2. The Place of Places
Starting with a mixed metaphor-- "The drippings of sunset / ride away on a cloud / like water on a huge gray whale's back" [italics added]-- isn't the best way to gain fans, perhaps, but as one who has been lucky enough to have readers overlook his first page howlers, I did read on. Apart from that, however, the lead poem, "Nineveh," isn't particularly strong for its position. It's dominated by pathetic fallacies, especially the second (and last) stanza, which begins with "And the trees kneel to pray" and ends with them "rais[ing] their dark arms / in praise." Remember Tennyson's more controlled "laid their dark arms about the field?"
Thematically, the poem does lead directly into the collection: these are religious poems, by and large, poems of and about faith, belief, even Mennonites. So I thought at first I'd be the wrong person to review the book: I'm biased against the ready finality of any faith, I'm skeptical of especially Mennonite beliefs (having been raised under their benevolent influence), I've spent a long time investigating the difficulties of expressing anything, let alone the truth.
I do know something about rhetoric, however: I know what topos (place) is, and this book is supposed to be "a collection of poems that speak in the long tradition of American poetry connection to place" (Jeff Gundy, in the back-cover blurb).*And that's why I took heart and it on.
Of course Gundy means place in its referential sense: place as the provinces, for example, of the title, or Chicago, the setting and subject of one of the book's sections. But reference is never mere reference, is always also figurative, and as soon as it's figurative it's topical, which is to say rhetorical.
The topos that informs these poems is more than the geography or even the region in which they are set--the "place of places" in this book is religion. The sort prescribed by Mennonites: Yes, bengel, God exists, he behaves pretty much like a Mennonite patriarch, and the antidote to this world is a personal relationship with His Son. Oh yes--and it helps just a little bit if you know what schnetkje means.
Some of you will point out that "the place of places" is not a place at all, and of course you are right: it's something else, a figure, perhaps a topos, maybe even an instance of an ur-topos. The argument goes like this: every figure (think for example of metaphor), every topos underlying such a figure (think for example of analogy) has a binary structure (tenor/vehicle, similarity). The binary itself, in other words, is a prime candidate for the role of ur-topos as the place of places.
What happens when the ur-topos takes on the specific colours of religion? As Wright's poems do, we might remember T. S. Eliot, we might recall George Herbert, better yet Kit Smart, and certainly John Donne. These poets teach us that the ur-topos of religion is powerful exactly to the extent that the full binary is respected: which is to say, to the extent that faith trembles on the abyss of its loss, that disbelief actually challenges belief, that the forces of darkness are worth opponents of the forces of light. Salvation figured as rape by Christ, escape from the darkness of this world into the madness of full light, challenge to the yes/no logic of unquestioning dis/belief, and expression of the full agony of uncertainties.
To put it bluntly, if reductively, P or not-P, as long as it remains undecided, comes very close to the human condition, to the defining experience of homo sapiens. Drop either half of the full binary, and you approach dogma; keep them both and you have, at the very least, an engaging question to engage.
3. [Some of the] The Poems
Beyond "Nineveh," the book's first section, "Ascents," evokes that peculiarly Mennonite fascination with fear ("Fenceline Vigil" 8). The fear is not fear of uncertainty but rather fear of the "eroding of [. . .] grace," fear, in other words, of damnation. Still, the poem's hawk, a reduced falcon, is nicely done. More successful is the meditation on God as mother hen, "Chicken Scratches" (11)--a note of powerful doubt, here, sounded in the contrast between the diminished almost deconstructed brooding image and the cry in the last line for an implied return to the fuller grandeur of God's former providence (to round out my Hopkins subtext). There follow "Bethlehem Sonnets", "Lenten Preludes," poems on Palm Sunday and Holy Saturday--all of them competent enough and thematically sound. In terms of my method, the full binary of religion is muted, the echoes of the great tradition of religious poetry are faint. "A New Mennonite Replies to Julia Kasdorf" initially excited my interest, but it only gently tweaks the proverbial Mennonite nose. Kasdorf's epigraph, "This is why we cannot leave the beliefs / or what else could we be?", by contrast, makes a sharp point: there's a real issue here, even if an anachronistic one.
Part 2, "Red Line," I pass over, grateful, however, for the author's notes--and excellent and excellently realized idea. And I enjoyed Part 3, "Skilled in the Art," again, a rueful, gentle rumination on the pitfalls and joys of academia and poetry. Wright's suggestions for teaching "you how to hate Plath's 'daddy' poems" teeters on offense, saves itself through reflex, and illustrates nicely what I mean by exploring the full binary, though not, here, in a specifically religious context.
I liked also the familial context realized in the next section, "Medium (see also Part 5, "Confessions"), in the evocations of mother, father, grandparents. An especially fine poem is "Photographic Proof of the Last Day I Saw My Father" (50). Again a binary, the frame, lines, and angles of art versus the curve of context: "this instance becomes icon, warning / how sentiment softens angles hard and / sharp to arcs and curves." "Plain View" should give some of its Mennonite readers a shock of recognition in its rendering of the church's repressive attitudes toward sexuality. In the "St. Augustine" poem, the saint's well-known doubt, another example of the full binary's power, almost infects the narrator with the same.
"Descants" (Part 6) is full of musical metaphors--romance, fugue, adagio--a tricky business if one is to avoid the pitfalls of cliche.
I turn to the title poem, then, in its pride of place, last, in the last section. This longer poem is set in a serial evocation of the places of the author's personal history, and includes a dialogue (sections 2, 4, 6, 9) between the narrator and an unnamed mentor-figure on the nature of poetry. Apart from section 7 on the mother's sending the author his own childhood poem in college and very fine evocations of two family heirlooms (in the manner of the father-photograph poem) in section 8, the poem is interesting chiefly for its exploration of the role of place in poetry, culminating in the narrator's view that "I want lines to tether us to something / after all," expressing his need "to be bounded by / a ground, a fence--somewhere I know" (83). Something more substantial, it is implied, than simply being "lash[ed . . .] tight with language to a page."
This is familiar topos: reality / experience, thing/ word, truth/ illusion, in short, the Renaissance's res / verba multiplied many times over. It's all too easy to forget that each of the terms in each of these binaries is itself a figure, to forget, in other words, that the question of place is only deferred by this explication. A topos within a topos within . . ., If you like. A place of places. . . .
But a line of poetry, a construction in words, tethers us in the first place to other words. To be bounded, in words, by a ground or a fence is to be bounded by words. When I take my dog for a run along a mountain trail, I may be bounded by the earth; when I write about it, the earth is replaced by the word. This is not to say that poetry does not refer, but that it does not only refer. And when the words have to do with place, reference and figure are equally confound, equally implicated in each other, inextricably bound up with each other. Now double the complexity by considering the place of places: why would anyone halve the profound richness of such a doubled double for the false comfort of artificial reduction?
Andthat, namely, the fullness of the place of places in religious terms, is what I find missing in this collection.
*The quote this reviewer attributes to Gundy is actually just the promotional copy for the book. It reads: "Lines from the Provinces tenders to readers a collection of poems that speak in the long tradition of American poetry connected to place." Gundy is quoted on the back cover as well, saying: ""In these vivid, urgent poems David Wright contends-- sometimes angrily, often tenderly--with a whole series of his crucial loves and adversaries: family, landscape, history, faith, his fellow poets and teachers. Among this welter his voice rings out, modest but stubborn, gentle but keen, funny but quite serious, and always alert for the secrets to be found in such canny, lyrical explorations of the provinces."
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