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Descartes' Nightmare (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry)

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Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, Descartes' Nightmare is a free-verse poetry collection by Susan McCabe (associate professor of English, University of Southern California) that seeks to understand more about the split between body and mind by looking deep within nightmares. The poems are not told from the viewpoint of Descartes, but rather by a "nightmarist by trade" speaker who is compelled to collect the nightmares of others and examine what they have to tell us about how the nervous system functions. A hauntingly unique venture into the mysterious pitfalls of the human psyche. "After Esther in Bleak House": I was somewhere in great black space / One of the beads of a flaming necklace / That I could be so parted / from that dreadful string

DESCARTES' NIGHTMARE University of Utah Press 2008




In McCabe's ambitious and macabre second collection , the author
drops her plumbline into squid ink and nightmare -- well , that
is , into the post - Cartesian splits , and these are legion ,
between body and soul , flesh and imagination , viscera and
thinking . With peculiar-magnificent x-file to gothic ( that is
chartreuse to amber) preserved - in- a - lab - bottle light sources ,
McCabe offers her 21st century update on nightmares .
Through first speaker , Sybil , no ordinary overseer or taxonomist,
but a "nightmarist by trade," McCabe collects unexpected treasure and
debris from the unconscious ; actually, it is in her dreamers ` taboos
that the book finds its dynamic psychic energy ; the poet is able
to pulse in penumbra spaces between waking and imagination .

Welcome to her underground , underwater world -- the more one looks
into Descartes' Nightmare , the bigger it gets . As a poet ,
McCabe is agile and thoroughgoing ( Capricornian intense ) ,
able to bring up so much , an archetypal plethora , through
fragmented strata of the intimate dream narratives ,
explorations into soul , war , dismemberment , death , dying , blood ,
limbs , brain , -- the mind strains ( but lusciously ) -- heart ,
ethers , air , spirit , drug/s , art ,water , even creating with "
bits of mosaic " .

Lifting some poems as if from the wet retina of the eye , her
atmosphere is also lyric , fluid . Water , a character all its own
, in fact , makes appearances ( fluid , blood , ink , sea , original
soul conditions ) as what flows beneath the " Fortnight Bridge
" when " swimmers come from all directions / the sparkling water
slips into the void I am opening / ; " " in climes of caffeine ; "
to where was she " before she sang in liquid choirs ? " with a
way " to speak / by unseen waves and wires and bells " and
beneath " river flowers staring from far under . " Water also
finds Hart Crane who "swallowed all the dawns he could, " drowning
in the river "stepping into us , " Mesmer identifying the "Ebbing
midnight ' universal fluid. " and the speaker herself making " her
hands water . "


But more subtly , as if behind the reader 's back , McCabe also
takes up mortality , threading the question " who made this body
made this soul " with the fear of annihilation : "(B)rains are
exchanged , the sleeping and the waking, all contact zones ironed out "
(" Unfinished Horror Movie " ) -- and with nonbeing : " This is
one flung - open with arteries half - undone / . . . The box spills its
contents , cards fly off , / maps didn't gather "
( " Rue Descartes " ).


Throughout Descartes ` Nightmare , one enjoys such sharp images
and their refractions , also sensing they have been
(beautifully ) hard won : "Stretched with an air that withdraws --
can't you stay behind the burden ? " and the dream (in its '
fellowship ' to the question , as two partners can become
question to the other's question ) answers : " That's the
dream saying / rose petals fell where my pillow lay . " Turning
her ' eye ' upon the nightmare , experience that tries to wake
us up , McCabe enacts humanness , the courageous act , eye ,
spectres , nightmare , song , all truth muscles .

I enjoyed reading this book . First from cover to cover then later from which ever order I fancy . Several poems jumped out at me, one in particular struck me. Specimen, using a skilled visual description with language inspired me to make a 6 minute short film Specimen . Susan McCabe seems delighted with word play and infuses some humor into macabre subject matter Mixing whimsy with horror.though horror is too strong a word.Nightmares to be enjoyed rather than feared. Brian Lizotte