Enough Music For Now: On Jenny George, Carl Phillips, and Jacob Eigen
Jenny George | After Image | Copper Canyon Press | October 2024 | 96 Pages
Carl Phillips | Scattered Snows, to the North | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | August 2024 | 84 Pages
Jacob Eigen | The Twenty-First Century | Copper Canyon Press | September 2024 | 88 Pages
The relevance of After Image, Jenny George’s latest, lies in its quiet, then surprising disjunction as a familiar word twitches into unfamiliar grammar. Her language, a kind of sustained negation, develops with ghostly slowness, as though each boxy stanza were stared at a while (“It floats on my vision like a burn”). In the subsequent sense—of an object’s content abstracted from its form, the image as memory—George may remind us of the faded teacups, pitchers, and vases (“Something you can wipe with a cloth”) in Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes or the quotidian aesthetics of mingei, the Japanese folk-art tradition that worships the everyday utility of monochromatic kettles and pencil cases.
Keeping these poems from dissipating into wispy impressionism is the honesty of George’s process—“her words are just images,” we’re told, “gleaned / off a dying girl like an apple peel / pared in a slow spiral off an apple”—and straightforward translucency. To take her own metaphor, the poems are like “perfume bottles / unmoved on the bureau, [which] glow like glass fruit”; not, assuming further comparisons are even wanted, the abstract mysticism of Hilma af Klint, but the water clarity of Georgia O’Keefe, whose bleached buffalo skulls and yonic, close-cropped flowers confront us with George’s principal themes: death and sex. (George lives in Santa Fe, where the major share of O’Keefe’s art can be found.) Surrounded by the orange of “soft canyons” under a light snowfall, trailed by “a foam of moments” amid “thunder, snakes copulating in a ball,”
I wait on our bed,
the curtains moving slightly
as if from a hand.
Evening comes on.Where does it hurt, they ask.
Where, specifically.
A formal feeling after great pain, after all.
Topically, George’s range is that of nature, from the quantum physics of the kitchen table, where atoms might be equated with orgasm (“What you think is form / is just a kind of trembling”), to thumbing winter peas into dirt, like green brains. Desire is tidal, wreathed red and brown by sea-girls, and the wild swans at Coole have become “the loons calling / from the pond. Where do they go / when they go away from here?” Funeral butterflies, one of After Image’s guiding symbols, are sewn into their cocoons the way a mortician zips a cadaver bag. Yet the music is beautiful rather than lugubrious, as are George’s falling rhythms, cascading over the lines’ ends only to break up midair:
Someone brought cloths, a bowl of flowers.
Raised the windows.
A scent floated like opened liqueur.Then the light turned strange
and silvered, as though the air
were sealing off something
still close at hand.
A chill entered the room.Describe this, the language
said, as the sudden snow
began—
As with the famous commandment in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” George’s exhortation, spoken by a personification after the fact, suggests getting down in words what we cannot possibly, the external world mirroring one’s despair.
After Image’s real thread, a noncontiguous sequence of six poems, refreshes the myth of a defeated Orpheus having failed to retrieve Eurydice from a latter-day Hades, when “the earth closed after me, keeping her inside.” Orpheus’s musical head—severed, in Ovid’s telling of it, by a band of intoxicated Maenads—floats downstream on “a large continual motion that isn’t me” or is alluded to, in George’s imagination, by a large, vibrating hive. Stepping back, an interesting reversal becomes apparent. An unusually lucid Eurydice, cured of her Lethean dream, haunts the place where she once lived as “inside the house / the one I married is forcing quince branches / in a jar of warm water.” For Orpheus, meanwhile, adrift in an eternal present of sensation with a markedly Glückian syntax (“did we love did we lie down”), there is only an insistent “now now now”; George’s metaphor, we might assume, for a mourner lost in their thoughts.
At the heart of addressing the dead, who appear to us in dreams as often as photographs (“One of them was looking at me last night / from the hallway”), lies a contradiction. Though love shudders in the body, “electrical and bright,” the admission is a simple one: “I’m in the world and I still want the world.” The immediate past in this collection handles like a View-Master as you click through its cardboard disc. George’s imagery—besides that already mentioned, silk, Greek mythology, blackness—has the irrepressibility of daisies; except there is an assured, almost dharmic calm, that of one who has managed to cultivate, as with a difficult orchid, a bit of peace out of stony grief. For peace comes dropping slow, as Yeats knew (a reference to honey—“with humming bees / ferrying the gold grains” and “droning paths / through the air,” who “polish their faces like little hand mirrors”). In imitation of the hermit of Innisfree planting beans to a soundtrack of insects and lapping lake water, George finds herself in thrall to a garden, managing onions and sunflowers as the apricots drop.
•
Scattered Snows, to the North opens on a disrobing and the patter of rain heard indoors, an immediate nod to the cover art (a sketch of a soaked hare, seemingly with no shelter to be found); and, as is true everywhere in Carl Phillips’s new, post-Pulitzer collection, his enjambment plays to the room:
It’s hard
to believe in them,
the beautiful colors
of extinction; but
these are the colors.
The year’s ancien régime—summer, then fall—will shed its clothing, too. The allusion to Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is un-ignorable, whatever its relevance here. A latent Beckettian strain may also be felt, specifically in the way Phillips locates the dead in nature’s diminutions, its thin places. “[T]hat the dead persist / is enough,” we’re told, “for me, it’s enough.” And if the air stirs, it is “like history // Like the future // Like history,” whereas Beckett’s dead, for whom life was not enough, make a noise like feathers. (Like leaves, Estragon counters. Like ashes, says Vladimir. Like leaves.) The self, ensconced in “this / second life,” might as well reflect on having settled into its last changes, of house and of all: “here, where it’s likeliest you’ll die.”
Phillips possesses a finicky, conversational syntax, one that’s as liable to tumble out
the one tree from a
city years ago, its weeping branches of pink-white poisonous berries, like a vow against winter, against giving in, or as if
the tree, to cover its nakedness, had chosen a stole of what, when looked at closely, seem the shrunken heads of goblins in miniature—from afar, just berries, more proof that victory wears best when worn quietly, or it never happened, or to someone else, I’m only trying to help you, let me help you, he said, something like that, unbuckling
as it is to fold back on itself, such as when he’s describing his pyrophobia (“all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves / the handling of fires daily // daily handles a fire”) or a recollection of sailing, when the water “was as close to perfect as perfect gets here.” Rarely are we forced to endure that hand-me-down of Rilke and James Wright, evergreen among Phillips’s contemporaries: the sentential, abrupt swerve. Abused into the clichéd state in which we now find it, the typical narrative swerve’s full stop could carry an epiphanic, even gnomic power—the inexhaustible Du mußt dein Leben ändern and the pathetic “I have wasted my life”—if the revelation weren’t invariably trite.
Scattered Snows prefers trailing off (“as if there were a choice that summer / —or ever—and I’d chosen, and I could almost still see it, from here,” “The only fires we lit / were private ones. Black. / Into blue”) and is the better for it. And while the bulk of this short collection could be described—in no spirit of uncharitability—as a capacious mix of talk and thought, “like an abandoned / but still persuasive, still shifting argument,” when metaphorically inclined Phillips shows himself as capable as anyone. The apartness of animals particularly suits his dreamy melancholy, as when a beach of spindly plovers are likened to “soft, mechanical figurines” or he compares “thunderclouds [. . .] clambering over / the mountains” with “sluggish bears just done wintering.” It’s just not his métier (that would be mystery, apparently). Best are the little metaphysical gestures with which Phillips usually closes a run-on of clauses stapled together by dashes:
Just this morning, what looked like signal fires being lit at random from the mind’s high watchtowers—half-abandoned, now but still under guard against siege by barbarians—
turned out instead to be the light reflected off the blade of a knife that a gloved hand, as if disembodied— I couldn’t see a body—had extended, but to no one visible, with the handle outward, as one does in friendship, or toward an enemy in truce. Then the hand let go of it. And then I was the knife, flashing, spinning downward, in a bright, bright sun.
Phillips’s preoccupations of late openly lay claim to the vicissitudes of midlife, not its proverbial crisis but certain understandings attendant with getting older: the lapse of friendships into a kind of affectionless instinct, when one’s surest companion is a leashed dog, then the admission that the fall of Rome no longer interests you like it did in college, a sly irony. Staged in imaginary marshes, a meadow where horses were, or the interminable shore, his “competing / powers of revelation of distortion” give us something like sustained somniloquy, being equal parts confessional and oneiric. Despite the stray Heraclitean comment about how rivers work—“running always away // the way rivers tend to, [. . .] proof that reliability / doesn’t have to mean steadfast”—eternal as the surfers one watched “nearly fifty years ago, [. . .] hidden in a stretch of dune grass,” Scattered Snows both is and isn’t a lot of autumnal fretting and remembering. Survive long enough and you become a voyeur to yourself, to things said and done in innocence. “Unequally, but / in earnest,” what’s past fascinates us again.
•
That Jacob Eigen sustains for fifty-ish pages, with his debut collection, no less, an almost Buddhist act of egolessness, one pierced with sad inquiries and shrinking self-appraisals, should give American poets everywhere pause. That isn’t to say what’s here is overly serious. After all, the proem consists of a talking wheat stalk worried about becoming flour. The Twenty-First Century manages to blandify Eigen’s backstory to something the Bureau of Statistics—or Camus’s Meursault—would approve of. On purpose, of course. His wandery consciousness, with its dialogic tic (“Here we are in the night, / it says to itself”) and predilection for third person, has the narrative breadth to locate the whole fishbowl of childhood in “Xeroxes / its father sometimes gives it, / still warm from the green light,” then balloon into an experientially collective we, like a lot of thinking minnows,
our glossy eyes pressed against the algae. Are we dead, you would ask, and yet we were still talking. Or were we talking? A cleaver was beating a cutting board in a kitchen above us, like a round of applause. They’re cheering for us! you would say. But who are we…I would ask. Who are they…
True to his namesake, there is an intrinsic, one’s-ownness to Eigen’s poetry; the personae—a sailor, an insomniac—shade grayly. Not apathy, but an objectivity that only feigns indifference when in fact it is laying out with masonic regularity a sigh Kierkegaard would have recognized:
A seagull takes the body of a baby
turtle from its shell
like a gray tongue, and shakes it
in tiny gestures with its neck,
no no no no.
Is it the turtle pleading or the observer? God to his biographer: “Was that my genius, to separate these creatures from each other?” What breaks up all the nostalgia—for “the shimmering / green sheer plastic grass / its parents stuffed into Easter baskets,” the luminescent stars of kids’ bedrooms, the neighborhood ice-cream truck at midnight—is usually some shower thought of Eigen’s on paleolithic art or a summer camp in Australia (“as if [he] were telling a brilliant joke,” except you feel he always means it). Like Michael Robbins, Eigen isn’t afraid of scraping the barrel of pop culture; at least for him, what’s revelatory is confronting what was once loved through the aperture of the present.
Whatever poetry may be latent in cheesy action films and the average videogame involves the culture object’s accidental surreality told flatly, when recollected with a straight face: “All the other soldiers rushed toward the man-eating plant / and were taken // into it. They became it: they were its flowers”—a reference to GI Joe: The Movie, the notes explain. Eigen’s voices are jaded, even haunted (“the idea / that the soul maintains an independent / existence, untouched / by life, like a jacket / left under the seat at a theater”), and tonally lo-fi. Looking back over the precipice of adolescence, from suffocating crickets for one’s pet lizard to the bitter mystery of champagne, Eigen, shuffling through semi-adulthood in snowy Queens, seems temporally homesick. When a subpoem, titled “Bedtime,” follows another about fish sticks, you wonder.
The Twenty-First Century, for all its exaggerated hangups about lost innocence and the libidinal goings-on of adulthood (“‘Someday you will understand these rituals,’ / his mother said”—to the end, Eigen sounds like a sex-obsessed Franz Xaver Kappus without a Rilke to ask for advice), is a curiously bold first effort. Instead of ransacking his closet for skeletons—as far as the reader can ascertain, anyway—Eigen opts for novelty, that of sheer invention. Throughout the collection are fabular, Márquezean prose vignettes, where a Mowgli-esque boy watches a crocodile cook on a spit and a spider delivers a monologue on Thai food to a fly. Here a neglected parrot sighs in its cage; there, an ibis, spotted in a Costco parking lot, turns out to be a couple of pigeons “mounting each other and flapping, / each one trying to cover itself with the other.” The latter is too banal not to be true, while the story of the molting parrot reads like Robert Louis Stevenson.
It’s a dry whimsy, for which Eigen is unapologetic; and when he throws in Boethius or Leibniz, the scales tip hard the other away:
Take unity away from a thing and existence too
ceases, that brain
had once thought. And in the moment
it transmitted this thought to the muscles in the hand,it must have believed it would go on living, just as
all of us believe we will go on living
when we say I will die but really mean
here I am, thinking. And silently,it commanded its hand to transcribe those words
while the soldiers sat outside its cell,
playing cards and throwing
knuckles of animal bone down the long Roman table.
As to whether frivolity may also be serious—a dead giveaway for Gregor Samsa “will stop on his way home / and rub his mandible with one of his six hands,” while an earlier poem appropriates the classic spy trope of the self-destructing message—Carroll and Sterne have answered. But to alternate between them by the page, changeable as a mood ring? “Perhaps,” writes Eigen, “the most likely explanation is that both are true.”