David Swerdlow, Small Holes in the Universe, WordTech Editions
Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights, Boa Editions
The most enduring poems have been those that embody mystery at their core,
those poems that meditate in rich metaphor on the nature of being-in-the-world,
lyrical searches into the nature of self, death, and reality. These poems
are more concerned with their internal landscapes than a narrative vision;
their lyricism is more evocative of the metaphorical possibilities of a more
fluid and tenuous world. Moods rather than moments drive their momentum,
and the signposts of the tangible world are externalized reflections of their
vast interiorities that nevertheless also contain history, but in more
subjective ways. These poems don’t exclude the dream world. With these
poems, one thinks of Rilke’s angels, or of poets such as Lorca and Trakl,
whose freshness of language startles with equally original perceptions
and states of consciousness. These poems want to embody the mystery
of silence, the other side of language, and thus their language often
seems stretched and collapsed, turned-in-on-itself and dizzyingly unexpected.
We often find poets concerned with these mysterious sources outside of North
America, in countries where they have experienced some oppression, violence,
imprisonment, where the absurdity of their historical situation often leads
to a surreality in their work. But of course we find them also in the U.S,
sometimes because of their wider experience outside of this country.
Li-Young Lee’s background is widely known; along with his family,
he was exiled from China and Indonesia and came to the U.S as a refugee,
an experience that has informed much of his work. David Swerdlow is a new
poet who has not experienced exile (he hails from Cleveland, Ohio), but,
rather, has traveled widely in South America, is a scholar of Peruvian poetry,
and his first full-length book of poems reflect that rich perspective.
Beyond the conventional debate between narrative and lyric, accessibility
and inaccessibility, both poets share a common passion for exploring their
interior landscapes in thrilling and original language that opens out into
the mysteries—in Swerdlow’s case the “universe,” and in Lee’s case the
“nights”—rather than shutting them off in narrow narratives or facile word play.
Small Holes in the Universe moves much as the poet’s life moves:
his marriage, a first daughter, a second daughter. We learn his
wife and children’s names, where they live (rural Pennsylvania),
where they travel (Peru). These biographical details, though, are
actually signposts for the poet’s vastly spacious interior world, and
we recognize fairly quickly that, while they are rooted, the poems are
not narrative, grounded as they are in an internalized space, the edges
of moments or moods, wise to the complicated registers of feeling.
These are utterances that contain within themselves what is also withheld:
“We turn to the person we love whose sadness,/resembling our own, cancels our
own,/and we hold on” (“After Tithonus and Aurora, Thoughts on a Life of Work”).
Sadness and celebration are so interlayered as to sometimes become indistinguishable,
reflective of the twenty poem’s great ambitions. The poet’s response is “to say,
without saying,” to infuse the moment’s fragility with love and attention, yes,
but also to allow us to understand that the words—beautifully rendered as they
often are--can sometimes be the least of it. Throughout this startling first
collection of meditative and lyrical poems, Swerdlow reminds us of how poetry’s
task is really to enact being.
Though our speaker is not always comfortable with the surfaces,
he’s wise enough to accept the ambiguities, as in “Common Ambition,”
where he scrapes the ice from his windshield, clearing out a small
hole in his universe. The poems demonstrate an understanding of
the tenuous boundary between beauty and loss. They are self-aware
(“The slow/wagering of the mind against itself”) in their skillful
attempts to utter a lyricism that maneuvers within the interstices where
the interior and exterior worlds meet. It is refreshing that this poet—rare
in contemporary poetry—can be self-conscious and sensual at once, and the poems’
energies seem to generate on their interplay:
Mortality in the lack
of space for the complete body seen
as beautiful. Clavicle
and window, window and emptiness
suggesting itself
possible and attractive.
(“Looking Out the Window, Drawing Nudes”)
This doubleness is certainly the case in one of the strongest poems in the collection,
“What Milagros Might Say,” a dramatic monologue in which the poet speaks from the voice
of his wife, who’s speaking primarily about—the poet. Milagros is associated with Peru,
and her presence, along with that country’s, offers the collection much of its earthiness,
its sensuality, its visual texture, of which there is an abundance. The speaker’s
sense of color recalls us to Stevens in the way in which he can be at the same time
metaphysical and painterly: “eggs in a basket, the basket/resting on a blue and green
cloth, one egg on the cloth,/its shadow lined in red, its shell given its curve by shades
of slate blue-/gray and light rust, the rust backdrop moving to a red line, to a diffused
blue….” This sense of color, though, implies a deeper commitment to the intricacies of the
physical world and the various ways we hear the “long vowel of seeing.”
Much to admire about these poems is that Swerdlow doesn’t merely record that
“seeing,” but rather questions, explores, or otherwise identifies his (and our)
role in that complicated relationship between self and world, or being-in-the-world.
Humble, the poet announces “the small self I have been” in the face of an overwhelming
natural mystery, “the water//expanding into its calm” (“The Last Hill and the Wild Trees”).
Likewise, in “After Tithonus and Aurora, Thoughts on a Life of Work,” the speaker, after
buying corn from an Amish girl, wants both to celebrate this “fact our lives have come to”
and to not read too much meaning into the connection between his own gardening and his wife’s
pregnancy: “The parallel too conspicuous, and thus/dissatisfying.” As with the “small
holes” he scrapes on his windshield, the poet arrives at the conclusion that, in the jar
placed over our songs, we have “small holes to breathe” through. In the enormity of the
universe, we have a little space of our own to mourn, celebrate, and affirm.
Particularly compelling about these poems is their ambition to be both long,
which we often associate with narrative, and lyrical at once, in lines that seem to
sweep, Charles Wright-like, across the page—long or short as need be, following the
accurate pulse of the mind’s flow. Swerdlow manages this by dividing many of these poems
into sections, self-contained units of lyric that sustain their moods in shorter sequences.
In this respect the poems are orchestral, the sections reiterating and building on their
themes. The wholes are always greater than the parts. “Whose Lives We Complicate,” for
example, is broken into two sections, the first containing five shorter segments, the second
containing four. The signposts of this lovely poem are his wife and two daughters, but the
whole piece chooses various ways to explore—in that signature metaphysical and lyrical
language—the interconnection between love and loneliness and parenthood in general.
Likewise, the book’s seminal piece, “Mosaic of Splashed Light,” eleven pages long, contains
four sections that embody thirteen segments. This last poem in the collection contains all
of its themes, and pushes the language even farther into his sources. Boldly stating “I am
so glad I have no tidy religion/no repertoire of belief,” the poem is an annunciation of the
poet’s own sense of being-in-the-world, carrying on in spite of itself, loving the fleeting
moments of a head on a lap, a bird in a tree. And though the poet recognizes perennial
sadness (variations on “sad” are perhaps the most frequent words in the collection) and our
inevitable “demise,” he returns again to the daily rituals--secular, artistic, or spiritual—a
weaver practicing her loom, the poet’s grandfather wrapping his leather tefillin, a man
“squeezing oranges/into a clear pitcher.” These observations (perceptions, memories)
constitute the “small holes” in the wider “universe” of being, and Swerdlow, in his brute
and lyrical honesty, understands these almost insignificant snatches—splashes—are all we
have, as he concludes: “half of comfort must be disgust.”
Small Holes in the Universe is a reassuring collection, demonstrating that contemporary
American poetry can be at the same time metaphysical and earthy, exotic and thoughtful,
meditative and lyrical. It doesn’t have to choose between regional and self-reflexive,
personal and historical. These brilliant poems embody all of these qualities, in addition
to one we seem to be lacking and desperately need: a poetic voice that knows that “a word is
elegy for what it signifies,” a poet who questions his own language and perceptions in
skillfully beautiful images and surprising assertions. And though he knows that, at bottom,
being is unsayable, we’re very grateful to him for saying it.
Li Young-Lee’s Book of My Nights is a collection largely concerned with how our experiences
and perceptions are fundamentally beyond language, unsayable. Since his first volume, Rose,
Lee’s work has traveled from the immediately recognizable--the logical, physical and
accustomed way of articulating ‘reality’--to one that is more interior, dream-like and often
surreal. Indeed, it’s as if Lee is steadily writing his poems later and later in the
daylight, his subjects blurring, becoming more fluid, and therefore opening out into
imaginative possibilities. With this latest volume, the dark has finally arrived, and these
poems are a recording, journal-like, of what he discovers in his night-world.
It’s a dream world where the normal rules of perception won’t apply; his “subjects” are,
rather than physical figures or external perceptions, particles of an internal space, in
flux, altering and transforming. Lee’s language must rely heavily on metaphor and “leaping”
images, but unlike many poems that are language-driven, what satisfies in this collection is
that Lee’s speaker is always a voice who is emotionally committed. Whereas Swerdlow refers
to his family as signposts in relation to the “universe,” Lee continually alludes to his
family--father, mother, brothers, sister; wife and children as intimate bodies shaped out of
the vast “nights.” Perhaps the key word in the title of this volume is “My.” The poems are
explorations of mystery and spirit, the poet seems to say, but it is my life that compels
these dark searchings. That the poems so often can inhabit these two worlds, in a
beautifully mystical use of a language that is grounded in the emotional urgencies (memories,
desires) of the poet’s life, is what makes Book of My Nights so compelling.
The central metaphor in the collection is, of course, “night.” Night is that
mysterious source where a warehouse of images, memories, and fragments of parables and
stories (that often carry a mythological weight) are stored. Lee means it to embody the
timelessness of Keat’s Grecian Urn, but also the mystical qualities of Roethke’s far
field—it’s that unsayable space beyond the named world, that place of Rilke’s angels,
“a river bridging/the speaking and the listening banks,” a shadow world that informs the
historical one of memory and relationships. The power of these poems comes when the worlds
collide, sometimes in opposition, sometimes in fusion: “Night is the shadow of my father’s
hands/setting the clock for resurrection” (“Pillow”). Objects, figures, and gestures are
never only themselves, and, as in the best poetry, everything becomes metaphor, resonates,
suggests. The richness of the unsayable, that place where “even my name isn’t my name” (“A
Table in the Wilderness”) is that, when it is tapped, it offers the poet numerous ways of
suggesting, questioning, proposing, naming. These poems, in their attempt to tease out the
unsayable, are closer to Lee’s memoir, The Winged Seed, which so often explores the varied
poetic possibilities inherit in images and even ideas.
Two of Lee’s strategies in exploring those possibilities are in asking a lot of
questions and posing alternative possibilities. Often-repeated words include “or” and
“either,” as in, for example, “Depending on who you ask,/his mother or his night, he’s
either/the offspring of his childhood or his death.” Again, from the same poem, “From Another
Room”:
Depending on who his mother is in his dreams—
beggar, thief, boatman, mist—
He’s either a man paused
on the stairs, thinking he heard
the names he used as a boy
behind his parents’ house,
during evening games of lost and found,
or else a child
reading aloud to himself
from his favorite book every morning.
Because the source of these poems is the dream world, central is the speaker’s uncertainty,
his unwillingness to commit to a story, a scene, a secure phrase that might limit
possibility.
Lee’s speaker is a child in this night-world in the same way that adults are “children”
of the “infinite.” Many of the poems take on child-like cadences, allowing Lee to forefront
a sense of uncertainty, inherent in the night-world, which in turn offers more imaginative
gestures, as in these opening lines of “Nativity”:
In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
one more song, then you go to sleep.
Whereas in his first two collections Lee writes about his parents, here the child expands and
becomes the adult and the ‘parents,’ too, enlarge to become night, God, the infinite, and
“mother,” “father,” “sister,” and “brother” become shadow-figures, ghosts and angels,
mythological presences that reflect the unsayable. They are totems of memory, the poet’s
emotional connections, sources of love. In poems like “Degrees of Blue,” Lee takes the
innocence of the child and projects it onto adults: in the face of the overwhelming night,
we’re all children, though in the sense of Job addressing God. In fact, sometimes we hear a
voice reminiscent of God’s voice in The Book of Job, but gentler, less assured, more
questioning: “the hours themselves, where do they hide?” It’s the voice a man would use if
he didn’t, as so many of us do, outgrow our childhood curiosity. Whereas, for example,
Job’s God questions, “Hath the rain a father?” Lee suggests that “everywhere is home to the
rain.”
Because these poems are so grounded in their mystical sources, the language often
has the flavor of parables (from “Little Father: “I buried my father/in the sky./Since then,
the birds/clean and comb him every morning/and pull the blanket up to his chin/every night”),
aphorisms, Zen koans, even the quality of fairy tales (from “Our River Now”: “you close your
eyes and dream/the king’s bees build the king’s honey”) and lullabies. Lee sometimes even
invents phrases to convey the multiplicity of variations on saying the unsayable:
So many words for son:
He-Dreams-for-All-Our Sakes.
His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.
His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.
(“Words for Worry”)
What drives these explorations into the night world is, of course, metaphor, but a metaphor
stamped out of Lee’s own unique sensibilities, sometimes repeated like leitmotifs. Often,
metaphors will generate out of themselves in wild associations. They pervade the collection,
in the tradition of the deep imagists or the Spanish and Chinese poets they translated,
where metaphors will birth more metaphors until the whole image resonates with many levels
of meaning:
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.
(“Little Father”)
These poems are non-linear, surreal worlds where the images take leaps and bounds, sometimes
in the manner of Lorca, where we can find lines like “And when clocks frighten me with their
long hair” (“Black Petal”) and “whoever’s heard the title/autumn knows him by/is heir to all
those/unfurnished rooms inside the roses” (“Heir to All”).
Yet this poetry is not merely surrealism: rather, we have a speaker often troubled by loss
and death, poverty and exile. We need not have read Lee’s other collections to sense that
this poet’s past was fraught with fear and dislocation, wandering and homelessness and it
is these memories that, finally, supply the emotional richness to the beautiful phrasings.
From the first poem, where we are told about the night that “There’s nothing that hasn’t
found home there:/discarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet,” to “I can’t tell what my
father said about the sea/we crossed together/from the sea itself”(“Hurry toward Beginning”),
there’s a rich undercurrent of memory sewn through these poems, and its images supply the
emotional details, the pulse, of the otherwise vast and formless nights. In “The Eternal
Son,” the speaker recalls a faint memory of his mother at the moment of a profound turn in
their lives:
My mother’s eternal son,
I can’t hear the rain without thinking
it’s her in the next room
folding our clothes to lay inside a suitcase.
And now she’s counting her money
on the bed, the good paper
and the paper from the other country
in separate heaps.
If day comes soon, she could buy our passage.
Ultimately, the poems journey from one space to another, from memory to night’s lyrical
horizon, or attempt to embody both places at the same time. The central image in “The
Hammock,” a piece that asserts the collection’s central concern, symbolizes how we can live
both in and between two worlds, where the poet lives his life, where we lead our lives. As
in this poem, Lee constantly muses about the “eternity” on “either side” of his life—the
past, involving his parents and their stories, and the future, which includes his own and
his children’s. Between these two eternities, he asserts in the last line, there’s “a little
singing.”
What keeps this poet and David Swerdlow singing are the two impulses their books attempt to
embody: heart and invention. While their world’s speculations offer Lee and Swerdlow ample
opportunities to make beautiful poetry, indelible phrases that have the spark of imaginative
originality, they never forget the sources of that invention, the figures that, even in their
loss, infuse Lee’s “nights” and Swerdlow’s “universe” with intimacy: their loved ones—wife,
children, parents—the emotional signposts that signify their wide-ranging imaginative
landscapes expressed in a stunning lyrical language that always says the mystery beyond
itself.
--Phil Terman, 2004