Shallcross
C.D. Wright
Copper Canyon, 2016
ISBN 9781556594960
Hardcover, 140 pp.
$24
Evening Coming On
Shallcross was not meant to be C. D. Wright’s last collection – it went to press just before her unexpected death – and yet it opens with a poem set during a funeral with the poet playing the part of corpse. The ceremony brings together kin and friends “beside the hole” (5) – those
…who pulled the shivering rug from
my bones, he who knelt over my face
drenched in self-inflicted tears, tendered
his pen and left me spinning the poetry
of white hair in advance of its years…“Some Old Words Were Spoken” (6)
This poem memorializes the momentous and the transitory – a fine metaphor for Wright’s own imaginative shape shifting:
No destination in mind.
Just an unseasonable chill. For dying
this way is nothing. Is like losing
a sock. (7)
Here, as in much of her work, Wright’s voice is rangy, bemused, curious, sympathetic, and social. Both corpse and mourner, she acts as photographer fixing an image and storyteller plotting the scene. We hear the Southern cadences of hymns, call and response, and the naming of names, of experiences. Hers is an art that plays even as it mourns. Or, as Wright put it in Just Whistle: A Valentine (Kelsey House, 1993):
We hold mirrors. Bloody our lip under the rent in the backdoor.
The crow of the quick and the dead and on the third day
They rise and crow again.
Very soon now we can return to our life of wonder and regret.
It is this that one feels reading Wright – that the poet concerns herself with what unites us in experience, in absence. She asks, as Wordsworth did, “How is it that you live, and what is it that you do?” – an epigraph of Shallcross. Her stance as a poet is one of witness and reflection. Her “I” is active but it is the poem that acts rather than the performer; “poeming” — she called it. Poem as verb. For better or worse, her poems are not about grammar, irony, or control, but live within an all too real world. Wright’s poetry is “one with others,” an active whole.
Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislator(s) of the world” and Wright often shouldered that burden. In One Big Self, Wright’s 2007 collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, she wrote about prisoners in Louisiana; in One With Others (2010), she peered into the prismatic facets of a racist incident in a small Arkansas town during the Civil Rights Movement, an act that encapsulated the brutality and puerility of Jim Crow. Her fascination is never self-righteous or voyeuristic, as evidenced in this collection’s long poem “Breathless.”
In “Breathless,” the dead — real people murdered over a typically bloodthirsty two years in New Orleans — are as indiscriminate and as individual as snowflakes. They are the ones who:
Had on the dress he bought her
Facedown
Bringing back stuff to make gumbo
Lying on his back on Willow ___________ watching the dark torsos of clouds…. _____________________________He loved his mother’s pies
by his idling car
faceup. (60)….
Did your loved one like beets or rhubarb _______ or okra or gizzards
Hog jowls [with or without greens]
Did your loved one have a name for you other than your given…(75)Can you pass a day without rancor ____________ can you
Lift yourself up _________________________ again (76)
Lines sprawl across the page, wide caesuras giving visual evidence of fragmentary lives, young and old cut off at the root. She mourns, she rages. Her tone is never didactic although it teaches us of the sorrows others bear.
Readers of Shallcross will find Wright’s typically inventive titles and forms, but these poems are shorter than her recent epics that focussed upon single ideas or events. The sequence “40 Watts” includes “Poem with Undergrowth and Two Figures,” “Poem in which Her Mortgage Comes Due”, and “Back Forty Poem.” In these, she observes ordinary scenes with such care that they become extraordinary, otherworldly, a harbinger of death – or life:
a dog has appeared at the gate
for the second day in a row
against a dirty peach sky
a single car wobbles into the sun“Poem with Evening Coming On” (13)
“The Other Hand” is a series of poems linked by the word “Obscurity” – “Obscurity and Empathy,” “Obscurity and Lockdown,” etc. – poems that do not attempt to control reality so much as offer snapshots of a possible imaginative response. These sequences steer readers away from the de-personalized and tepid to poeming — a focus on observed details of this world and the next, the Shallcross of dreams. There is less in this volume of the slyly humorous Wright of, say, such early poems as “Personals” – “I’m still trying to find a job/ for which a simple machine isn’t better suited.” Less of that James Tate-ian elision of surrealism and wit. The poems of Shallcross ring with a sometimes-gnomic tone of prophesy, of metaphoric correspondences:
she is telling her husband that he is dead
and he is telling her he is no such thing
she tells him where he is buried and he
assures her that he is seated directly across
the table from her she tells him
she is going to call their son and settle this
and he’ll need to cough up $$$ for rent“Poem with No Up or Down” (39)
As Wright wrote in her book of short prose, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All:
seeing and dreaming are not exactly held at a premium [in today’s world], and the tempo of the day makes it very hard to make what you see stand still long enough for you to articulate, makes the dreams harder to clarify. (67)
Seeing and dreaming. Of all the poems in this collection, I found “Closer” the one that most perfectly balances that passage between sight and vision. It describes in a sophisticated diction (no Arkansas twang) a relationship in stasis and in peril. “This is not a life study, but a chronicle of a them,” she writes.
the body of the husband, the momentous nearness
of the body like something grafted to something not kin to
itself, and yet the graft has taken, the invisible areas seen into……The mystery, wrote the woman, in how little we know of
other people, is no greater than the mystery of how much. (128-9)
Wright’s prose is sinuous and certain. The long marriage, the familiarity of sex, of work, and distance: I’m almost done. The poet is faithful, dedicated, loving — note the lack of question marks in the last lines:
If she knew what
He was thinking, would she turn away…
Would she turn away. Never. (129)
And yet this is a chronicle of remoteness: “Let’s all sit down in our broken chairs with our broken hearts in our lap and clap.” (129)
D. H. Lawrence opined in his hilariously excoriating Studies in Classic American Literature, “Art speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day.”’ (8) These days, however, few poets want “to see into the life of things” or want, as Rilke advised a young poet in 1921, to “draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose?” (19) Shallcross testifies to an artistic truth rather than a factual one, including gestures toward the ghost world, the dusk where evening comes down, but with always keeping an eye on the light of the sun, the places where a self comes into its own, speaking of “wonder and regret.”
[A note about the book itself. Unlike Copper Canyon’s usually understated editions, Shallcross is a kind of memorial edition. Expense has been lavished on this hardback’s cover, the color photo of the author on the inside cover, the poems that open out like centerfolds, and the lovely tribute from press editor Michael Wiegers that includes reproductions of Wright’s marginalia. (Curiously, an author’s note wavers between present tense and past tense: is becoming was as if documenting the shock of Wright’s death.)]
Wright, C.D. Shallcross. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2016.
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. WA: Copper Canyon, 2016.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. NY: Norton, 1963.
Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. NY: Penguin, 1978.
Celia Bland published Madonna Comix, a collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg, in 2014; a new collection of poetry, with illustrations by Kyoko Miyabe, will be published in 2017. Poems and essays have recently appeared in the “Second Thoughts” series for the National Book Critics Circle website, in Station Hill Press’s poetry anthology, In/filtration, and Vela. and are upcoming in Gulf Coast. She teaches poetry at Bard College.