EMILY ROSKO. Raw Goods Inventory.
reviewed by KATHLEEN ROONEY
Akhmatova scholar Max
Hayward observed of her school, the Acmeists, that most
of them believed that language must be “treated with the respect that a
craftsman accords his materials,” adding that “it was not for nothing that the Acmeists first referred to themselves as Poets’ Guild: the
word tsekh
in Russian can also mean ‘workshop.’ Language was like any other material, and
in fashioning poetic artifacts from it, one had to take account of its natural
qualities and limitations.”
Emily Rosko, clearly, is no Acmeist, but
this notion of craftsmanship—of artisanal attention
to the construction of the poem and the materials of which it consists— is
useful when trying to figure out what it is about her Iowa Poetry Prize-winning
debut collection Raw Goods Inventory
that makes it so raw and so, well, good.
The book itself
resembles a well-built house, with each room mindfully blueprinted and
assembled accordingly. Divided into four sections—“Clearing the Yard,” “Tongues
of,” “Hanging Out the Wash,” and “Spare”—each subdivision has its title, or
prefatory, poem on light gray paper, like a painted doorway, allowing the
reader entry into that particular space.
Intelligently crafted
as they are, Rosko’s poems remain raw because, while
they are not unfinished or unsatisfying, neither are they overdone. Her poems
are concise, playful, and powerful in their syntax and word choice, as in “An
Opening Onto,” which opens:
A field of sorts,
fucked over
by flower: shepherd’s
purse, cocklebur cordate
and hooked. A rather
haphazard collection it is,
cordoned by wire, massed in
clump
the greenbrier, the
clover rooted and reaching
up from the
in-between spaces…. (61)
While the poem can be said to be ‘about’
flowers, Rosko’s writing is not flowery, ornate, or
overly polished; her rawness has not been worn away by workshopping,
as some debut collections feel as though they have been. Raw Goods Inventory is a fresh first book, unified in its overall
scope, but happily lacking the homogeneity from which other recent offerings
from young poets sometimes suffer.
In many cases,
these “in-between spaces” she mentions are precisely what permits the poems in
the collection to deliver the titular goods. In “What’s Discovered is Wiped
Out,” for instance, a poem about a suicide, she writes:
To say it was over
and done with no harm
wasn’t really the case.
The hemlocks wind-
burnt, losing. Fishermen
wrestle with, hook salmon
in high lead content
water. Stunned look, the red
frayed marks. It’s
better: eyes averted, both
of us tucked in,
knees touching. Placement,
the stars rocking in
their cradles. Always:
the dreams of the dog
alive again. Such childish
dreams, such disregard
for the stock market. He
was kind enough to
leave the proper notes… (4)
At times like
these, she puts one in mind, favorably, of the Harper’s Index, that
publication's assemblage of at-first-glance unconnected facts and phrases which
on further examination offers up patterns to notice and paths to follow. Like
the Index, Rosko’s poems don’t make an argument, per
se, but rather give you the materials you need to persuade yourself of a point,
to lead yourself to a conclusion.
She stacks the
bricks of her poetic structures so skillfully that they stand without mortar. Her leaps and ellipses leave the task of making connections up
to the reader, while still positioning the poet as the person of authority: the
architect or the head builder. Rarely using metaphor, she derives her strangeness
from syntax and off-kilter rhythms, and these quirky constructions give her
poetry its weirdness and wonder. In any given line, you know exactly what’s
going on, but between the lines there can be vertiginous jumps.
In this sense, Rosko is simultaneously
a materialist and a poet of ideas—a materialist not in the sense that she’s
materialistic (for if anything, such acquisitive materialism is a feature of
the world she critiques), but more in the Marxist sense, in that she chooses to concern herself
with actual experiences of actual things in the actual world. In “Any Good
Scientist Could Tell You”—a title which cleverly elides into the poem’s first
line: “Accuracy is the mark of love…”—she writes,
…Precision’s
in the splice, the
genes matched
and repaired: pig
in tomato, human
protein in rice.
A greater yield
for the me
generation: quicker
maturity,
better plastics, newfound
viral strains… (10)
concluding, “there’s been
some/excessive growth in the bloom/ department. Too much/ correction has made
the cart/ tip. Yes, the garden’s overrun” (11). Here, we see how she takes risks in writing authoritatively about real-world
concerns in a clear fashion.
That said, Rosko’s work never
sacrifices beauty for the sake of a message, and it certainly performs the traditional
function of literature in that she consistently employs the “strange or rare”
language that Aristotle recommends in the Poetics.
Yet she is hardly ever metaphysical, nor does she
mystify the objects she represents. She refuses to resort to the strategy of
making things appear more profound by being vague about them.
In her willingness to tackle such capital-I Issues as bio-ethics
and genetically modified food, Rosko proves she is
comfortable trafficking in the world of ideas, not unlike a Don DeLillo or a Joy Williams—or an Alice Fulton, to use a
poetic example. Or, if you prefer, she is not unlike the outspoken vegetarian
friend you take to lunch even though she might alienate your more conservative
dining companions with a pointed comment. She seems to know that she might lose
some readers unwilling to grant her that authority, but she seems comfortable
in hazarding that loss.
When she writes in “Pigskin” of:
…A sour-milk
stink like outdated
candy
from the chocolate
shop I worked
at that went to fatten hogs
in
of corn syrup, Coke—… (23)
she is not judgmental, but she seems
well-aware that certain audience members might not approach the web of
implications she chooses to weave. Rosko seems
willing to test readers’ patience in order to talk about the stuff she believes
is important to talk about. For that, she is a provocative, entertaining, and
necessary poet.
The poems in Raw Goods
Inventory yield and keep yielding, even after multiple readings, thanks to
the fact that they sparkle with the fingerprints of the hand of their maker. You
can see the intelligent and engaging consciousness moving across the lines,
putting them together, presenting them to the reader, thereby inviting the
audience in the best possible way to participate in their completion, to help
with the thoughtful creation of meaning and understanding.