North Virginia, near the Potomac. The book’s narrator is ‘living rough’, ‘crafting wood’ in a forest cabin ‘beneath the ridge’. Alone apart from a dog, he’s bathing in the creek, dozing in the heat, carving images of snakes into the doorframes, and above all walking in the woods. He gathers gemstones. He survives gales, storms and cold. He identifies the local flora (‘golden seal, mayapple, pipsissewa, bloodroot’). He sees lynx, deer, foxes, treefrogs and snakes.
But also, prone since childhood to ‘dervish visions’ and mystical voices, he sees ‘dream-beasts’. He discerns ‘the feral ground/ pulsing with stones shivered by their own genius’. A snake tells him, ‘You think of Paradise lost […] yet the dream, the dream/ is everywhere.’ A fox says
“Trees recall the time before our time,
remember the tribes that farmed this soil,
that walk here still.”
In the forest, he spectrally encounters these ‘first people’, who ‘cured animal skins’, ‘carved arrowheads’, and whom he senses as ‘both peaceable and defiant’. But he’s also afflicted with darker visions of their destruction by ‘the white folk’ who ‘turned these woods into slaughterhouse and pyre’ in order to take the land:
There was no witness that saw what transpired,
so if that land-claim was misbegotten
none could judge – but then none enquired.
In this now-haunted landscape, the book becomes increasingly death-driven, with several powerfully savage poems:
The head swung in darkness, eye-bolted
to a chain wrapped round a branch, blue tongue
wailing
until the narrator, via an Ovidian pun,
wooden slivers in the wounds, subtly curved,
pushing down through the skull, deep down, into
the trunk
metamorphoses into an oak-tree.
This Romantic pastiche with Gothic flourishes (‘the beast is father of the man’) is buttressed by its formal choices. The quatrain dominates: about half the poems are loose Bowlesian or Shakespearean sonnets, with many others in heroic stanzas, plus a dozen or so in loose blank verse. But odd things are happening in the prosody as well as the subject-matter. Some concluding couplets feel like they were written by Wordsworth’s dog:
whenever the frogs possess me with rhythm
I’m remade by their musical vision.
Or a jaunty light-versifier:
On issues like this you must be precisional:
hold on life can be mighty provisional.
Or with sententiae that look suspiciously parodic:
The self-judging mind is prone to laxity
when it’s confronted by reality.
Meanwhile the register runs from archaic (‘emperies’) to neologistic (‘frenzilicious’). There are high-flown apostrophes (‘o creature from the/ world before the flood, were you sister of/ Jörmungandr’) and also street-talk (‘badass gullywasher,/ no-shit cyclone’). Line-breaks split not just articles from nouns and auxiliary from main verbs, but even a bipartite placename. The supposed shack is built both ‘three centuries’ ago and by a Civil War veteran.
A trail of internal geographical clues, as well as the epitext, join these literary giveaways to expose the cantrip. The shop-fronted wilderness is actually high-end wooded suburbia, the rough cabin a stylish spread, the lyrical isolation a well-frequented country park, and the narrator-poet certainly not the titular poet, who is in fact an eminent professor in a prestigious Washington DC university, his own origin being one of the myths. The reveal undercuts the ostensibly ultra-serious performance in a manner that makes the book considerably more interesting but more troubling. For instance, the afterword’s concern with the history and current treatment of native Americans feels genuine. But what can now be trusted after such audacious self-sabotage? I suppose Romanticism always was a mythologizing ideology. I suppose a contemporary epigone has to wink a bit. Well, it’s worth reading to make up your own mind.
Guy Russell 25th January 2025
