Invisible Bride.  By Tony Tost.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 57 pp. $16.95, paper.

    

    Winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets, Tony Tost’s first collection, Invisible Bride, is a book of beautiful elaborations, of fantasized distances and dilations.  The presiding mood is overwhelmingly ideational, contemplative, hyper-thetical.   And yet for all its brisk ponderings, Invisible Bride reads less like a sequential collection of ordered thoughts than as an impressionist flow–cognitive out-takes that hover after, over, around one other, and often without the grounding tether of titles.  What he is up to Mr. Tost states late in the collection: “A method to conversation: invoking at times what other people say, at times what one thinks on one’s own, and the two mixed together like a couple of kids beneath a sheet, a shared skin.  Talking becomes a conscious stammering not in one’s language, but in how one thinks; a conversation represents not so much a break with solitude, but a newer form of solitude, a revision of the logic of solitude.”  While such earnestness could signal a too self-conscious book, it is not the case with this one.
   
    Instead, such vision geneterates a pleasurable kind of disorientation, the sort that teases our expectations for arch pacing and pattern.  It’s a design that prepares us for the shifts and wiles of Mr. Tost’s tone–itself a conjunction of registers everywhere sliding and ramping into what becomes the nimble propulsion for his prose.  Consider these paragraphs from one of the few titled sequences in the book, “The man’s Vision begins with the child’s Sob”:

For years, irate mothers’ groups have demanded playground reform as child-guidance experts, educators, architects and artists formulated the exact number of dangerous illusions in the world.  For openers, the lakes appear to be sheathed in glass while it is in fact the dreary expanses of asphalt that are stuffed with it.

Two swing-sets are nearly touching.

A playground lets our children dash about–willing, laughing, suspending, breaking each other’s bones–as the thinkers make fools of us.  The playground spins our thoughts around and extends a hospitable welcome to those who want to avail themselves of a chance to walk in the shade of some excellent exterior landscaping.  This month, I will explore playground reform as an intuitive response aiming to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children.

While such baldly declarative writing might sound stilted to some, Mr. Tost deliberately cultivates a flat, legato prose, and with an ear–like that of an Ashbery–tilted toward the contra-versions of rhetoric and tone that approximate experiencing experience.  A mind that puts into words its counting, its measuring, its approximations and prayers.  Indeed, the world of Invisible Bride is rife but illusory, one where the enacted word is at anytime susceptible to change in the face of changing circumstance,  and where a beard is a bridge between the speaker’s "past and [his] face" and a few plums hung on a tree parody William Carlos Williams but also acknowledge the slippages inherent in reference since “This is just to say.”
   
    The balance of “The man’s Vision” attests to how elastic and associational such writing can be:

A child’s body itself is a playground in which gender identities can be monitored and produced, compelling reformers (yours truly) to locate them in public, visible settings.  Like a cloud, I am meant to serve a large population.  A playground should be a sort of truce between the tunnels and twilights of childhood.  A playground should be rippling at its outermost branches.  According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, about 120,000 playground injuries are treated in U.S. hospitals each year.

A playground should remain in a child’s heart, even as that child, years later, awakes, in his or her own clothes, on a beach, bruised (in a “pool of bruises” in fact), blue-veined and delivered from his or her indolence into an outdoor, multi-use play area of a completely different sort, one that unambiguously acknowledges a community’s commitment to its children and the future they will inherit.

A playground, above all else, should be the first blossom and the wintry ground, the fuzzy, distant shore and the whale’s belly, the physical soup and the philosophical skin that agrees to mouth adult expectations concerning aesthetics and safety, even as it swallows them.

Wry, reportorial, tongue-in-cheek, lyrically provocative–the agress and regress of each of these modes points to one of the presiding pre-occupations of the collection, what Rosmarie Waldrop has elsewhere described as “making language think.” Such is the hypnogogic effect of Invisible Bride. The most quotidian circumstances, Mr. Tost seems to suggest, have their difficulties, their exfoliating perspectives.  Not just here but throughout Invisible Bride there drifts a kind of dead-pan metaphysics shot through with moments of lyricism, rapture, and provocation.  
   
    Subjacent to all the working at thinking are the familiar inscapes of love, loss, and mortality. The biological father who appears to disappear again, the coma patient who draws birds, a sage-like airport waitress Agnes, and a dead hostage contemplating the metaphysics of identity, as well the references to a familiar world (including an eclecticism of cultural figures–Bob Dylan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bette Davis, Ted Williams, et al.) all find a place in Invisible Bride even though an essential part of that world drifts just beyond our apprehension. And yet there is nothing megalo or strident or confessional about the way the speaker gives rise to these preoccupations.  With this guiding (albeit distracted) intelligence, we become a more wide-eyed Polonius, susceptible ourselves to making something from this drift.     
   
    If anything in Mr. Tost’s aesthetic wears thin (and there’s not much), it is the speaker’s compulsively aphoristic flourishes, which sometimes tip the work toward an over-hipped insouciance.  Consider these few sentences from the first poem of the fourth numbered section: “During my lifetime, I’ve made at least 200,000 observations.  For example clouds often just disappear.”   A forgiving reader will consider the occasional clunkiness the kind of thing that makes a first book endearing, particularly when such moments are rare and the writing supples back toward provocation:

When women think about abstract concepts like love or death, they use visual images, such as a sliding glass door.  For example, a romance must be approached gently for barging forward too quickly may shatter the door.  Some women enjoy watching automatic sliding doors for they receive the same feelings of pleasure that occur when they engage in kissing or other, typically romantic, behaviors.  My father told me how he gently encouraged my mother to tolerate more and more kissing; one evening she was held in a light kiss until her weeping lessened, then she was released.

Despite what is intellectually vogue about so much that girds the book, there’s something unmistakably (and refreshingly) warm-blooded about passages like this one, a trust, perhaps, in a rhetorical flexibility that allows Mr. Tost to make something out of his doubts, as if the very act of putting memories and perceptions into language–no matter how provisional, temporary, fleeting those memories or perceptions may be–becomes a kind of faith in itself.  Throughout the collection, the language is often elemental, primal.  Fire, water, trees, ghosts, rivers, snow, night–all point to a kind of reinvigorated symbolism.
   
    At a time when books of poetry bloat into the high double-digits, Invisible Bride, at a lean 57 pages, offers a welcome change, as do, more substantially, the book’s complex and ambiguous notions of truth and falsity.  For Mr. Tost, who cites an excerpt from a Keats’ letter to Fanny Brawn as the epigraph to the collection, sensations and the gestures of evocation–the O, O, O of felt life–are always already negotiated through language; this is what makes the collection feel so immediate, so contemporary.  Poetry under these circumstances becomes one mode of expression among many; if it is to exist at all, something that invents an awareness of itself on the go.  This consideration above all else raises one other affinity with Keats, his notion of negative capability–“that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason . . .”  For Mr. Tost, the notion of what is poetic is doubted yet everywhere acted out, simultaneously under suspicion but deliberately set in motion.  While the Keatsian pursuit of an ideal Beauty could never be the paramount consideration, the classic lyric moment is hardly something he avoids or condescends to.  There is something numinous about Mr. Tost’s first book.  The poet “speaks for the room, the river, the air.  He speaks to the heights because he wants to.  A fine trembling will be written.  The heights will be written.  An answer will be written, and an embrace.”  How old-fashioned to attempt even a provisional answer.  And yet how needed.


-Morgan Lucas Schuldt


CUE