Jess Mynes. birds for example.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson. A Ghost as King of the Rabbits.

Pam Rehm. Saving Bonds.

***

birds for example

Jess Mynes

CARVE poems, 2006

These poems are erotic in the sense that they are about pleasure, playfulness, but with a dark scape around it. Or more sensually, these poems talk of and through early spring, the sick holding sense of it: blue skies, bare ground, cold wind, birdsong and birdshape that serve as an “example” in the sense of illustration, in the sense of model.

The cover of this book, which is also full of birds, references well the shape and movement of these poems. As the coverbirds are little more than vees yet evocative of the whole bird, so the poems, though mostly small and airy, assemble or dissemble – once you drop into them – into stunning cross-sections, intimate internal views.

The relationship between speaker and audience in these poems is both intimate and new; the poems have a weight— carefully considered responses to old, important conversations— but the boundaries are the variable, the language changes. Both line breaks and syntax help to create a language that shifts on the page and functions beyond its diagram; verbs become adjectives, work overtime and beyond either line or sentence. This is a characteristic of much poetry, of course, but Mynes’ poems be and am and verify. From “in West Virginia, in 1938”:

Hope is too like despair

accustomed to the open throat

for sorrow is so often a tidy

secret

From “It is the sun that shares our works/ The moon shares nothing. It is the sea”:

through counter-weight the essence

of scale water and air are

transitional regions out of

place in either I find

evening’s birdsongs break

me like bowed heads of

sunflowers

One-third in, a poem stands out both for its form and its content; “no fly zone” exists on a somewhat different plane of language; it shares the syntax of other poems but on a different surface, dedicated to Aaron Tieger and Burt Bacharach, more associative and easier to laugh. A five-page poem, it makes up too much of the book to say it might not belong, so what different dimension does it create? The poem before it ends, “i’ve half/ a heart/ for this,” and the poem after it begins, “where you left off.” “no fly zone” seems to be an earlier moment, approaching a question posed in another poem: “who are we to say cities/ do not create nature.”

***

A Ghost As King of the Rabbits

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

New Michigan Press, 2005

I want to call this piece an epistemological notebook, but I also want to express to you its sweet humanity, the patient usefulness of its weighted silences, both suggested and spatial. While the point-of-view shifts and the “narrative” fragments, a focus holds: language queries its anecdotes, anecdotes query their transformation to story, story wonders about its own weight.

People and animals die in these poems, and in the poems their bodies decompose and change, and both the bodies and the poems ask us, what makes story meaningful? Beyond story, how do we know what we know? Some of the points-of-view are searching this answer; others know but don’t say, not because they will not but because they cannot. The point-of-view(s) is human and humane because it resides on all sides of wisdom. We learn by smelling, by listening, by playing dumb. From the first half of the book, “A Moth in the Projectorlight”:

Memory opens a little door;

the dark & you listen

with your eyes

& write things in my letter

you’ll pretend later

to forget.

If Jess Mynes’ birds for example’s territory is early spring, Wilkinson’s A Ghost As King of the Rabbits stands in autumn, holding pattern, autumn as a bridge. Reader and speaker gather to watch the object reveal the message; then the object becomes the message:

The man slumped wide-eyed

dead at the wheel of the milk truck

isn’t enough for a poem until

the ground thaws,

the windshield spatters onto the dash,

into his pleated lap & animals catch

the opened scent.

The second half of the book, “Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk,” starts in a darker, more worrisome place. Speaker(s) have the same questions but are less patient, less willing to wait for knowledge to surface or smell. “Lug Your Careless Body” is more pierced by human error and human intervention, more willing to discuss fault:

The mailman is deaf & accidentally keeps ringing

the doorbell with his elbow as he pushes a package

into the slot.

Irate, our neighbor drags the gushing

sprinkler in from the lawn, alert enough

to keep her robe closed with the same hand

clutching her morning cocktail…

Questions pile up without answer; never rhetorical, they hang and panic alongside each other. How does this book move? From ignorance to knowledge back to ignorance, perhaps, but our understanding of these terms is changed. More intent on the ends than the means, the voices of the last half of the book still gather some peace, but it is less through clarification than silence: a blanket of snow.

***

Saving Bonds

Pam Rehm

The Cultural Society, 2002

Like Wilkinson and Mynes, Pam Rehm uses play—wordplay, the terrain of children—to query knowledge itself. Saving Bonds is full of the language and images of parable: lambs, psalms, shepards—but Rehm breaks the ratio down, suggests multiple understandings. I am drawn to her punning and alterations of language, a puzzling spareness that shoots like Dickinson:

The Road to be take

is most certainly

A Rod

To be taken into one’s own hands

A shepard

You know the road, don’t you?

What the tiny foreleg holds

Proper nouns support the reference to parable and suggest poem as code. Rehm’s repetition of language and line length creates a cycle, a careful spiraling out. Rehm uses language to capture, disarm, freeze, and then she questions her own uses, dissembles her own sentiments:

When Rescue is Secure

Your reward is with you

And you are your own reward

But we do not end up where we begin. Clarification comes through a suggestion of responsibility, the lingering and weighty suggestion that we are what we say, do, make, purchase. Rehm both critiques and preaches this bind:

The cost of finding something

and then losing it

defies possession

The very last poem, “July 4^th,” stands away from the rest of the book and requests its own close reading. In what new and domestic (that is, from home) way can we understand the double-bind of knowledge and plenty, the dichotomy of darkness and light, the Idea of Independence?

—Jen Tynes