The End of the Alphabet
Claudia Rankine
publisher: Grove Press, 1998
isbn: 0-8021-1634-5
price: $20 (hardcover)
While Nothing in Nature is Private, Rankine's first collection, deftly explored a community on the outside of "America" through formally conservative modes (which, nonetheless, recorded in politicized ways the distinct speech patterns of her native Jamaica), The End of the Alphabet contains twelve poem sequences that are more open in construct and narratively indeterminate, and yet which are, in their detailed mingling of tones and observations, no less precise in their effects and meanings.
Like many women poets of her generation, such as Ann Lauterbach and Jorie Graham (though far less grandiose in tone), Rankine proceeds with the understanding that the most true form for a poetry of witness is one that questions the very genre of documentary, recognizing text as an untrustworthy window onto reality:
Door opening to green bowl of narcissus [...]
she is dreaming the story of recurring commas,
the one that gossips of simple equations, complicated,
solution obstructed --
or hers is a wake claiming delay, piling blemish onto finery?
[67]
But in this poem the private -- "Though you thought you heard, so sure you heard / sweetheart" -- takes on the tone of the public in its winding down to the issues of choice and agency, translating the feminist concerns of a poet like Adrienne Rich to the level of the micropolitical:
(suspecting only illusion (some vindictive act of mind
even before voice
depressed the edge of the bed, pulling shadow
from beneath memory spoke from its crushed
throat
corrupting neutrality, until I knew, must know
what was coming, already here --
[69]
A radical self-detachment combined with rich narrative skill gives parts of "Hunger to the Table" a unique philosophic cogency (reminiscent of the early poems of Creeley):
A turned ankle is its own consequence. She hops about,
then caught on the sofa waiting for the swelling to go down
is reminded we move among others to fall from ourselves,
windswept, having a liking for laughter but the
ridiculousness
of falling off one's own heels. What
was being viewed from up there?
[38]
Yet even this poem ends on note of social urgency, though the play of words doesn't cease:
Don't ask to be told x to y in time or eternity.
Passage bleeds between the hammering
breath and flesh. Sweetness mumbled
is the voice nice. Just as the lips open open the eyes.
[39]
With a resonant ear and a light imagistic touch -- "Faced with its staggering number of runny noses / the day begins..." -- along with a rigorous concern for language's material betrayals -- "I arrived unprepared for the lobed, dark- / grayed matter of 'wearisome' and cannot weep..." -- The End of the Alphabet is sure to be as recognized as her first collection and to acquire this young poet a larger audience.
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