Peter Gizzi. The Outernationale. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

Review by John Ebersole

In his new book, Peter Gizzi is drawn to the things he was drawn to in Some Values of Landscape and Weather, the loss and recovery of vision, the humiliating processes of Time, and the ongoing attempt to achieve balance between exposing the speaker and creating the reader. When the poet writes, “Too much spectacle conquers the I” he confesses both self and optical exhaustion. Such is America, and Peter Gizzi, understanding the contrarieties of our national identity, boldly refuses confusion, deciding instead to brawl with reality on his own terms, yet not with the violent, novel methods so often found in young writers, but with the graceful ruthlessness of a mature poet: “I have come to regard / the winter fly. / To regard electricity / its purpose and charge. / Regard life / no matter the voltage.” Here, we have the determined speaker, the courage it takes to Gaze, but in other poems a more doubtful, and less resolute, voice emerges: “Can’t one stumble beyond / the cheap effects / of planet light, planet tilt / and all that gaggle?”

Elsewhere, these themes of uncertainty persist, like when he announces that his poetic lens can become smudged, become vulnerable, and malfunction: “I mistake many things in the dusk / like seeing liberty everywhere today.” In this book and his previous one, Gizzi has become comfortable questioning the tense camaraderie between imagination and freedom, and not only through his annihilating searches and bolts of wisdom, but through the surprising appearance of what he’s thinking during a poem’s composition. In the middle of one piece he writes, “Where am I going with this?” and in another, “I lost my way. / Can I say that / and still be trusted?” The answer is yes, of course, because such gestures are genuine and hard-earned and besides, Gizzi overwhelms his doubt (and ours) when his poetic vision is recovered, “So someone can feel it / and break it down / inside themselves.” And the reader does feel it, and like the poet, always through the act of seeing.

For Gizzi, the poet is an apparatus of sight, sometimes acting as telescope, microscope, camera, projector, an Eye, and for him these modes of vision possess a liberating utility that enables the willing individual not only to apprehend the images of nature—sun, moon, sky, leaves, fire; cars, libraries, television, Saturdays--but to transcend them, creating a sublime space where we can discover, together, a credible faith: “The wanting that keeps us / looking hard into the dark. / The dark we hope to unpack / and move into / that one day / we find ourselves lit up.”