To See the Earth navigates the increasingly turbulent waters of a globalized world from Moscow to Chicago, from Philadelphia to Ramallah. In poems haunted by Anna Akhmatova, Robert Lowell, and Lev Rubinstein, Metres renders in vivid language what Fredric Jameson called 'cognitive mapping' -- a kind of 'situational representation on the part of the individual subject to the vaster and properly unrepresentable totality.To See the Earth travels to Russia, memorializes immigrant Arab American family life in a Brooklyn brownstone, witnesses to the violence visited upon people both at home and abroad, and carves out of such losses images of hope -- the birthing not of a terrible beauty, but of the 'dreaming disarmed body'.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Do our voyages Auden once asked, 'still promise the Juster Life?' Too many of us would answer this question in negative -- not so Philip Metres. His poems seek above all to traverse borders, not merely those between nations and cultures but also -- and most importantly --between the personal and the political. With a sure command of craft, which he displays in abundance, Metres plays for high stakes. To See the Earth is a debut of unusual distinction." --David Wojahn
"Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that's Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres's superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another -- in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres -- they're as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree 'burning into its name.' These poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed." --Maura Stanton
"Founded on a fault line, the poems in Philip Meters' first full-length collection navigate terrains as fraught as his grandfather's kitchen, Sarajevo, Hiroshima, and the Pushkin Square McDonald's. . . . Undaunted by the inaccessible, Metres never ventures far from the dream of origin, returning frequently to his childhood, where adult nightmares of Ivan the Terrible and the pounding of nails into 'Christ's ivory wrists,' as well as the poet's oracular burden, give way to simpler passages. . . . Though compelled to remember that even the most realized poems are a staging of reality, rather than its substitute, Meters' at-time-otherworldly, at-times-blissfully homebound speaker offers a powerful contribution to Derrida's hallucinatory discourse on the 'metaphysics of presence,' if only by alerting the reader to the possibility that what we so desperately seek -- the substantive, the real -- may, in fact, already be here." --MAR, Mid-American Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2
"Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that's Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres's superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another -- in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres -- they're as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree 'burning into its name.' These poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed." --Maura Stanton
"Founded on a fault line, the poems in Philip Meters' first full-length collection navigate terrains as fraught as his grandfather's kitchen, Sarajevo, Hiroshima, and the Pushkin Square McDonald's. . . . Undaunted by the inaccessible, Metres never ventures far from the dream of origin, returning frequently to his childhood, where adult nightmares of Ivan the Terrible and the pounding of nails into 'Christ's ivory wrists,' as well as the poet's oracular burden, give way to simpler passages. . . . Though compelled to remember that even the most realized poems are a staging of reality, rather than its substitute, Meters' at-time-otherworldly, at-times-blissfully homebound speaker offers a powerful contribution to Derrida's hallucinatory discourse on the 'metaphysics of presence,' if only by alerting the reader to the possibility that what we so desperately seek -- the substantive, the real -- may, in fact, already be here." --MAR, Mid-American Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2
About the Author
Philip Metres is the author of Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941, as well as the translator, from the Russian, of Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky. His work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, New England Review, and Tin House. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili.
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Format:Paperback
Not since Li Young Lee has a contemporary American poet (and Philip Metres' Lebanese ancestry is only marginally alluded to, his sense of displacement being, like Edward Jabés, both literal and figurative) written so beautifully about the sorrow of watching one's cultural identity bleed into indistinction or, worse, commercialization. To put it reductively, Metres' in many ways astounding debut collection To See the Earth, published in February by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, marries the healthy skepticism of someone whose aesthetic isn't co-opted by a Western sensibility, with the loyalty of a blue-blooded American patriot.
The images in Bat Suite are of restlessness: a helpless vigil beside a baby monitor, driving in circles around Lake Erie to comfort his squalling daughter. The speaker recoils in horror, recalling the time his wife fell down the stairs holding their child: "There is no poetry in this:/ how once, addled by lack of sleep, my wife carrying our daughter down-/ stairs, tripped on a vacuum's/ umbilicus, and tumbled . . . " To define poetry by inscribing what it is not constitutes the path of apophatic theology, and in Bat Suite as well as other poems in To See the Earth, this technique allows the speaker to access, define and protect the ever-marginalized and constantly re- and misappropriated realm of the sacred, which is for the speaker of this poem, his family. In a logocentric culture such as the West, an understanding of the merits of via negativa (Latin for the "negative way," ostensibly to God) is rare, but Metres displays both an appreciation for and mastery of the noncircuitous: a road, or series of roads, through which we can journey home through language. The late Bob Creeley (1926-2005), Lorraine Niedecker, and, in his own fumbling way, William Carlos Williams, were honorable poetic practitioners of via negativa, a path that, taken seriously, draws us closer to creating what Wallace Stevens (who also haunts Metres' book) so memorably referred to as "the central poem(s)" of literary history.
I would buy this book for my scholarly friends interested in the fragmentation of the subject, barely literate members of Cleveland's immigrant community yearning for the dream of home, and my mother, imagist poet and practicing Catholic, who would fall instantly for a line like this (italics added): "Arches of eyebrows and aisles, stained glass/ gaze and minaret mind. Onyx-eyed. You take everyone in, and raise them . . ."
The images in Bat Suite are of restlessness: a helpless vigil beside a baby monitor, driving in circles around Lake Erie to comfort his squalling daughter. The speaker recoils in horror, recalling the time his wife fell down the stairs holding their child: "There is no poetry in this:/ how once, addled by lack of sleep, my wife carrying our daughter down-/ stairs, tripped on a vacuum's/ umbilicus, and tumbled . . . " To define poetry by inscribing what it is not constitutes the path of apophatic theology, and in Bat Suite as well as other poems in To See the Earth, this technique allows the speaker to access, define and protect the ever-marginalized and constantly re- and misappropriated realm of the sacred, which is for the speaker of this poem, his family. In a logocentric culture such as the West, an understanding of the merits of via negativa (Latin for the "negative way," ostensibly to God) is rare, but Metres displays both an appreciation for and mastery of the noncircuitous: a road, or series of roads, through which we can journey home through language. The late Bob Creeley (1926-2005), Lorraine Niedecker, and, in his own fumbling way, William Carlos Williams, were honorable poetic practitioners of via negativa, a path that, taken seriously, draws us closer to creating what Wallace Stevens (who also haunts Metres' book) so memorably referred to as "the central poem(s)" of literary history.
I would buy this book for my scholarly friends interested in the fragmentation of the subject, barely literate members of Cleveland's immigrant community yearning for the dream of home, and my mother, imagist poet and practicing Catholic, who would fall instantly for a line like this (italics added): "Arches of eyebrows and aisles, stained glass/ gaze and minaret mind. Onyx-eyed. You take everyone in, and raise them . . ."
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