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5.0 out of 5 stars
From The Guardian UK, February 4, 2009
It seems, at first, an unlikely strategy: a poet embracing the bland strictures of dictionary definition. Poetry, after all, strives after a truth beyond such rigidity; for a language that slips the bounds of conventional, clinical meaning to nudge the reader closer to the abstract and unnameable. So there's an instant sense of intrigue to finding Amy Newman taking as her platform 72 definitions of the single-syllable word that gives this impressive collection its title, each one yielding its own poem. Many, indeed, go without a title but for the definition drawn from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language .
Of course, the attraction of this particular single-syllable word for Newman - whose third collection this is - seems obvious. Repository of fear and wonder, it carries with it a taste of mortality, a sense of the physical at its most fragile and finite. But, again, Newman sidesteps the expected; rather than visions of plummeting figures, she instead starts her collection focusing on a rather different fall - that of Adam. And from there, she sets out to create that most treacherous of devices: a narrative, subtle but overarching.
"The body falls like a story," declares the opening poem (the briskly titled "To move under the influence of gravity; especially, to drop without restraint") - and so begins her own. Lack of artistic ambition is not a charge likely to stick to Newman, as she casts her eye around Eden in the poem "He Stumbled and Fell" and finds Adam, already on the cusp of disobeying God. The root of that mutiny? Words; language; the will to imagine, and to name. And, of course, what is imagined and named is "woman" - followed, sure enough, by the arrival of Eve, complete with her hair that "fell in ringlets" and "bad, bad love for fruit".
But language, here, is as hazardous as any biblical apple. God may loom over the first section of the collection with vague intimations of wrath, but it's words that truly fail man. Edenic perfection comes, for Newman, when "Adam believed the grasses soft / (though there was no word for it)." From there, however, it's all downhill. A quotation from Rilke sits at the very beginning of Fall - "How little at home we are in the interpreted world" - and serves as its manifesto. It's a beautifully subversive approach for poets to take, charged as they are with that very interpretation. Newman, you begin to feel, came to the project less to pay tribute to the dictionary than to discredit it.
Not that either her mistrust of language or the artful conceit at the heart of the collection should obscure some breathtaking writing. There's an aptly vertiginous quality to much of the material here, the way a vivid juxtaposition grabs at you or a nimble switch in rhythm catches you off guard. Newman's default style is a clipped lyricism loaded with similes, but within that there is no end of surprises. Over and again, her imagery startles: "Above her cool form, / the ether of him hovers, / pretty as a keepsake," she writes in "To be conquered or seized"; then, later in the same poem: "She is ready to burst her skin at the crisp possibilities, / Juiced up, the garden shines like a fat corsage / for the prom, and she believes him."
For someone so wary of language, Newman employs it with deft precision; and that gift remains in the foreground as the collection moves into its second section. Now, the fall at the centre of the piece has become that engendered through grief and loss - specifically the loss of the poet's mother through cancer.
God is rarely on hand any more, replaced instead by a persistent melancholy. The lack of faith in language, meanwhile, seems suffused with frustration. In "Fall Under" we find the grieving Newman standing among red and yellow lilies that she feels compelled to address: "I tell them / How the words I use are useless." But despite the raw hurt, the poems in this part never lapse into the maudlin. Instead, that frustration at the blunt tools of English in capturing the chaos inside burns through even the most mournful lines: "My mother was blade thin / as thin as blade, and scattered to the wind / as seed, and left us all she had: / the final shell of her, the lace of her/ veined like a wing."
There is a brimming humanity to these poems, a rare intimacy. Amid the grief, there is sex, heat, images of vines extending "like naughty girls". And it's this splicing of seemingly discordant tones that begins to strike you as Fall's major achievement. Gravity (what else?) pervades the book; yet in the space of a line it's suddenly coloured with an audacious note or wry aside.
Indeed, Newman's wit is addictive. Witness, in the opening section, "His Face Fell", or - as it is subtitled - "God's disappointments", a slyly droll list that begins: "To enumerate: / 1) Sand / 2) The birds hovered less than would be tranquil / 3) Rain could be problematic." Meticulous and subtle as this collection is, that doesn't mean it's not capable of comic playfulness.
Like all good narratives, meanwhile, Newman's wraps itself up in a third act. Here, truth be told, the thematic becomes less coherent, fragmenting around vague ideas of resignation, recovery and fall in its American, seasonal sense. Yet taken individually, these poems are every bit as compelling as those that precede them. By now, after expulsion from Eden and the trauma of bereavement, the tone is (appropriately) autumnal, elegiac; a quiet, defiant beauty emerging through the sadness.
Until, eventually, we find ourselves in the dying moments of Fall, both book and season, and a poem titled "Often Capital F. Autumn". Spare, graceful, and possessed of an emotional charge all the more affecting for its restraint, it acts as an emblem of the entire collection, finding the poet outside, now in her yard, the red and yellow lilies replaced by a "blue scrim of sky" and something else besides, something almost floral. "We hope / into a bloom," Newman writes, and that bloom - "its scent so apple-sweet" - hangs over the final stanzas.
That Newman has created a series of poems this accomplished would be worthy of praise in any circumstances. Doing so while detailing the flaws and lacunae of language itself - that is a definitive mark of excellence.
· Danny Leigh
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