Oubliette [Paperback]

Peter Richards (Author), Tomaz Salamun (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2001

In his introduction to this, Richards’ debut collection, Tomaz Salamun writes "It is inscrutable how Peter Richards produces this religious magma and bathes himself and us in it. How he restores internal time to the work of art."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The deliberately wary lines of Peter Richards's Oubliette his first book, and another from Verse magazine's first season as a book publisher limn a beleaguered self in a crowded world, one resistant to postmodern skepticism but uncertain of its own makeup: "I am not broken as they envision, am not partial," the first poem declares, yet "I fear there is no... place to be inside of." Richards's slippery, fractional meditations recall by turns Charles Simic, Mark Levine and Mark Strand; he explores the domestic and the exceptional, the narcissistic and the ecological: "Waters are tepid, careful and I walk on the waters." It can be hard to separate Richards's work (featured in several quality magazines in Australia and America) from the up-to-date contexts and practices it involves, but the impressive surfaces and postsurrealist musings here promise further developments.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"It is inscrutable how Peter Richards produces this religious magma and bathes himself and us in it." -- Tomaz Salamun

A tonal soup that is one part tenderness, one part comic slyness, and one part awe. -- David Rivard, Ploughshares

Shows a modern audience what spiritual autobigraphy would look like were it written without the consolations of an everlasting soul. -- Srikanth Reddy, Denver Quarterly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 73 pages
• Publisher: Wave Books; 1st edition (April 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970367228
• ISBN-13: 978-0970367228
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #887,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Unfurled Blue - Color and Religion in Peter Richards's Oubliette, April 21, 2008

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Oubliette (Paperback)

Peter Richards's first poetry volume, Oubliette (Amherst, Mass. 2001) is a poetic dialectic boiling over with birds, colors - particularly blue, hoods, rain, hair, the sea, Greek mythology, Old Testament characters, and God. Part Imagism, part Symbolism, and always a combination of the two, Oubliette (from the French verb oublier, "to forget") takes the reader from Moses' pre-birth to romantic love in a gritty part of a 21st-century city, engaging tropes of religion and nature on each poetic journey. Its 48 poems share one theme - words and people that want to emerge, or hide in a liminal existence.

The book opens with a poem titled "Remainder." The title alone is fascinating for the way its linguistic roots are opposite to "Oubliette." "Remain" derives from a literal Latin translation, "remanere," to remain or to stay, while "forget" comes from Old English, "letting go of." An oubliette, the noun is a French word for a dungeon, from which escape is possible only through an exit in the ceiling. In "Remainder," the persona may be using the oubliette (noun) as a safe space from which decide which writings will remain, and which to take with him to the outside. "But I fear there is no carriage to begin with,/ nor place to be inside of. No sooner do I arrive/ than I find this or that is already full." The last two lines indicate he fears showing his poetry, his images, to outsiders. There is cheer in what one has become used to, although Richards shows us the rarity of words: he chooses a threatened species to represent poetry, and the oubliette has become its palace.

More recently I'm afraid of the linnets.
I fear for the palatine comfort in their still-day song.

"The Hood" shows birds as more frightening. The author is carving "a great bird of prey in the ground," but explores his work before it is completed. He is trapped there by birds, and although "I went down hooded before it was mine--"the design he made, a series of inanimate perforations, becomes threatening - "and the great bird of prey was the hood I see." Although it may be construed as a stretch to associate Richards's birds with poetry, the author makes good use of myth, and in myth, birds are associated with, among other anthropomorphic attributes, poetry. "The Hood" suggests Richards's narrator is revealing a poem that is unfinished, and that act is causing him grief.

The color blue emerges in the fourth poem, "The Blue Nest," and appears frequently throughout the volume. It is such a fair color that, in this poem, the speaker steals it from the home of birds, making an Imagist's gift of it in the envoi.

When they finally lay sleeping
I crept down from my ambuscade
And carefully wrapped their blueness in paper.

It is the same paper you're holding now.

"Suicide's Last Week at a Glance" is anomalous to the volume's subjects. Hardly symbolic, it looks at the calendar ("week-at-a-glance) of someone who would end his life - and did. Each day is x'd out, until the week is all filled in:

On Monday the black X in the Sunday box is the eye of a
cartoon walrus.
...
On Saturday the black X in the Sunday box is a black X in a
Sunday box.

Richards turns immediately back to blue in the next poem, "The Balance," in which the poet asks:
A single blue stocking in one hand
in my other a man

with a wood cross nailed to his limbs,
Which hand weighs the most?

Does redemption weigh more
Than two weaves of blue?

Blue is a sacred color. The mother of the man "with a wood cross nailed to his limbs" wore a blue cape. Blue is the sky - hence the heavens, and in some cultures represents the sea. It is a tranquil color, especially when combined with white. Richards's red, however, is inauspicious. In "The Balance," he asks, "Does blood painted on/ weigh more than a stain?" In "This is the Color," red is implied in injury and carrion. "This is the color God wants nothing to do with./ On the scraped side of his turned away face, ... These are men who die in public./ Whose ravens get sent for and peck by decree." Richards's colors are talisman, or ordinary. "Blue" describes the color as "rifts" but also as "solvent," a material used in painting, among other media. In "Bulrushes," "a cream-colored conversation" leads to the revelation of the prophesied child, Moses, who listens in while still in the womb." `You're welcome,' she said, though I still was not born."

But not all in this volume is death and fear and mysticism. "Central Square" has the narrator ambivalently falling in love with city neighborhood and woman alike, although surely one could anthropomorphize the city as a woman. "From the window with deep spoons a street lamp offers your/ breast./ Tonight will I take you without seeing your breast?/ Spine like a staircase, leave me astray." "Io" poignantly reads like a map of Io's journeys, and a judgment on her. "She shouldn't whisper the coves./ So shouldn't want to fill her boats." Richards reads the myth of Hera's priestess rather literally - the "coves" and "boats" remind the reader that the Ionian Sea was named for her. Part of Io's myth but not her womanhood, not her bovinity, is described. Form is essential elsewhere. In "Warming Bretagne," Richards poignantly describes one of the sea's gifts, a shell, in detail, including its strand-like fissures, and its relation to evolution.

Seashell listen to me--
hairs without cunning
O hairs of creation.

I could not read the beginning of "Wilderness" without thinking of the Grateful Dead's "Box of Rain" (from the album American Beauty, 1970, Warner Bros. Records - WS 1893). Pop culture may be ephemeral, but at times it has permanency. The Lesh - Hunter tune was for Phil Lesh's father, who had cancer at time the song was written. The refrain goes, in part, "Just a box of rain --/ wind and water--/ Believe it if you need it ... ." From death in that song, I read "Wilderness" as about life - Adam and Eve's - with life-giving rain being a connector to healing and growth.

A forkful of rain held over your tongue.
A rack where the desert can land.
My tented field of a free and open nature.
Water according to your own due surface.
Of clay already pitted with me.

The poet Tomaz Šalamun was chosen to write the introduction to Oubliette. Like this reviewer, Šalamun is taken by Richards's ways with water, sometimes a remedy as in "Wilderness," and sometimes an assist to self-censorship, as in "Unable," in which the poet says "When I drank from these waters--/ I drank from my own face--/ an endless wet bird/rose in my throat,/ at once wingless/ and unable to sing." Šalamun chooses to focus on the restorative elements of water in his introduction, telling the reader, essentially, to jump in and treat the book as an experience. "Get wet by yourself," he says. But he begins with something that surely goes beyond platitude. I say, ignore his thesis that "It is better to be a new young god in American Poetry than to be President of the United States. It [the former] is the only divine and democratic position available." His words are precious, pandering, and indulgent of the craft. (Frankly, if this were my volume, I would be embarrassed.) Instead, ignore the introduction, and go straight to the poems, each one hopelessly beautiful.

6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True and clear, more familiar than "religious magma" . . ., July 5, 2001

By 

Keith Levenberg (New York, N.Y. USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Oubliette (Paperback)

The reviews on this book's page (and even some of the blurbs on its back cover) seem, unfortunately, to be of the sort that discourage people from exploring poetry. I was a student a few years back in Peter Richards' excellent poetry class at Tufts University, and his most remarkable talent as both teacher and writer was to rescue this art from pretentious language and cryptic ramblings. The value of his instruction is just as evident in his own work compiled here. Consider, for example, "The Moon is a Moon," a poem that appears to be a reaction to verse that obfuscates reality rather illuminating it: "The moon is not a hole / into an alternate sky / where the dark is quiet, / the thunder white.... / The moon is a rock with blue scrapes." Here, as elsewhere, Richards demonstrates that the most poetic insights inhere, as I can imagine him saying, in the quotidian, and are lost on those who think so little of their own experiences and sensations that they must supplement them with an artificial depth. I do not mean to suggest by this that the beauty of these poems is always obvious on the surface: Most need to be read many times for full effect. They also are best appreciated line-by-line, the better to absorb the clarity that is the hallmark of Richards' voice. Real highlights in this collection include "Circled Square Drawn to Scale," "This is the Color," "Boy for Sale," "The Sea Looking On," "Central Square," and others. I would especially recommend this book to readers of Charles Simic, Pattiann Rogers, and Wallace Stevens.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark Beauty, May 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Oubliette (Paperback)

Oubliette is a powerful, dark and beautiful book of poems. While the title is absolutely appropriate -- a dungeon entered through a hole in the ground -- one imagines the prisoner has found a way to entertain himself in the darkness. The poems celebrate the power of the imagination over that of dissolution and decay. They are subtly playful -- and one of the real highlights is the poem that remembers a lover's ease at falling asleep under a tree in daylight -- a heartbreaking memory to recall in an oubliette. The poem that obsessively returns to the word "doth" is also brilliantly funny, repeating "doth" until it's meaningless, and ending "hey Doth, Doth, are you there, Doth?" One imagines the question echoing in the dark chamber.