Evan Commander. A Thing and its Ghost. H_NGM_N B__KS, 2007.

Review by Brett Price.

Let’s just get it out of the way: with a name like Evan Commander, one’s poems better hit with force and one’s book better drop like a storm of hammers. I am not surprised therefore, but definitely relieved, to say that A Thing and its Ghost does. This is not to imply, however, that the poems are heavy and wild or that one could imagine them being sounded from a mountaintop in extreme weather, though there are moments like that. For the most part, the poems in the chapbook are quietly thoughtful lyrics assembled in such a way that the poems themselves (as objects or “things”) often take precedence over what they signify or at least establish themselves as equally important.

This is certainly one way to think about the title of the book, A Thing and its Ghost. It seems to posit that an art object, in order to become alive in the heads of its readers/observers, takes on a significance that is separate from its own material, yet simultaneously initiated by it. In other words, with every “thing,” regardless of how interesting its own properties are, comes a “ghost”—something indeterminate and slippery, but nevertheless present. Language, more than most other media, can’t escape these ghosts. This is an idea that runs throughout the book, though the poems don’t always address it directly. In fact, they often establish a tension between the raw materiality of the language and its ability to represent or create experiences that take place beyond the poems themselves.

The poem “A Dream of Three Oranges” is a great example.

A dream of three oranges

1. I dreamed of three oranges

and without them no longer sleep.

Once you are apart from

2. the moment you begin to rethink

what it was that made you want

it. I believe it has something

3. to do with sugar or it’s because

I can’t stop having seizures.

Sometimes I am still for so long

I forget how

It’s comprised of three numbered stanzas and ends with a single unpunctuated line. The language is colloquial and the speaker clearly speculates the consequences of the dream. However, the stanzas are harshly enjambed and the numbers work directly against the continuity of the sentences. This draws attention away from the lyrical or narrative significance of the poem and highlights the fact that it’s a formally interesting object all to itself. Just by reading the title and looking at the concrete aspects of the poem, one could view it as a kind of still-life, each stanza standing in for one of the three oranges the title suggests. The poem shifts back and forth. In one kind of reading, it points to the dream the speaker had and now examines. In another, it formally illustrates the title itself, solely through the organization of the stanzas, making it a self-contained and self-supporting object.

Other poems address this notion of looking for ghosts more directly. The poem “The Wind-Up Bird” ends with the lines “I am looking for the cloud behind the bird/ behind the tree,” which again seems to stress the speaker’s desire for the abstract and mutable, while simultaneously showing the awareness that the abstract is only accessible via the concrete. Hence, the progression from the most ethereal or elusive object (the cloud) to a more tangible, but nevertheless mobile object (the bird), to, finally, a fixed and immobile object (the tree). In other words, what the speaker is looking for exists behind, and in relation to, a number of other things.

Lines elsewhere in the book similarly demonstrate how the conceptual is only recognizable in, or in relation to, “things:” “Twice I saw gravity like yarn in a tree” (Raymond Pettibon). Part of “Critique of the City as Family” seems to hint at this as well:

the salt mounds in huts along the road

go unnoticed until suddenly they are

and it’s all you see except for the tall tall

buildings behind them shouting

we don’t need anyone until the lights

go out and it’s time to sleep

With references to poets like Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, it’s not surprising that many of the poems in A Thing and its Ghost employ strategies of rule-making/breaking and game-playing. These “rules,” which seem to have been established solely to begin a poem, often remain in the finished product and end up functioning as a guiding formal structure. “The Wind-Up Bird,” again, seems to be a good example. It begins with the line, “I am best in Ohio in winter without you I am thinking,” which sounds the cadence for the rest of the poem. Every complete thought after begins with “I am” and the poem progresses via this trajectory. It’s as if the speaker (as wind-up bird) is re-wound with each uttered “I am” until the poem’s finish. This parameter not only hints at the process of the poem’s creation, but it also provides a recognizable formal connection to the title.

Mexico City Yee-Haws is another poem where the process is left to see:

The last thing I need is another failed attempt.

Aircraft on ground Historic Bird

What am I gonna do today?

Gonna make one and one be two today

Here is an instance where the reader seems to gain access to the actual unfolding of the poem; not only as a reader, but also as the creator, in that the language itself reflects the mind of the poet, in the act of creation. With this in mind, many of the poems seem to have a presence, both in the sense that they unravel before the reader’s eyes (that they take place “presently”) and also in the sense that there is a real speaker/mind behind them, making improvisational choices.

There are poems, however, that don’t seem to work so successfully. Sometimes, only a hint of the “rules” are left in the finished product, making it difficult to see how the poem works as a whole. This is one way Commander seems to depart from the New York School. Whereas Kenneth Koch, in setting out to write a poem in which every line contained the phrase “sleeping with women,” would end up with a poem that fulfilled that requirement, Commander sometimes seems to abandon the initial goals altogether. This often results in poems that are strange and move in surprising directions at every turn. However, it sometimes results in poems that are difficult to follow at all.

Overall, the poems are complex on the page, gorgeous in the mouth and in the air. The book is littered with lines that can stop us dead in our reading track: “Lanterns/ and sea crafts on fire in oil, we know to come running” (Ode to Mega), “Because without headlights the moon/ Glows but with them there are so many/ More moons driving by” (Fragmentary Head of a King), or “There the ocean makes waves at the horizon/ And the horizon blushes/ The equator now stirred arouses what is hyper in flowers” (Neon Teeth).

A Thing and its Ghost is heart-felt, sophisticated as hell, and offers up more, in its manageable size, than most full-length books. “More love than logic be rapid!” says Commander. Read it.