Brief Under Water [Paperback]

Cyrus Console (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1886224870 | ISBN-13: 978-1886224872 | Publication Date: March 15, 2008

Poetry. BRIEF UNDER WATER is a sequence of 55 short passages that uses prose narrative as a design element in a larger lyric structure. The title refers to Kafka's 1919 Brief an den Vater, reflecting a struggle with the notion of literary inheritance. So does Console's sentence, refined nearly to the point of anachronism, that owes a great deal to Melville and to Garnett's translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. The book was written while the author supported himself as a metalworker, housepainter, and waiter. The clashing of these professional spheres contributed to the struggle outlined above. The binary numbering (1, 10, 11, 100, 101...) is meant to express his sense of movement-in-place. "[The] manuscript is terrific...The sensory detail of the writing, not surrealistic, not plot-oriented, is not even with the sense of 'leading anywhere' but accumulating both detail and expansion at once, opening a floating, fascinating, sometimes apparently violent yet detached terrain, as if not the author's psyche--but the world itself--seen from at once extreme and mundane edges"--Leslie Scalapino.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Burning Deck (March 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1886224870
• ISBN-13: 978-1886224872
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,408,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The Shape of a Lifetime, May 29, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brief Under Water (Paperback)

Console's first book of poetry has something in common with the work of his compadre, Ben Lerner, but on the other hand it's so different that only occasionally will you feel experience something of Lerner's persuasive and gustatory enthusiasm. In BRIEF UNDER WATER a muter gravity prevails, a downshifting subtle and lengthy. Right away it jumps out at you, this mode of going slow. At first the narrator and his brother Mickey are "going through butcher paper like there was no tomorrow." It's a time of great excitement, comets flying through the air, historical events occur so potent they're expressed as the names of places: "Libya," "Chernobyl." Then the wind goes out of metaphor:

"In fact there was no tomorrow."

Our narrator is a sensitive and sometimes undemonstrative sort of fellow, but he is living inside a verse so supple and knowing that one feels nothing too tragic is going to happen to him, like a baby swaddled in inner tubes. What's the brief under water of the title, anyhow? Reminds me of when I first moved to San Francisco and used to go to those wet jockey shorts contests down at the corner bar. For Console the "underwater" theme has a bit more of the numinous in it. In one sequence it's a troubled snowy day, the sky "clouded and inarticulate," and when the narrator looks under the ice that covers the river from bank to bank, he sees "Gamble Gold on his colorless horse, the hills closing around them in the salt air." That one word "colorless" supplies the sequence with a good deal of its tremendous punch. Elsewhere he realizes that he has been for too long overdependent on the phrase, "monsters of the deep."

Deep feeling alarms our boy, but he is resilient and knows his limitations. Console builds a beautiful surround for him, like the million dollar aquarium Dr. No installs to make his tiny fish look bigger. Always in the background a spectral presence, the brother (Mickey), casts shadows against the narrator's bright, lustrous world. Mickey imitates an orangutan. He scoots a chair next to the kitchen counter, then steps to the cabinet to sneak something out. Maybe he's the id? The narrator finds himself stepping into the haunted shoes of Francois Villon, "Scaura mon col que mon cul poise." As you can tell from my breathless recounting of the book's plot, it is rather more about setting, character, and mood rather than a linear narrative, and yet a story does develop, a story of subtraction, loss, and dissolution. Oh, and of doubling. "And" must be the word most often employed. "This, after all, is America, where everyone has been in love two times."