Lapsed Hymns
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone by Kerri Webster. University of Georgia Press, 2005. 62 pp. Reviewed by Elena Karina Byrne.
Wallace Stevens believed the poet's subject was his
"sense of the world." Indeed, we think we know our sense of the world,
but it's not really so simple. Whether from the perspective of Magritte
or Mata Hari, it all really comes down to not only what we seem but
perhaps more importantly, seeing ourselves see the world, which might be
looking back at us. Stevens also believed "words are chosen out of
desire." Like seeing, the author must come to terms with desiring -
his
"body, fiercer in his mind, merciless," - and desire certainly comes to
terms with its author. Themes of both perspective and desire are crucial
to Kerri Webster's refreshing and welcome debut collection. Because of
the distinct lines drawn between experimental and "conventional" or
"traditional" approaches to writing, that grappling with desire is all
too often missing in contemporary poetry.
Kerri Webster's marvelous first book finds a fugitive comfort in its
innovative handling of diction, desire, and a justly askew, yet sensuous
seeing/sense of the world. We are never made to feel that the poems wear
a false, emotionless suit of avant-garde self-consciousness. Early on,
Webster declares, "The word is a rented room," and paraphrasing
Tennyson, "we do not eat our hearts alone." Imagine the poet entering
the mind's exile without everyday idioms or vernacular; it's like
entering a rented room or house through an upstairs window, rather than
through the front door. That's the gift and beauty of inadvertent
seeing. In Kerri Webster's case, something exciting and far more
personal happens, between a Magritte-ish subversion of reality, and a
Mata Hari-very-real dance.
With gorgeous maneuvers in language, Webster multiplies image, subject
and persona, the way a scientist splits atoms. A priori knowledge takes
over. The book's opening poem, "Lexicon," is a good introduction to the
poet's fresh stance and understanding, where she tells us there's "a
figure of speech for ellipsis [and] a verb for slow peril / logged in a
commonplace book dog-eared and oily -". This first poem, like the book
itself, moves through sadness and longing, time and absence, being and
the universal self. All this is coupled with "drowning mirages" that
serve to body the poetry forward, toward a civilized disorder.
Meanwhile, a subtle narrative gracefully unfolds through "holy
vanishing." Webster's sonic equipage is visceral, smart and accessible,
derived from sensory nouns and verbs. She employs enallage - surprising,
unexpected descriptions that instantly provoke a kinesthetic response.
It's a kind of "Genuflection, like gravity, world within world - that
breathes beyond the page, and also moves outward, "safe-passaged &
gleaming," into its own temporal "lapsed hymn." These poems rhythmically
find their way out of the dark with unconscious authority. Here's an
aurally playful example from "Bestiary":
In the House of Sleep, such a frail house, flail-chambered
and failing, watch him pull his pants on, watch him
palm hilly hilly, leavened he's leaving
all yeasty, the part with the
bird...
***
and I court
abandon - hilly hilly - underbelly
of the senses and someone forever
walking away...
Webster "understands / gray like some academics get theory." In other
words, she expertly brings multiplicity to bear on the concept of
"poem," thus translating the dryness of theory into the embodied
physicality of the body and of lyric. The book achieves this through a
congeries of poetic forms, subjects, and modes. One section of the book
comprises a section of short prose "hotel" poems, which address Joseph
Cornell's box series. These poems seek a fresh logic, the kind that
seems to turn dramatic lyric and metaphor into a Rorschach test of
creative conjecture. Another section, bearing titles like "Grace,"
"Gratitude" and "Silence," addresses equations of definition and
punctuates turns in observation, directed by epigraphs from Rilke. They
delightfully double monologue as dialogue. When the speaker says,
"frankly I'm asking for more than this" we know "What doesn't read like
trespass" reads like revelation. Every section maintains its own
invocation, its own unique format, and many of the poems use nature as
personal vernacular for the abstract sentiment: "Folded animal, my
loneliness." This sentient transfer liberates humanity through the vatic
acquisition of nature. What inevitably ties all the sections together is
the accumulated weight of the writer's voice, as well as her
relationship to the one addressed. Here, interrogation is a kind of
invention, a signature defiance where each section also presents an
unlikely, yet intimate marriage between the theoretical and the
physical.
As art comes to terms with a new wartime, postmodern angst, we ache for
language's accessible passion, a hunger for not only a new kind of
approach, but a gut-level (not gut-wrenching nor heart-on-the-sleeve,
please) emotionality. When the "phrase for absence gullied" seems
abstract or remote in Webster's work, we are coaxed to let "haunting be
the sum of touch." In other words, feeling becomes visually clear:
And suddenly
a chunk of sky falls out of the sky, as though
Electrons cannot be trusted to orbit, as though everything
Is fundamentally collision.
Her images and syntactical arrangements feel primitive - new and
viscerally accurate. The poems are alight with intuitive intellect,
where "consumption and consummation are kin." A unique brew of lists
serves as alchemy to the imagination, where the opiate of her language
enters its own "permeable skin," enters our bodies and that "whole silly
empire of sorrow." In this re-sensing of the world, you might certainly
find there's "a word for sadness that dwells in the small of the back."
You might also find anchored moments, mid-stream, like, "I am frail /
And you are frail." This works as a kind of "etherized version of
seeing" that is nearly prophetic. What if art is the muse itself, the
sensorium of prophecy? Then we might gladly return to it again and
again, as we would Kerri Webster's debut.