimes the gravitas is more than is warranted; the work might be leavened by a lighter, swifter touch here and there. But these are quibbles; one can make the same points about Milton.
Last One Out is elegant and athletic, eloquent and brave, deeply thought and felt; the work of someone who, if we survive, may well become one of our classics. Poems like these helped make me fall in love with poetry when I was a teenager. May they have the same effect on some young reader today.
Christopher Bernard’s fourth collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in spring 2020. His third novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, will appear in January 2020.
