Sarah Vap. Dummy Fire. Saturnalia Books, 2006.

Review by Melanie Hubbard

These are difficult poems. At first they are nearly repellant, inaccessible to the sense-making activity of a reader. And yet they beckon. An “I” has wishes, motives, thoughts: in relation to others, self, objects, memory, and landscape: what could be more like lyric? And yet all the conventional connections have been misplaced, like Sappho in fragments, translated to another tongue. Or Dickinson’s resolute derangements.

The language sounds like self-talk, like someone talking, but it also seems to sample, and scramble, scraps of information, halves of sentences, others’ words: “To do: ride herd. The shifty talk of oracles--/ tell me only/if it doesn’t hurt to tell.” And, “To the junctures of my meta-/tarsals (I jokingly call ‘the wimps.’). Or, my brave little// uprights.” And, “that very/ personal enormity which peeps, then runs to seed.”

I sift the bits for sense, rearrange phrases, trying them this way and that for the key. At times it is hidden in plain sight, a matter of a certain perspective; at times Vap’s simply thrown it away (I can’t find it), and I can go away rebuffed, or I can appreciate that I am being given another way to read. Titles and endings are often not helpful, or are actively obfuscatory: these closure points, pressure points, have been undone. Perhaps one can say a poem doesn’t ‘work,’ therefore, but perhaps Gertrude Stein’s renovation of the parts of speech in Tender Buttons, the odd angles and distortions that tease our sense-making into view, the seams and knots exposed, calls out this kind of play, which clarifies for us that something delicate, sometimes crazed and even tyrannical, but always vulnerable, is taking place in our stitching.

What is poetry for? Dummy Fire incited this question, because the first time I went to it I was in a bleak mood, seeking succor, and found everything hard to know. But the mirage of presence and the genuine kept me reading, the clarity of the bent observations, the seeming knowingness: I wanted to spend more time with the one who says “I suspect,” “I don’t believe,” “I love,” “I’m a little embarrassed,” and “What the fuck is the gadfly?” There was some kind of authority in the language. I knew I’d try again when I was fit to read, when I had something to bring to the encounter.

But what is authority, and how did I know I’d experienced it? There is an awful lot of crap out there, a lot of corrupted-by-theory posing—so what sets this work apart? It rewards sustained attention. It gets more, not less complex, as bits are raveled to bits, and seams are joined. It cannot be ‘reduced’ by a reading, and it calls to be read; dead cows are frozen under the snow; these poems provide.

Sometimes lines seem nonsensical, not to follow in even a liberally associative way from anything before. “Guess it, apologists” feels like a dare when the rest of the sentence is “to measure donkey-knockers on cranes, and the plutonium-basket.” But a poem like “Eventide” meets the reader somewhere in the middle of a field of endeavor, providing just enough words to the wise—feeling-words, such as “unbearable,” “unaccountable,” and “vulnerable”—to mark a range of tone. Put together “a secret memory of a cow/tormented by the gadfly” with the apparent swerve to the moon Io, and if you know your myths, the speaker can be read as lamenting or celebrating, in ‘even’ portions, her appearance in a “vulnerable dress.” The ambivalent assertion of femininity may be merely used by the gods (“cashcow”) or may mother and magnify the god (“cowgirl magnificat”). The gadfly might be a jealous Hera, a primitive history of revenge and punishment in which men and women are never ‘even,’ and women themselves are “unaccountable.”

“Burning the Tick off the Snake” seemed like nonsense, and yet there was so much sense in individual passages, I knew I was missing it. On my third pass, a sudden insight whispered, the title is from the perspective of the ‘he’; this is what ‘he’ thinks he is doing. And then, I have to say, a pile of fragments rose into a perfectly straightforward narrative, like a tightly locked crystal, and I was relieved to be encountering sense. This is the old way of reading, I know, decoder ring at the ready, all already arranged by the beneficent deity, the author. Perhaps it is fitting then that in the poem a crazy man, who makes sense of his surroundings through rigid Christian categories, burns down the world.

I don’t know why it’s called Dummy Fire. Is it “cover to reveal,” as, perhaps, firing blanks might ‘cover’ a position? “The feeling is:/ a viewing, and the whole thing missed.” But so much has been given, so much attended to. The world is senseless, people and weather and animals and land are mysterious, cruel, undone. Something incalculable is ticking through experience; humanity huddles in its limits and forms. Expose this sense-making; let us have more of it.