Invisible Tender

Invisible Tender by Jennifer Clarvoe. Fordham University Press, 73 pp., $12.95 (paper). To describe is to re-create a visionary experience, to render the elusive language of human spirit as it interacts with the natural and man-made world. This impulse fuels Clarvoe's Invisible Tender, 2001 winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Whether exploring childhood memories, the "first shapes" and bedrock of person and personality, or the complications of adult life and love where marriage "seems like a promise to keep / overflowing a small space" ("Leave-Taking"), Clarvoe' s gaze is alert to the innate divinity of the commonplace. Edgy as often as lyrical, formal as they are free (Clarvoe relishes, for instance, variations on the sestina), this poet's lines accommodate the tensile connections of eros and intellect, dramatizing the explosive powers of knowledge, "Something you couldn't find in something you knew" ("Parts of a Bomb Poem"). More fully concerned with metaphysical space than any actual landscape to whi ch the poet may be anchored, Clarvoe's poems track rhythmic progress: the maternal body moving toward birth, the wonder-filled child feeling its way toward language, or the mind as it "rains through its percussive this-es" ("Lining"). Admittedly extravagant at times, Clarvoe's poetic speech is more salvo than salve: in "Gaze," an award-winning soap star's "breathy gasps and cries" combine with her "speech of heartfelt thanks" to create both a very "real moment in her real life" and a moment of dark epiphany for the poet. Attentive to the varied ways our culture proliferates "the gloss / we reinstate to wall us from our loss," Clarvoe suggests that language itself is fraught. Even our most intimate speech, she suggests, is susceptible; our own words become "speeches like Sweetarts / cheap jazz on the tongue, chalk in the teeth." "In between stars, what distances," wrote Rilke, "and yet, how much / vaster the distance / that we learn from what is right here." For Clarvoe, as for Rilke, the act of poetic inquiry bridged such distances; through its perceptive language and striking description, Invisible Tender transforms the familiar into the extraordinary.

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