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3.0 out of 5 stars
The cold solitude of formidable, isolated places, March 27, 2009
This review is from: Minsk: Poems (Hardcover)
Lavinia Greenlaw's third book of poems, Minsk, is her American poetry debut. Picked as a "Next Generation" poet in 1994, Greenlaw has become a major voice in British letters. Minsk, however, is disappointing. Harcourt could have easily produced a selected poems, as they did for "Next Generation" poet Simon Armitage, with a dozen major poems from Night Photograph, a dozen from A World Where News Travelled Slowly, and a dozen from Minsk. Such a volume would have better presented Greenlaw's remarkable skills, her icy gaze, and her geological imagination to her new American audience. Instead, in Minsk, we have a poet in transition, trying out some new modes, not all of which fit (and a supremely inept introduction by Edward Hirsch).
Greenlaw's early poems are full of careful observations--of the night sky and the earth, of those who study the earth and sky. When they do turn personal, Greenlaw creates enough distance to show she is working a theme rather than just telling us about the tribulations of last Thursday. This is not always the case in Minsk, where she too often recounts some childhood moment as if we had asked:
The piano years . . . Too young to drive
I played pedal to the metal
full reverb, wah-wah and fuzz,
a collision course bending Chopsticks
into hairpins, trilling the hell
out of cheesy Für Elise.
Thus begins "Essex Rag," and while it has charm, Greenlaw cannot make something from nothing much. The contemporary post-confessional confessional mode is not her strong suit, and neither, it seems, are lists: "Picture this:/an estuary, where the eye can't tell/sea from river, hill from valley,/near from far, first from last, in from out/--any one thing, in fact, from any other" ("Blackwater"); or, "It has no tissue, nothing/to touch or taste or bring to mind/a memory, no iris or artery, no gentian, aconite or anemone,/no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,/no titanium or turquoise,/no mercury or magnesium,/no phosphorous, sapphire, or silver foil,/no duck egg or milk jug,/no chambray, denim, or navy,/no indigo, octopus ink, no ink,/no element" ("Blue Field"). The only interest here is guessing how quickly she will run out of possibilities.
Other experiments also go awry: "A Strange Barn," for example, with the conceit that historical events were occurring during the construction of sections in the British Zoo. There may be a scholarly interest in noting (as in "Spin") that Ralph Waldo Emerson was peddling Transcendentalism, the Arc de Triomphe was being constructed, and Arkansas was becoming a state in the Union while the Giraffe House was being built in 1836, but it doesn't make much of a poem. If these smell too much of the lamp, others smell too much of the TV tube, like "The Sun Sessions (after Otis Blackwell)," where Greenlaw's attempt to dig that groovy Memphis vibe is as irritating as her compatriot Paul Farley's attempt to be an American hepcat.
However, when Greenlaw's talent matches her materials, she is as good as any living poet and better than most. Minsk's first eight poems--dealing with Greenlaw's parents and childhood malaise--are undistinguished, but having gotten those out of the way, the next four are masterful. "Clownfish" moves rapidly, and everything counts: "So bored we made a film of our lives/and played ourselves--botched reincarnations/of doctors, madmen, evangelists and spies." Her listing here inspired; her diction nearly Lowellian:
Adolescents drowning in our own soup,
we crooned their baggy truths . . .
Only we knew how to dance The Hoe,
how to unrhyme slang, the rules, the angle,
the camber in the mini-snooker's baize,
the warp and dimples of the ping-pong table,
the laws of croquet on a scuffed, erupting lawn.
Greenlaw captures seething adolescent boredom and the ignorance of teenage rebellion; meanwhile her mother engages in real revolt: "Taxes for Peace, telegrams for Amnesty,/lifts for strangers, the communist vote./She left Protest and Survive by the phone." But, Greenlaw recalls, "Neither ever occurred to us." Instead, "We lived smack dab in the village eye,/bubbling up to mouth obscene charms." In "Zombies," Greenlaw returns to these "fields of our years of boredom," and asks:
Did we not remember the curse of this place?
How Sundays drank our blood as we watched
dry paint or the dust on the television screen.
How people died bursting out of a quiet life,
or from being written into a small world's stories.
Who can see such things and live to tell?
In "Battersea Dojo" Greenlaw connects karate lessons, her crew cut that gets her thrown out of ladies' rooms and kissed by gay boys, and I.R.A. bomb threats. She even pulls off an opening that flopped earlier: "The hardcore years./Towers emptied on the strength of a rumour./For all that, the skyline boomed like a graph./Inside the walls, money grew on trees."
Many of the poems in the middle of Minsk seem to deal with a separation or break-up with a lover who is "like the dream which, early that morning,/had flicked its magnificent tail then was gone." In "Faith," the lover metamorphosizes:
Watching you walk off among rock pools,
your gaze, a rapid adjustment of angles
as jittery and acute as a blackbird's,
I see how your black linen suit
makes you a preacher, or a preacher's son.
Makes him, indeed, Edmund Gosse--mediocre poet, translator, and critic, son of a famous father Gosse spent a lifetime trying to escape. The failed relationship is also cryptically chronicled in "Mephisto," "Lachesis," "High Summer Weir," "Ergot," "The Last Postcard," and "What Makes for the Fullness and Perfection of Life." One of the book's strongest poems, "Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos, 1603," continues to jab, as she responds to a fictive letter composed by Hugo von Hofmannstal, recently published in a new translation, about Chandos' abandonment of poetry and being "out of rhyme." The last poems find Greenlaw away from all that, off the coast of Norway in the Lofton Islands or in Polar Regions, where the only real question, as in "A Drink of Glass," is, "how to keep warm?" These reports from the field evoke the cold solitude of formidable, isolated places and show how one can see oneself anew in the brutal elements apart from the trappings of one's past. Overall, however, Minsk lacks much of the power and authoritative tone of Greenlaw's earlier poems. As she tries out new modes, she remains what other reviewers have said about her: a poet of remarkable talent but inconsistent; a poet of great if unfulfilled promise.
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