Spar, by Karen Volkman.  University of Iowa Press, 2002.  $14.00


    Gerard Manly Hopkins said that poetical language “should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally:  passing freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one.”  Of special “graces” the work in Spar, Karen Volkman’s second collection, demonstrates plenty.  Winner of both the Iowa Poetry Prize and the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Ms. Volkman’s is a poetry of new and considerable significance.
   
    As it was with her first book, Crash’s Law, the strength of Ms. Volkman’s poetry lies in the eclecticism of styles and tones; more specifically, in her collapsing together not of traditional prose poets but, rather, of an innovative lineage of traditional versifiers.  Hopkinsian intensity, Dickinsonian epigrammatics, the angular eliding and supple word play of a  Gertrude Stein--all commingle within Volkman’s lyrical paragraphing.  At its best moments, Ms. Volkman’s idiom is transgressive, violent, mesmerizing—simultaneously rife with the archaic and the conversational, the concrete and the abstract, the punning, the phonetic, and the personally symbolic. Take, for instance, this passage from what this reviewer considers the best poem in the collection, “When Kiss Spells Contradiction”:

If kiss were conquest, were conclusion, I might be true.  In the bluebit, heartquit leaping, I might be binded.  But tongue, lip, lap are brim beginning, a prank of yet.  I waxed for a man all hum and hover and stuttered must, what he’d read of snowlight and sunder I’ll never pearl.  I said, are they moons, that they bleach in your fingers, and so much wrack at the socket, and rune and run.  (Like a moon he was sharp when new and blunt when done.)

At a time when irony and cleverness continue to be the vogue, here is a poetry that enacts a faith in language as an object; indeed, the inherent playfulness of her figurative mazing keeps her poems at a healthy distance from those poets who might otherwise have chosen purely (and mundanely) to deconstruct or confess.  Ms. Volkman’s prose poems reconstitute language away from irony and choose, instead, to exploit the suppleness of the English language into a sassy, mischievous, tender kind of poetics.
   
    Now and again, her emotional eliding is too angular to be pleasant, the language less suggestive:

The end of the day said that was my day.  Overnight the field is mown, always attentive.  We walk through its callow leavings, sweep.  Six was more than seven was in those days.  An argument for basic enlightenment, for drop.  This forest, like a head of horns, a dim migration, June was always increment, stanch, encumbered song.  Dirt in a hand like a bird wing.

But thankfully such moments are rare; usually, images or turns of phrase, which at first seem severely rendered, justify themselves later as strong or delicate harmonies of thought, feeling and sound.  Consider, for instance, the disjunctive interior of “What, I said”:

What, I said, noise, I said, is you, are you, all?  Yes scream yes shriek yes creel yes bawl.  Yes hum, clink, boom, chink, slap, scrape, wail.  But is, I said, noise, I said, something to nothing, is noise to flight to fall?  Is blue noise to black, or scorch to sow?  Atom to vacuum, or Please to No?  Riotous wave to staid shoreline?  Cardinal to crow?

Such syntactic kinking and deranged verbal constructions could frustrate our reading, and entertain that motive to a certain degree:

        Or horizon to axis. Or exile to in. Barbarous tongue to true language.  Me to him.

But here, once we learn the operative relationship among the parts of speech—how nouns, prepositions and verbs as qualities and abstractions are freely substitutable—the short, syllogistic relationship, “me to him,” modifies at once what has come before; the poem untangles into intimacy.
   
    The charge could be leveled (and probably has) that this work is over-pronounced, affected, artificial even and, as such, highly mannered; such self-conscious styling might thwart our emotional investment in the work.  But this would be merely to reduce Ms. Volkman’s writing to an over-achieved cleverness, and art and cleverness are not the same thing.  There is a saving emotional resonance to these poems.  Agitated, rejuvenating, risky, visceral—thankfully we have in our midst a poet like Ms. Volkman; she is an artist to thrill to.


-Morgan Lucas Schuldt


CUE