Union! by Ish Klein

Canarium Books, 2009.

Reviewed by Shane McCrae

The poems in Ish Klein’s debut collection, Union!, simultaneously expand and contract—think Whitman tempered by Dickinson, but think neither Whitman nor Dickinson—inhabiting, at times, a language, a music, and even a narrative strategy of the long-since:

Some time ago was I, mid-ocean, lost

with dog. Unfortunate, drifting board

to board until a skiff of three survivors

did like our shades enough to save them.

And at other times the poems speak from our seemingly interminable present:

From the floor I see a cutout of the President

behind which is the President.

He plays a shoot-’em-up video game … poorly.

His kill shots take the substance from himself—

even the missed ones.

But perhaps the first thing the reader will notice about the poems is that they are, as above, centered on the page. This centering is essential to Klein’s aesthetic. Physically, the poems occupy a position between extremes, and thereby enact—visually, immediately—the simultaneous urges toward both expansion and contraction that are again and again manifested in the content of the poems.

Union! is divided into four sections: “Amid Ocean,” “Dry Land,” “Hard Earth” and “Up and Away!” More so than often seems to be the case with poetry collections, these section titles map the narrative arc of the book. And Union! does have a strong narrative. Although it can be read as simply a well-organized collection of independent poems, Union! can also be read as something of a short novel-in-verse, and it is as a novel-in-verse that the book seems to me most rewarding. Union! follows the narrator of the poems, who is also named Ish Klein, from an apparently failed romance—failed seemingly before it really began—to her exile at sea, then back to dry land and society, and from there through various urban situations, in the midst of which the narrator slowly seems to lose her grip on reality, to the White House, where the narrator encounters the unnamed President and is killed by his security detail. The last section of the book is spoken from the land of the dead (the image, from Dante’s Inferno, of trees as the souls of suicides recurs), and the book ends with “The Garden,” in which the narrator is returned—not, it seems, as a participant, but as an observer—to the beginning of human life on Earth:

In my book they get to go to the place that needs them most,

the place that would save them.

The gold rope, the wick pierces a flower’s heart

to be blue this way of flame is to be new always.

In my book everyone can always be new

if they want to.

Friends this place has a garden; your heart has a flower.

It is in the teeth of mystery,

it’s exploding as we speak.

The echoes there, in those final lines of “The Garden,” of the ending of T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” are telling:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Klein’s poetry does not look to the moment of resolution when “the fire and the rose are one,” but rather to the moment when the flower is “exploding,” the moment at the beginning, in which all future complications are rooted. It is a moment, the moment, of expansion, yes, but it is also the moment of greatest compression, when everything to come is still potential rather than actual.

Matters of narrative aside, Union! is brimming with gorgeous writing:

Once she wanted a love so big it could hold together every errant piece

of her diced heart. A million pointed pieces

scattered through her travels, her heart

and as each falling heart part may become a star somewhere else

inside her, replacing it, is sand.

That is what nature does—it balances deposits.

The pendulum leaves and retrieves.

What stays is her rickety chest

inside a bloody cup beside a glass of sand

and the rising cry is so far out it is forgetting why it’s there…

And here again we encounter expansion and contraction: “her rickety chest / inside a bloody cup beside a glass of sand.” Blood is life and more life, it is expansion; sand is aridity, it absorbs liquids (like blood), it is contraction. The heart finds its place both in the bloody cup and in the glass of sand. In recognizing this, Ish Klein’s poetry recognizes what it is to be human, and sings of that being in a new way.