Customer Reviews

The Forest (Phoenix Poets)

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The nature of Susan Stewart's The Forest is to ask questions about life. And not just any questions, but the ones that we are habitually returning to in order to define what life is. Can the story of Adam and Eve be revelatory? Can a single moment from childhood overwhelm all subsequent time? Does lost love define our adult lives? Many books of contemporary poetry settle on any one of these questions and use each poem to answer with a resounding, "Yes! I can define my life by this!" It might be why when I read those books I get impatient. I'm constantly thinking, "I don't believe you." I believe in the pleasures of the more complicated life.

"The Forest," as the first poem in the book posits, is a place where you get lost, just like any question about life starts with one answer and then turns by necessity to a circuitous string of more answers. For every answer gets burdened by new facts, which is in turn burdened by a reconsideration of earlier facts. Memory is always imperfect. And this is without even considering the motives and expectations of those you hold dear.

But even how we frame a loss in our lives changes over time. The Forest partly enacts this in "Slaughter," where the speaker is taught how to slaughter an animal. Loss is not only suffered in an instant. Most tragic narratives have a sharpened point. The plot leads us to the moment of catharsis. But tragic experiences usually hover over our lives. We live through them, sometimes for months, sometimes years. And just when we think we know what they mean to us, they become something new. Stewart's poems in The Forest are this exercise between certainty ("truth" often appears in poems) and reconsideration of certainty. Turn. And then turn again. Poems constantly urge the reader to turn from one idea to another. In "The Arbor 1937," the speaker turns "from tragedy to cynicism" as the interpretation of this childhood story. "Turn" is one of the end words in the oblique sestina "Holswege." And, then, in "Nervous System" the turning away that allows Aeneas the luxury of forgetting he left Dido behind.

Where does all this turning lead? The book begins with biographical poems set in the 1930s that could be interpreted as someone close to the poet. But any expectation of this biography as a sustained frame is contradicted. Considering the longer poem titled "The Desert 1990-1993,"dates which correlate with the first Persian Gulf War, should I be reading The Forest as a crisis in the American identity? Or is it about the complication of identity after crisis? Could it be Stewart presents an open-ended approach to narrative, and then asks the reader to use allegorical image (in "The Desert 1990-1993") or lyric association (in "Medusa Anthology") to think through whether there is "truth" or certainty behind a narrative? I wish I could say for certain. Though I admit, I appreciate the gesture toward a logic left open-ended and uncertain.

I heard an interview on Ex Libris with Susan Stewart and soon after ordered The Forest. I like the way she uses language. There's a back and forth motion in her lines with words and ideas. Slaughter is at the beginning and about the slaughtering of a cow and how the slaughtering changes the cow to the point that it is no longer recognized as a cow, but as products to be used by people. The Forest is also about the same type of thing. We have what appears to be forests, but the forests that we know now have been controlled by people for so long that we don't know what real forests are. We only know facsimiles of forests. In places, she gets very academic and the voice that draws me in to listen is covered over. Overall, her mysterious and quiet voice speaks these poems that I will read again, entranced.