Geoffrey G. O’Brien. Green and Grey. University of California Press, 2007.

Review by Claire Becker

In his second book, Green and Gray, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s poems are almost conversational and often humorous. Beautiful in their pessimism, the poems are grounded in the world, as part of it and as versions of it. Human existence distorts the world and affects the speaker’s perception of it: “the absence of houses / a gleefulness best not confused / with any of the birdsong and light on the earth,” “to say of leaves they represent everything / except themselves,” “to count the gold auras / around bushes on cliffs by the sea while others work,” “These things scripted because they happen, / wild radish, tournaments, lead,” “Maybe rust and flowers are friends…”

The natural world is in the process of ending. We’ve got a billion years left of our just-right sun. Global warming, warmongering and mass culture make our end seem near: “The nature we were taught of / shadow of a magnet on the grass / some think will soon disappear,” “It’s tempting to be useful and tempting to lie down / Inside the active spin, in the penalty / For having thoughts, to wait there for / A sky and its sequels.” But the world’s mini-ends make life livable in the poems by portioning it into weather, seasons and days (“It would not be embarrassing that morning came”). The poems are written with restrictions: many of the same words come back repeatedly, like the weather, seasons and days. The final poem in the book, “To Classes,” ends, “It’s like twilight to be alive now.” This like-twilight, this gloom or glint, is of our time.

The book’s opening poem, “Some Versions Of,” consists of seventeen tercets which demonstrate an inability to reason why or how a poem would begin. There is “no reason” a poem would begin in the ways or with the features described, ie. “with reference to the territory / with refrains to be used by all sides…” In tercet nine,

Would begin as expressive acts stills of time

headed in all directions in wartime or peacetime

solitary avoidable while snow fell

A poem can head in all directions, as the reader makes his or her ordered way through the lines. Time moves in one direction toward its end, but as we make our way through it we think in all directions (alluding to other texts, other times, as these poems do). The third line of the stanza describes a poem, person, thing (solitary avoidable) existing in the past (while snow fell); its sound reaches backward. “Snow” collapses sound from the three words that precede it, the “s” in “solitary,” the nasal in “avoidable” and the “w” in “while.” And “fell” is the third internal slant rhyme: “sol-,” “-ble,” “while,” “fell.” The last two words in the line introduce almost no new sounds; instead they engage existing sounds to make new words. If the poem acts unsure about beginning, it proceeds with confidence in its repetitions and refrains—deft movement of sound in all directions.

The poem “Man of Joy” demonstrates one thing these poems can’t do—exist in a world without art already in it. “It’s a parable of isolation to remember / the name of a painting while traveling.” The poem links art to isolation. Art in the world (or replacing the world) is happiness: “This is happiness / a place no longer anything else / as the drying picture chases it away.” Maybe we can think the world, like the forgotten appointment in the poem, does not exist. The windows on a train are portraits; the train passes through paintings of a world. But what we get out of the “real world” is poetry: the train pulls “meaning and music out / of the last station.” The world has all the stuff in it—the triangles and bars of paintings (or places) and the whistling and dull roars of poetry (or trains).

The desire to move, the desire to write, might be akin to the desire for new connections examined at the start of “Man of Joy.” A “new connection” is made and called into question: “unless I am much mistaken everything / is music, but that’s not really right.” Then the new connection’s origin is examined: “What can one say of a desire / for new connections other than that it swells / up out of feeling happy, wanting / to play, not knowing how to, / traveling with a companion in the dark.” The presence of the companion may drive the isolated one to make art. The need for other people is present in many poems, though it is sometimes mild: “Still, it would be good to have someone / to talk to, if I’m to do this thing / that goes on without me.” The speaker has the desire to make new connections, to say something. The speaker seems unable to say anything that will remain static: “Still all the strands change lengths when you move, / I can’t say why this is...” A watch becomes a lion, child, head, woman, laughing dog. In the poem things change in part because the speaker changes (moves) also.

Nature is ever present, ever changing in the speaker’s thoughts. He states the difficulty of thinking about it: “Thoughts of spring lead only to other thoughts.” Thoughts lead to other thoughts about spring or they lead to unrelated thoughts. Being in our world, creating in our world, it’s hard to get the world out of our creations. If poems can’t move beyond our world, some of them do move beyond thought. O’Brien’s poems become movement, sound and form while maintaining rhetorical structures that lead us back to thought. If at times the speaker feels or wants to be separate from the world (“I am that member of the family of things / that never leaves the house again”), he is joined to other people in the world by thought.

In the poem “Ajar,” words and thoughts can’t order the world. In Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar,” the jar (a figure for art) takes dominion (“The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild.”) In O’Brien’s poem, a woman notices a change in the meaning of the word “ironic,” then “she sat at home making the air / flow around her exactly as before.” And “the world / crept on by, perfecting being watched.” People place words: “some people break the silence by saying ‘It’s me,” / as night would fall across a doorway with its many incitements and accusations …” But night “says” more. The human’s voice “a sound of deference to their own voice.” People run out of things to say. They lose their words and wait “in hopes the world would act.” The world refuses to take action. In “Ajar,” people have dug into the world, making a cellar instead of a jar: a cellar “no one had noticed / was there.”

More apt than a jar, word, or cellar, a fountain is the clearest figure for art in the book. Consider the poem “Fountain”:

There is no such thing as the abrupt

Doubleness is the first plural

The abrupt comes in many forms

of which doubleness is one overture

The world occurs as time enforces it

In return it recognizes time

Again the bottom predicts a top

Fresh sources resemble each other

Goods are exchanged throughout the day

The world’s economy, natural laws and language function as a fountain in this poem. Many of O’Brien’s poems function as fountains, circulating words and phrases, trying out new configurations where all orders are true. In “Man of Joy,” the speaker thinks of “happiness” as “new editions of the same world / swelling or rising from a fur-lined machine.” For many of us “happiness” is the act of making. O’Brien’s poems remind us we’re making noise and movement. They make world-sized noise and movement in our heads.