Geoff Bouvier. Living Room. Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

Review by Alisa Heinzman

Geoff Bouvier’s language isn’t inadequate in Living Room, but it’s almost bare, and at first I mistook this for ordinary and obvious. I charged straight through—read poem after poem—and the path seemed drearily well defined. There were numbered sections with short introductory poems and paragraphs with solid endings. Initially I didn’t see much else. I was unimpressed. Reading “The Field Clear,” which appears half way through the third section, was the turning point for me as a first time reader. Bouvier opens with the line “I don’t know but my dream says no,” which strongly called to mind that beautiful poem by Louis Zukofsky that begins, “It’s hard to see but think of a sea.” This may be a purely imagined association on my part – but I began reading the book again. I looked for circuits and oscillating signs and I tried to consider what might inhabit the space between the structures Bouvier was building with his sturdy language.

The book is full of structured spaces, and many of the poems are room specific—there is hair on the bathroom sink, sugar cookies baked in the kitchen, maps drawn in the attic, even the title of the book itself. Bouvier writes with complete, strong sentences so that even occasional fragments feel grounded with grammatical precision, but his writing is not without play – it isn’t static. There is an eyeful that may be an Eiffel “the colors of steel and clouds,” and a drop-in Messiah who waves as he wavers between inside and out.

Special attention is paid to the idea of interior and exterior, the movement from one to the other and the most striking moments in this book deal with the idea of empty space, or the space between things. Maybe this is what Bouvier is reining in with his structure – creating walls for things to exist between. In “Metaphysical Ground” there is the redolence that remains, the moment between sound and silence “the way smoke extends, but strangely, briefly, the body of a cigarette.” And in “No, No, Never Nothing” scientists fill a glass room with smoke to see “once and for all, the indisputable form and presence of Nothing.” When the poem’s environment moves outdoors there are still lines of division between wind and stone, sky and mountain – or the inch of space between awning and building that shows blue sky. There seems to be a struggle in all of this, an inherent tension between objects working to maintain independence or merging, even momentarily, and in this tension there is energy – “Museum-goers are charged, a measurable refinement like electricity.”

This energy fills a lot of the structure in “Living Room” that I missed during my first attempt to read the book. There is an Edmond Jabès quote about whiteness at the beginning of the book – “The subversive does not necessarily proclaim itself as such from the start” - and while I wouldn’t describe this book as subversive, there is an unexpected modesty in Bouvier’s confident language. The language proclaims itself as nearly material at times, with its ability to open and close, but doesn’t overstate what it frames. It is the restraint shown toward the empty space, or the difficulty inherent in framing it, that creates the book’s charge.