Desire
Reclining, by Barbara Cully. Penguin, 2003. $16.00.
Barbara Cully is a poet of somber, speculative
abundance. As Carolyn Forché first observed in her introduction
to Ms. Cully’s book, The New Intimacy,
winner of the 1996 National Poety Series, “such writing proceeds from
the recognition of the end of irony; in it elegy has become, finally,
all.” In that first collection, a handful of prose poems undertook to
seek a language of “the easily broken private citizen, drained of
historical agency but still awake.” In 2000, the flirtation with the
social sentence continued in her chapbook sequence of some twenty prose
meditations, Shoreline Series (Kore
Press). Now in Desire
Reclining, her second full-length collection, Ms. Cully persists
in her search for agency and faith amid a culture of “illimitable
want.”
In the deftly suspended gravity of her paragraphs,
Ms. Cully’s declarative sentences utter and subside, carrying lyrical
moments of witness through their hurry, their delay, their spiritual
restlessness and relenting:
Are
the hills and mountains subject to spasms of perfectibility? Are
they alive with remembered phrases and choral ecstasies resounding
across a snow-lipped canyon on a waning New Year’s Day?
Steadfast, the mountain blunders into an act of keeping still when it
is time to keep still. But it has trouble going forward when it
is time to go forward.
Wise, anticlimactic, intimate, favoring a conspicuously flat
surface—there is a debt to the I
Ching here and to the lyro-philosophical tones of Rosmarie
Waldrop’s The Reproduction of
Profiles. Elegantly oblique, these poems report with the
informed intelligence and sharp percept of someone like a Marianne
Moore. Despite such a company of influence, however, Ms. Cully’s
poems are wholly her own:
First
we have the desire in its box of solitude, a sheriff to
seduction. Then the body with its hungers hoping to be
tried. The penitent’s punishment is ten million stones because
duration in time is the image of all that is powerful.
In language that is plain but not starved, sentences witness and
declare, ghosting from the vulnerability of a “body with its hungers
hoping to be tried,” to a somber repositioned quietude, and back again
to an almost talismanic, Asian precision.
Apparent when reading Desire Reclining is a reluctance on
Ms. Cully’s part to use selfhood as a fixed poetic center from which
the poems depart. Take, for instance, this section from
“Graveyard Soliloquy”:
Dead
that bend their fingers dark around a stone. The living that bend
their fingers thus. O, what door is shut? O, the lupine and
the wisteria creeping. The opportunity to listen much the same as
the opportunity to be good. Animals in relief, and writing, dogs
and swans, brass roses in an endless cascade. A brisk rendition
of poppies in September, silt in summer, washed until only the mountain
remains. Hymnless, I have broken herbs into glass to make someone
laugh. No, I have broken a promise to make someone tea.
Here is a poem at some remove from the implications of its title. That
the poem is soliloquy should raise our expectations for a consistent,
single, unified speaker, yet this second section is the only one in
which we observe a fixed first-person “I.” (The remaining four sections
deftly commingle and juxtapose the testimony of manifold means of
speaking other than the high-poetic, lyrical “I.”) Here and throughout Desire Reclining, even the
proprietary “I” is depersonalized to the extent that personal biography
becomes secondary to its larger, more important role as social,
ritualistic witness. Indeed, we might approximate it to the
transparent, communal, sagacious “I” of Eastern European poets,
particularly the work of poets like Milosz or Holub.
Because Ms. Cully declines to conclude and because
the stature of the heroic, Romantic “I” has been diminished, there is
no single point of climax in Desire
Reclining. Voices are manifold, thus the studied, contrapuntal
calm of her work as faith’s enactment is refracted and multiplied in
the social fields of her paragraphs. In short, the ecstasies of a
personal Eros have been let to rest, passions allowed to catch their
breath. Writes Ms. Cully, “the point of retreat is to leave behind the
clamor of the world, to stoop long enough to hail an insect and to
taste God.” Hers is a collection that shows us how the terms of loss
and faith may be not merely personal but shared, not only a matter of
private lament but of a public one as well—in every sense of the word
common, “salvation” as near to us as our “hands and feet.”
-Morgan Lucas Schuldt
CUE