Second Acts: A Round-Up Review of Four Recent and Forthcoming Second Books of Poems
Danielle Chapman, Boxed Juice
George David Clark, Newly Not Eternal
Didi Jackson, My Infinity
Miller Oberman, Impossible Things
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
Poetry is hard to define even for those devoted to reading, writing, and studying it. “It is difficult,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “to get the news from poems,” but that news can be indispensable to understanding our humanity. It is, as Ezra Pound put it, “news that stays news.” Charles Wright calls it simply language that sounds better and means more; John Ashbery considered poetry language with a “blue rinse.” Whether one is thinking about poetry on the page or the poetry of a beloved’s body or a mountaintop hike or an exceptionally ecstatic meal, one thing most agree upon is that poetry helps us experience, if not explain, the ineffable, the inexplicable, the unfathomable, the impossible. The mysterious. “Why should the truth not be impossible?” asks Anne Carson. “Why should the impossible not be true?”
So much feels particularly unfathomable as I embark on this essay in late June 2024—extremist racial, ethnic, and religiously fueled atrocities across the globe, wars, famines, accelerated climate changes, threats to the future of democracies, the ever-present and haunted subtext of the Covid endemic. Four recently published or soon-to-be-released second collections of poems remind me that grappling with the incomprehensible and mysterious is inextricable from being human. What we can’t comprehend is so much more than what we can. How can we contend with that? A husband’s cancer, the death of a son, a husband’s suicide, a brother’s drowning—these profound personal inscrutabilities suggest, as A. R. Ammons has expressed it, that, “touch the universe anywhere / and you touch it everywhere.” These poets’ accounts of private travail resonate with our larger imperilments.
Typically in these essays about second books of poems I pair a new sophomore collection with a second book written at least 20 years ago, but in this especially fraught summer, when so much feels impossible in the world and because my Inbox has been blessed with a number of ARCs of remarkable second books of poems, I’ve decided to round up four new or soon to be released second books that, for me, make challenging, inspiring, consoling company.
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I always emerge from the experience of reading Danielle Chapman’s work dazzled by the ways in which the Hopkins-like attentiveness, often playful, and the gorgeous torque of her language bring her inevitably to a cliff face where words fail to make logical what lies beyond them—danger, violence, racism, illness, mystery, divinity. That precipice of paradox, where “the savage / And the good / [are] So intermingled” (from “Dog Bites”), is what makes Chapman’s poems feel so vital, so genuine.
Boxed Juice is relatively small in size—5” x 7”—not unlike the relative dimensions of a carton of lunchbox juice—and in this way physically tropes many of the poems within the book, which tend to be one-paragraph prose poems or lineated, sonnet-haunted lyrics, some in stanzas, some stichic. The poems are strikingly precise, their beautiful deployments of image and perception powerfully constrained, not unlike nectar whose attar and sensory reach are all the more intoxicating for their confinement. Part of the energy in these poems comes from Chapman’s visually and sonically enviable image-making—“the seltzer’s / minareting spores” in “Advent”; snails “zebra-striped and pearled, / scooch[ing] tiny glam ottomans across a gulch” in “All Day We Drove”; lilypads as “the ponds’ loose coins” in “On Finally Reading Jane Kenyon”; a tree’s blossoms, “deep red crepe cups / candelabraed up / from Mrs. Abraham Malherbe’s / lichen-lepered tree” from “Unspeakable.” It is when Chapman brings these high-church lyric perceptions into juxtaposition with a keen eye and ear for the quotidian that the magic, paratactically, happens. Here is the better part of the poem, “Advent”:
I hear the refrigerator’s hum
turn over, the seltzer’s
minareting spores
while downstairs the girls direct
a play in which a scored balloon
named Lily Amulet is lain
in her bassinet against
the stratagems of her evil brother,
Stinky Butt, embodied
by an orchid—
yet no argument, nothing but
soft rips of gift wrap and unmasked
tape as they negotiate
the haying of Amulet’s
crèche.
This one-sentence wonder captures the mysterious anticipation of Advent, the everyday white noise hum of waiting, the time-lapsed movement of carbonated water, made all the more significant by the children’s imaginative danger play (that villain Stinky Butt!) and the unexpected hush attending their quietly reverent hay-making. This poem is all the more powerful in the context of the entire book, which holds at its heart a family whose father has an especially confounding cancer and whose wife, often the speaker in these poems, attempts to understand the cruelty of the disease and her husband’s pain even as they both work to hold their family together. Much of the book feels written with held breath; Advent is in many ways its emotional season.
The second of the book’s three parts is a long prose-poem sequence recounting the speaker’s journey, from falling in love, to the diagnosis and its consequences, to childbirth and the adventures of parenting. It is also a journey toward belief, toward faith, as the speaker and her husband seek meaning and try out different houses of worship (“These Christians think injustice comes from Satan. She wonders what they think causes cancer”). Many of the poems take on the energies—petition, thanksgiving, praise—of prayer. “There is a discipline, a sport to hope,” she writes in “Leaving Boston, “to pray for prayers that break the surface whether // you’re better or (please Jesus never) / worse.” The poems in Boxed Juice intimate that pain, like worry, is also its own kind of prayer. Here is “Friday Migraine”:
A bird, undeterred, tries to squeak
juice from April ice
as crocuses wince
behind black snow
though through the window
I wade into yellow
warmth as if into the aural form
vision has been tunneling toward—
tigered lemon flutes
trembling acetylene
and, past the nauseated pain,
Easter, blistering.
“Friday Migraine” shows how the poems in this remarkable collection also find their Lenten, Good Friday way to a not entirely explainable hope.
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It has been nearly ten years since George David Clark’s first book, Reveille, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press, appeared in 2015. For fans of his work and editorial praxis (he is the editor of 32 Poems), his recently published second book, Newly Not Eternal, offers ample reason for its gestation. In its beautiful, sometimes excruciating exploration of the death of a son, the book feels very much worth the wait.
Like Chapman, Clark is understandably obsessed with mortality, time, faith, and fate—and the relationship of all of these to what language means. “Yes,” Chapman writes in “Optimism,” “death will make the poem end. / But we’ll drive on . . . .” No doubt in large part because of the death of one of his twin sons just seconds after his delivery (“the child / who ends // at birth” from “Song of the Guardian Angel”), Clark knows that the clock is ticking “here on mortality’s turf” (“Yestermorrow”). Yet he, too, drives on, acknowledging how grief creates its own sense of time, in poems like “Yestermorrow,” but also “Afterhere” and “Elsewhen.” In “First Supper,” a poem written for a living, just-born son who is latching for the first time onto his mother’s breast, Clark addresses our incipience, when we are delivered from the womb’s infinity into our mortal coil:
Newly not eternal,
newly partly
past, he’s here by way
of forty weeks
inside another volatile
physique. . .
In poem after poem of startlingly beautiful formal nimbleness (there is so much amazing rhyme here, in forms as various as triolets, an abecedarian, and in an altered sonnet crown entitled “Ultrasound,” which is an extended elegy for the lost son), Clark seems to want to keep alive and even celebrate that moment of being “newly not eternal”—holding natal promise and inevitable human loss at once, with equal reverence. And like Chapman, whose speaker’s painful encounter with a patch of nettles in “Catch-All” stings her “into seeing,” Clark acknowledges the inextricability of suffering from vision, as in the poem “Migraine” (interestingly, Chapman, Clark, and Jackson all have poems in their second books entitled “Migraine”—perhaps not surprisingly a poet’s ailment?):
Unless the temples tremble,
this brain burns
few prayers, and this mind
minds no shiny Bible
when the kind God’s there.
It’s hurt that earns
attention. This hot
vein behind this eyeball
only learns alertness
by its pain,
and there’s a tender
tinder near this ear
whose nothing-nature’s
never won a name,
though now its livid suffering
proves it’s dear.
The hour’s dear
in which this brow’s an altar,
sweating gall
like gasoline to grease
the humbled mass of me
in flames I’ll falter
out of when the graceful
burner’s eased.
And aimless grief then?
This head wouldn’t say so:
the blazing briefly
wreathes me in its halo.
With its Hopkins-like cascade of closely keyed, hierarchical sonic explosions, and its zig-zag aura of enjambments, Clark not only evokes the migraine’s unique ability both to trap us in the head and “see” beyond the body, but also explores the paradoxical interrelationship of hurt and holiness, grief and belief.
Clark evokes a number of personae to lend context to his book’s odal elegies, many of them Biblical (Adam, Eve, Judas Iscariot, even God). We feel the power of these allusions perhaps most movingly in one of the “Ultrasound” poems, “Ultrasound: Your Picture,” which concludes this way:
You see, it’s false
to say your death
was somehow grace. It’s grace
that spared Cain’s life
and later gave Eve other
sons, despite creation’s
wastes and faults.
I wish you could have known
love’s aftertastes.
I wish you’d had a chance
to hate your brother.
In the book’s opening poem, “Mosquito,” Clark writes, “God was hard but speaking softly / when He told us we should die.” Newly Not Eternal attends closely to that message and responds to its truths with prayerful songs of its own. “This key,” Clark writes in “A Few Keys,” “is the pitch / and the torque / of my voice.” It is through this voice that Clark measures out time’s paradoxical state of the “newly eternal.” “May it fit,” he writes, “in a favorable ear.”
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Didi Jackson’s first collection of poems, Moon Jar (Red Hen, 2020), portrays a speaker beginning to come to terms with rage and grief and unimaginable despair in the wake of the suicide of her second husband while also falling in love anew in the wake of that tragedy. One central trope of that debut book is the titular Korean moon jar, a moon-shaped container made by joining two imperfect halves in a way that leaves a visible seam or scar. Imperfection is intrinsic in this process, and yet the jars hold together. Can grief and desire co-exist? Can the bereft do more than merely survive? The scarring, the repair, the holding together of the moon jar subtly and brilliantly chimes with the emotional journey toward not just surviving, but living beyond the break and wreck of pain. Jackson’s second book, My Infinity, due out with Red Hen Press in September, continues this exploration of grief and new love by attending less to dualities and more to the seemingly infinite, non-binary spirals and riddles of the natural world and their counterpart in the speaker’s half-life in ongoing bereavement and in her experiences of erotic, reciprocal love.
Born on the first Earth Day, Jackson is, in this new book, ever on the move through the natural world, where word and world—in her sensibilities—exchange their secrets. She takes her reader with her on these literal and mental walks, noting the names of things—goldenrod, milkweed, oven bird. In the poem “Awe,” she writes,
. . . I saw the first firefly
of the season not out in the field
hovering like a star above the unwieldy
night grass, but on the window near the light
on my desk; his own light dark.
In these moments I need to know
why the Luna moth has no mouth,
or if it was a sapsucker not a downy woodpecker
half decayed on the street near the elm. . . .
Her peripatetic sojournings are not linear—as in, someone I loved chose death over me, I grieved, I fell in love again, I moved on. Instead, they are full of tangents, circuitry, turnings, and re-turnings, patterns that Jackson observes in nature and, notably, in the late works of Hilma af Klint, in which she finds parallels for her own complex emotional pilgrimage. “So much of living,” she writes in “Early Morning Fires,” “is about death.” In “Awe,” she writes of “a friend who stops to bury / all the roadkill he comes across, / each journey he takes is like the end / of a war, the dead lining a road / that was supposed to lead to somewhere / greater.” The poems in My Infinity embrace the non-linear paradox that we hold (perhaps in our very helical DNA) many loves, many lives at once, and that growth doesn’t mean shedding those multitudes, but rather in holding “all that I find with my hunger and awe.”
Spirals abound in My Infinity. Snails (“their spiraled eyes stared back at me”), mollusks, a day spiraling to dusk, a nest of water moccasins “Lopped like cursive handwriting / as if they had been told what it was / I was listening for in my fistfuls / of day,” a “band of jays / . . . their clucks and whirs / curling back upon their bodies like infinity itself.” An article, “Why Do Spirals Exist Everywhere in Nature” on the Blue Labyrinth website, posits, “logarithmic spirals are so common in biological organisms because it is the most efficient way for something to grow. By maintaining the same shape through each successive turn of the spiral, it is argued, the least amount of energy needs to be used.” In “Finite,” Jackson suggests that before she began to notice these spiraling patterns in nature, she was inhibiting her own growth:
Finite
. . . and she skids out on her face into the light
Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares
I didn’t notice how the sun
split and curled into small shavings
or how they each moved like snails,
slowly, of course, but also with waves
of muscle, contractions and pulses;
orgasmic. Nor did I notice
Countless clutches of daylight
on my tile floor, right-handed coils
of ultra-violet and infrared light. I didn’t note
the golden mean of shine, the nesting ratio
of radiant flux, the sun’s mollusk revolution.
I wasn’t able to see the day turn aperture,
turn curlicue, quirk and whorl, become the apex
of a shell, mother-of-pearl, iridescent.
The reader comes to see the significance of this new way of seeing and being in the world in an exquisitely erotic love poem, written for the speaker’s lover in response to an af Klint painting entitled “Old Age, No. 10”:
My Infinity. The pitch of yellow
on the rump of the warbler.
My palm flattened against yours
when we make love. My feral.
Your smile as wide as the sky.
The ocher blocks like bricks
that make a life. The grid
that stitches with black thread
all that holds together a day.
My lips that touch the tip
of that thread before it passes
through the eye of the needle.
Where the needle points.
How we follow the needle.
How I brake. How you add
more blue to your smile.
My empty envelope.
My imperfect. My curious.
Your drawer of silk and lace.
The flip of the number
eight to its side. The laying
down of infinity. How it is
almost invisible. How it is
in and around, under and inside,
everything. Your green.
Your continent. Your swing.
My twist. Our union.
I love this poem for the way it embodies the “radiant flux,” “the quirk and whorl” of those mysterious and natural patterns in the world that are “in and around, under and inside, everything.” I love how, in the throes of erotic passion, even the infinite can, for a moment, be flipped to its side in transient ecstasy. This is the lesson of My Infinity. As the speaker of the book’s last poem, “Mercy,” says, “Everything / is of me and so much greater than me. And why quit this place?” Yet even as she opens herself to the ecstasies and revolutions of the present (“Miracles fall everywhere like loose leaves”), she can rock in her arm for a moment the ghost of the past, as its grief, too, turns into an everywhere.
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Miller Oberman’s exciting first book, The Unstill Ones, offered fresh new translations of Old English poems and riddles and puts them in conversation with his own poems about all matters trans, drawing out deep connections between linguistic translation, transgendering, and the “trans-shifting” motion of time itself. Impossible Things, his forthcoming second collection, is likewise a hybrid text. At its heart is the death by drowning of the author’s younger brother at age two, before Oberman was born. The poem tracks the intergenerational fallout of this “impossible” loss, both for Oberman and for his father, who, while he was alive, penned a memoir about this tragic death and his own attempts to come to terms with shame, guilt, rage, and notions of the unfathomable. Oberman lineates passages from his father’s unpublished memoir and threads them throughout the book, allowing the father’s often self-absorbed testimonies and questions (excerpts which Oberman sometimes puts under erasure, as if attempting to tease out their essence) to speak among poems about the poet’s own experiences as a child sometimes neglected by a preoccupied father and bullied by other children, and, later, as a parent himself, raising two beloved children while still haunted by an unfathomable loss that colored everything about his evolution as a person.
In a prologue to the book, Oberman writes,
It has taken me a long time to write this. It keeps on not being what I want it to be. Today is February 20, 2022. At first I wanted to figure out the mystery, what happened to Joshua, my father, my siblings, me. I began with an investigation, chasing down houses, local newspaper articles, police reports, the names at the scene. Patrolman, doctor, neighbor. I didn’t get far. People died, records were lost, phone calls unanswered. I kept logs in my notebooks, what I sent, who I called. Little came back. Joshua’s obituary and official death report are all I have. I look at the pages of notes and remember the sound of a dial tone. How it wavered and bent if you listened long enough, the sound of a phone off the hook, flatlined forever. This is a story about how we get stuck in time, or parts of us. Pain nails us to a spot, and when we move from the spot, the nailed-down piece rips off. . . . . So I set to work collecting these other pieces. . . .
From the father’s excerpted pieces, presented as numbered “memoirs” in the book, we learn some of the “facts” of the tragedy as the father remembers them: that a first-born boy, at age two, manages to climb out of his crib at night (something he’s never done before), make his way past his parents’ bedroom and out of the house and across the road, where he drowns in a neighbor’s unfenced, in-ground pool and is found by said neighbor the next morning. These excerpts also give us a sense of the enormity and obsessiveness of the father’s grief, the fallout of which affects the children he will go on to have with other wives. The father’s blind grief seems to have also shut him down in many ways, making it impossible for him to be fully present for his living children. There is so much to admire in Oberman’s book—the way the father is never demonized, the frankness with which Oberman copes with his own early gender confusion and resulting abuse at the hands of other children, and the tenderness with which he writes about his transition to adulthood and his own children. The book is a breviary of pain and forgiveness. To give a sense of that journey, I want to offer excerpts from three poems. The first is from “Theory,” a moving poem about how a child is hurt by other children. The poem is long and magnificent and may be found in its entirety on the Poetry Foundation website here.
. . . Maybe someone said “dyke” or “goy”
their names for me A boy who had just started shaving gave a whistle
gestured with his arm My body pressed against the mountain’s
steepness They are so high above me
I can see the soles of their shoes when they lift them up to kick
dirt and leaves in my face Zigzag swoosh honeycomb
head of a fanged roaring wildcat They stone me stone stone stone
stonestone When I wrote of this before I focused on the rocks
gave their scientific names suggested I was becoming one
Naming things feels good cataloging has great colonial power
and so distracting A way of looking away
They threw and threw All the roly-polys
from under the rocks revealed and scurrying
No one came No one stopped them . . . .
The loneliness and suffering of a living child resonates here with the loneliness and suffering of those who grieve a dead child. Miller’s capacity to hold both experiences at once is felt in all of the poems. In “The Pool, 2019,” the speaker has transitioned and is now a man, married, and a father. The poem recounts the experience of the family’s move into a new house that has an above-ground pool in the backyard (a “beast of rusted struts and blue / plastic sheeting”). The pool is quickly dismantled, but its detritus remains in the yard until the speaker has time to clean it up. When he finally does so, he finds that ants have “[taken] up house in the pool’s ruins . . . whole worlds / there come spring, the blue skin layered into an unplanned / and wild town in the sandpit, gritty with grease and chemical // buildup.” Feeling the pool’s specter “look[ing] back at our baby still in arms, / our cheerful toddler bounding around the daisy bush,” the speaker tackles the last of the morass:
. . . . And now
these blue sheets of ants swirling shocked at being lifted
and exposed to the sun, to me, my trash bags and scissors, my eyes.
Victims of genealogy as many ants must be, caught up in a story
of a boy who drowned through no fault of theirs, or mine.
No fault of anyone still alive. I cut the pool to rags, long
filthy strips, and bagged it. It took longer than I thought.
It was heavy work, and dirty. And there was my father watching,
not a next-to-me ghost, not in the yard, but in my cutting
hands, in my mouth spitting sand, in my eyes blinking grit
as I ended that pool. Here we are, Papa, trembling
in our tendons, shredding it shredding it shredding it.
The ants, like many of the human players in this story, are “victims of genealogy.” The spitting sand and gritty eyes remind us of the queer child pushed to the ground and kicked by supposed friends. And the urgent, primal labor in this poem (“heavy work, and dirty”) is an inescapable evocation of the whole process (centos, collaging, erasure excerpting, dismantling in order to rebuild and forgive) of Impossible Things.
Finally, here is “Tahara” in its entirety, a poem in which the speaker imagines the washing of his body after his own death:
I’m wondering about you, chevra kadisha,
the “holy society,” who will prepare my body,
once I’m no longer in it, for the earth.
Will you know me already, or see me for the first time
as you wash and shroud me, as my father was washed
and dressed in simple white tachrichim, for those
about to stand before God. Perhaps by then I’ll know
if I believe in God. I like the democratic
nature of the shroud, an equalizing garment. You
may see a body that surprises you. You may not have seen
a man’s body like this one before you, which I hope is very old,
wrinkled, and (since I’m wishing) fit, muscled
as much as an old man can be. You’ll see scars.
Ragged dog bit forearm, elbow my father picked gravel
from over the sink, then flushed with foaming iodine,
and the long double horizons on my chest, which trunked my body
like a tree. If I am unexpected, let me not seem
grotesque to you, as I have to many people, perhaps
even my own parents, and others whose highest
kindness was to say nothing. Please let me return to dust
in peace, as the others did, and recite those beautiful psalms,
remembering, as you go about your holy ritual,
how frightening it is to be naked before another,
at the mercy of a stranger’s eyes, without even any breath.
The book’s whole story is here—the speaker as child and as adult, his parents, the lost one who was bathed in water long ago and left bereft of breath. Part of the beauty of this poem, and of the entire book, is how it involves the reader, inviting her into its frank and tender vulnerabilities.
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Karen Solie, in an essay about Anne Carson, quotes Guy Davenport as saying that art as “an act of attention . . . which is to be transferred, after being made into an intelligible shape, to other minds,” is its own impossible and necessary “miracle, a metaphysical unlikelihood.” Flannery O’Connor wrote that to understand good fiction (and by extrapolation, poetry) requires “the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.” Any reader possessing those desires and capacities will find much to ponder and to cherish in these four impossibly redemptive and necessary books.
