Hum

Harvard Review, Dec, 2005 by Shrode Hargis

Hum by Ann Lauterbach, Penguin Books, 2005, $18.00 paper, ISBN 0143034960. Reliquaries by Eric Pankey, Ausable Press, 2005, $14.00 paper, ISBN 1931337128.

In his essay "Poetry and Happiness," Richard Wilbur writes of the poet's "primitive desire ... to lay claim to as much of the world as possible," a desire which manifests itself in what he calls "cataloguing": a poetic mode that allows the poet to both "name the world ... and embody the self." Eric Pankey, in his six previous books, has specialized in a particular blend of cataloguing which one might characterize as "psychological pastoral," wherein the aim is to take stock of the outer world (nature, in particular) in order to comment on and create an aperture to the inner. Indeed, Pankey writes in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and has confirmed as much himself.

Reliquaries, his new book, is a departure from this on two levels. For one, Pankey's cataloguing, though still imbued with the fodder of the pastoral, resides mainly in the realm of the heroic "I"; and two, Pankey abandons the compressed and predominately formal metrics of his previous work for a longer, more prosaic line:

    If only I were fluent in another language, I might be fluent at last
      and at least in this one.
    When I hear an angel rustle in the matrix of vines and hedges amid a
      thousand thorn spurs,
    When the screw-head is stripped and no tool I own can turn it,
    When I find a pale blue egg fallen, unbroken, in the green shade of
      the shriveled irises,
    It is my own wordlessness by which I set down the moment and its
      abracadabra.

The entire book reads this way, with each line acting as its own grammatical entity and each poem sounding like an engaging litany of Whitmanesque oratorios. Where the roll calls of Pankey's previous books succeeded, however, by granting flora and fauna the starring roles, Reliquaries sometimes verges on long-windedness when the poet too volubly rears his head:

    I want to wake and find myself awake amid the fog, Venice veiled in
      drizzle.
    I want to sleep so that I might wake to muted bells and the water's
      echoed slosh.
    I don't want to lament the duration nor the flux of hours as they're
      spent.
    I drop a coin into the poor-box, another coin to illumine the
      fresco.
    I stand in the light until the light clicks off, then fumble for
      another coin.

Most of the successes of Reliquaries come at the level of specific lines (or, as it were, particular elements of his many lists). One comes across gestures that are both beautiful and impressionistically affective--"The water, full of light, pulled from the well's depth, spilled in cold thick braids," or "Then as now, the road rolls behind like a winding sheet into a forest with Spanish Moss." But too often Pankey follows with a line that seems sophomoric and flat: "Then as now, the moon, my one companion, drifts beside me on a current of stars."

The form might be to blame for this. Each poem consists of four sections, and each section consists of five lines, but how these sections relate to one another is often unclear. In fact, without the poems' titles--which Pankey apparently intends as the lens through which each poem is to be interpreted--the interrelation of their sections would often be indecipherable. It's as if he sat down with conceptual cues ("Lessons in Art" or "Inertia" or "The Suspension of Disbelief"), constructed four litanies of self-contained reactions to them, then called it a poem. As a consequence, the book comes off feeling like a protracted Rorschach test, and many of the poems fail to culminate in satisfying endings.

Ann Lauterbach's new book, Hum (her first since the publication of her Selected Poems), reads like a post-structuralist inversion of Reliquaries. Whereas Pankey catalogues his different responses to the same word or concept, Lauterbach often attempts to create a catalogue of responses using the same word or concept:

    Is this a lyric? Can you tell me if this is a lyric?
    It is about a doll, which is a thing and also an image, one
    kind of thing image. Anyway, there is a doll.
    A "female," or else a cross-dresser, doubtful, but
    an interesting idea for an image.
    You would have to lift up her petticoats.
    Is this the same doll? Is it archival?
    Is it part of a collection, people have collections of dolls,
    they are serial doll lovers.
    I have had many dolls, and many lovers.
    Does this make me a lyric poet?
    Am I singing now, the way the doll might have sung
    something from "Guys and Dolls," a musical,
    in which there were lyrics I once knew by heart.
    If I know things by heart, does this make me a lyric poet?

Of course, this is more than just modernist anaphora--a rose is a rose is a rose--for a doll is no longer just a doll and a rose is no longer just a rose. As Lauterbach writes in "Trianges and Squares (Guston, Malevich)," one of the many successful poems in Hum, "The roses are desolate in their insufficient arrangement./The subject grows old. The subject may or may not be roses." Self-conscious word-play such as this is hard to pull off, and sometimes in Hum one feels battered over the head with it: "A doll, let's say again a doll ..." But Lauterbach has been perfecting this approach to poetry ever since the release of her third book, Clamor, and in this new collection she is at the top of her game.