reviewed
by
CYNTHIA ARRIEU KING
The first time I
heard Dara Wier read in
person, she was reading from her book Reverse Rapture. She was sitting
at a table. Medium sized auditorium. I don’t think I’ve ever been so blown away
by a public reading. She opened up the possibility that writing about the
bucolic, the small, the tender, the ephemera and the fantastic that we usually
pass by could really be about what is happening right now, in our foreign
policy. She seemed to be pointing at and framing the American way not of
disappearing suddenly by virtues (as one would in the Rapture), but its
reverse: of appearing out of nowhere with what cannot necessarily be defined as
virtues, of an invasion by monsters. Suddenly appearing
overseas. Suddenly dominating. Suddenly obfuscating the lines of journalism, lying to the masses,
and doublespeak. The poems then were stirring, and shocking through
careful inventions, rather than something shrill. The absence of shrillness
creates pressure and yields the truly upsetting poem. Think poetry of the abyss
(Frost’s Directive) shocking with an element of the science fictional, the
abstruse, and the completely and carefully observed truth.
So I heard that
this new book was much like an account found, or the remnants of a person, of a
ghost. But I wasn’t prepared for Wier’s return to the
subjects of Reverse Rapture and, in doing so, emphatically stress the
importance of what sometimes seems lost in poems – having a genuine subject – a
salient, pressing worldly matter rather than one interior, playful, or simply
surreal. And Wier seems to bypass traditions of
narrative and the surreal to communicate the loss of sense, politically,
patriotically. She uses vertiginous distances, and quiet allusions and
metaphors from nature and the shapes of thought. All these qualities add up to a lyrical interrogation
of
You know that
dejected feeling you’ve had after watching the news or a press conference. Wier chooses to mine the way one thinks and the way
sentences fit together for a suitable metaphor. In the “Attitude of Rags,” she
begins the poem and the book:
It felt like a
story sorry it’d lost all its sentences,
Like a sentence
looking for its syntax. (13)
Right off the bat, she’s prepared us for a
book where syntax may mutate or need rehabilitation and tells us this might be
about a story we know. She goes on, “All of the words had homeless, unemployed,
orphan/written all over their faces…” causing the reader to think of the
neglected. But these poor-faced words are left to hang: the mind of the poem
goes back to the original task, trying to delineate its boundaries, its
incarnations. You notice, “It looked the way a fence looks just after the
last/Stampede. A big old blood-colored barn collapsed in/its tracks. Out of
hiding came all the hidden cameras.” So the story can be the current story of
There’s criticism
implicit in every personified abstraction:
It was the kind of day in which emotions
roaming from
Town to town, free to be themselves,
enjoyed their
Rich fantasy lives. This was the kind of
day that day
was. We were rags in
the hands of a narcoleptic duster. (13)
The anger behind
“rich fantasy lives” burns after the deceptively free and light appositional
phrases. They meander: no biggie, but they’re deluded. The sudden appearance of the lyric “we” and the use of
such a quotidian and sad object as rags helps Wier
say what this anger was about – the story is just a cloth used to clean and
cover the truth. That the person dusting is falling asleep -- insensible --
only makes that person all the more politically culpable and identifiable.
In “Injured Books,”
Wier finds another metaphor for sense by the Mobius strip-like assertion that “Near the top of each page
a new story would begin, go on for a while, reach the end of the page, and
never end.” How can that make sense, yet how can we not imagine the endless
possibilities of mutated stories, stories that go one but cannot be finished
before a new one comes along? The political import of one story nudging aside
another seems to lie dormant during the prose poem until the lyric we once more
asserts a moral tone: “We took these books with us to
our desert islands.” The confusion created among citizens by undependable
communications with our leaders can only lead to self-isolation – to puzzle
things out if not escape.
The lyric “we” and
the leader appear again and again throughout the book. The “we”’s
are allowed moral exercise, examination, and recuperation: “Everyone spent the
next three days practicing/Free will” as if it weren’t coming naturally anymore
to choose a fate “Independence” (15); “We call it the sun, but that’s not what
it is” marking the purported life-giving star as misleading or disguised like
administrative announcements. (“Alexia by Other Means” 40).
The we’s
know that self-examination of how one affects others is needed even if
not happening: “We hadn’t yet begun to take ourselves apart/Oil was just
beginning to know what it was.” (“Was” 56). The leader shows up as a Scout whose notebook
lists “rationalizations, recipes…schemes time-saving some focus/Central it’s as
to have seems mainly knots of untying and tying of theologies rash the way they
went.” (“Some Not So Nearly Apocalyptic Borders…” 53).
The crushed syntax of these lines emphasizes the confusion, the pressing
together of quick fixes to solve a larger problem. Again, Wier
uses the alternate name Scout for the President or his administration to mirror
the way that administration refers to reality with names that cover their true
nature. Yet the effect is not so much that of doublespeak, but of sadness,
casting about for a way to speak of the problem, and an incrimination of that
lack.
The natural beauty
always inherent in Wier’s poetry also keeps this
sadness from bombast or easiness. The ants, the spiders, the “leeches and
maggots were back in business” (“Early Morning Ecological Radio” 21)
seem to serve a few allusive if not allegorical purposes. The ants seem to be
tireless citizens going about their business as we mostly do. The spider “drops
from a thread where the envelope is sealed” is if menacingly connected with
actual motives or even truth (“ Last Words” 20). Even
the sun seems to stand for something like sense when those with no names might
be freed from their Platonic caves: “Which one of us will claim possession of
the sun?” (“Riding With Plato on a Northbound Train”
50).
Finally, in
“Incident on the Road to the Capital” we find a wolf that had “grown tired of
his character” and wanted to change into something “more vicious, more deadly”
(29). And after the “I” converses with him under a tree in which birds “with
gaudy chromatic feathers” are perched, she notes that he didn’t seem like “a
very serious wolf. I think he was missing a real opportunity” (30). Though a
more obvious incarnation for our nation’s leader, the wolf receives a hopeful
assessment from the speaker – ironic and pained too – that perhaps he was
overlooking a role while looking for a new one, a role that would benefit more
than himself.
It is tempting to
say these poems are innovative and endearing, except for the matter of their
dangerous observations. It sticks like a pin or pins out of every poem. The
voice cautions and lulls alternately. While the structure of Reverse Rapture
felt epic or at least like murals, these poems prove the quotidian’s
relationship to these moral questions, the permanence of the problem and the
stamina of observation and attention the matter demands. Not what we always
think of as the project of poetry, but now, we’ve been warned and directed –
not through narrative nor harangue nor even easy surrealism -- to notice our
helplessness and to question inaction:
“I deny I’m a part of any of this” (“Circumference” 46)…“There wasn’t
any difference between what we started/Or we finished, or so said our new
circular arguments” (“Was” 56). The circular arguments crafted in strange
syntax, far drops and distances, point to a real, political silence. Even Poe,
like a ghost, demands in the epigraph, “I will not go until I hear from you.”