Spar
Karen Volkman
publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2002
isbn: 0-87745-807-3
price: $13
This must be some specious season, quick and numbered, pulling the this-world to quivered, hectic ends. Sepals could count it. Pistils, pearly queens. Little godhead stamens, tense, erected. All this intends.
[37]
writes Volkman with the mischievous authority of a sideshow barker standing before the curtains of reality and promising to reveal -- to you, the reader, should you take the chance -- the strangest wonders of natural world.
The poems of Spar recall Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, not only in her depictions of the language of sense experience as a congeries of active agents -- "What, I said, noise, I said, is you, are you, all?" [10], starts one poem, and "Berry, eye" ends another -- but also in her use of first lines that simultaneously suggest both a conclusion and riddle -- one poems starts "No noise subtracts it," and another "A light says why" -- thus tossing the reader in media res into a slipstream of cosmic, sensually redolent speculation, even if the subject remains aporic, an empty eye-of-the-storm.
Another influence is Hopkins -- alliteration and near-hypertrophied word-play abound, and one poem even declares "The day un-days" -- and Volkman convincingly melds her engagement with the ludic quality of words and the marvelously chaotic commerce of the natural world, a distinctive confluence of forces that keeps her at a healthy distance from poets who might choose deconstructive tactics to the exclusion of the image, for example, or mundane confession over the charge of the liberated word.
An element of this play is in the pairing of two nouns, verbs or adjectives that just don't go with each other -- "tremor and debit," [46] "blur and spend" [49], or the "numb, recumbent dust" (44) -- often combined with a conclusive, if inscrutable, declaration of is-ness, as when a poem ends "I am more than carbon or echo: I am fame," and another (on the facing page): "If words are wire and can whip him, this is the scar." [49]
The pronounced artificiality of Volkman's idiom thwarts any easy emotional relationship to the text, as the affect is often too highbrow, self-consciously heightened and alien, to be interpersonal -- one poem begins, rather badly: "O coronet -- your silver purpose stunts the weeds, the thrashy frays. I won't stall the morning to please you..." [42]
This literariness, which edges into irony, also thwarts the agonized, but celebratory, tone of a religious mystic in thrall with the clockwork orchestration of nature's plurality, as one gets the sense that Volkman is improvising a metaphysics rather than animating one she has a calling to describe, and her images -- the coronet, for example -- seem pulled from books rather than from her environment.
Despite these problems, Volkman's poems are involved, elusive, and often startling performances of language, and with a more subtle use of poetic stagecraft they may be revelatory.
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