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Drifting Off Into Sun and Sparrows and Wind: Review of Kathleen Graber's听The River Twice

Amie Whittemore

Reviewed:听The River Twice听by Kathleen Graber (Princeton University Press, 2019)

Listen to Amie Whittemore's review听here.

Liking a book of poems is not always a sufficient reason鈥攐r even a reason鈥攖o write a review. Often I review a book to try to understand it better, or because of a vague unease or curiosity it spurs in me: the review is a means to read better, to overcome the shortcomings of mind and habit. However, Kathleen Graber鈥檚听The River Twice, is that rare book that makes me feel giddy even as it makes me weep鈥擨 want to soak in the poems as if in long baths, travel them as if they were rigorous hikes through undisturbed forests, bed down in their intricate nests. I want to walk up to strangers and say, you need to hear this poem (and this one and this one and oh wait I just read the book aloud to a dozen strangers). I want to review it so that you will read it and feel your own head drifting off into sun and sparrows and wind.

If you are familiar with Graber鈥檚 earlier collections,听Correspondence听(2005) and听The Eternal City听(2010), you know her poems are highly associative, blossoming from a capacious and exacting, scholarly yet playful mind. The poems of听The River Twice听are no exception. Take the opening poem, 鈥淪elf-Portrait with No Internal Navigation鈥� which begins,

Have you ever been arrested? The pigeon arrests me.

No, not the wing but the sturdy round body & the sheen

of the throat, like the interior of a snail鈥檚 shell or the bruise

of spring鈥攖hink of the lilac blistered with blossoms,

of a burned moor鈥檚 sudden eruption into heather鈥�

a beauty we expect only from what鈥檚 broken.

Graber has bundled so much in that 鈥榓rrested,鈥� and 鈥榓rrest鈥� in the first line: beginning with the most common transitive or reflexive usage of 鈥榓rrest,鈥櫶�听Much of this collection rests in the space between these definitions, as Graber turns toward myriad subjects that arrest her鈥攑articularly the subject of America, which is the title of a series of epistolary poems addressing America, each with a subtitle to narrow its scope. In the tradition of听听and听, these poems both address and try to define America. Take, for instance, 鈥淎merica [October],鈥�

America, some days I can barely read the postcards

I have been getting each week from a friend, broken

loose & adrift for months along your back roads & highways.

Pictures of mountains & monuments, postmarked

but with no return address: West Virginia, Nashville,

Oklahoma, Deadwood South Dakota. So that, like you,

my mailbox has become merely the idea of听listening鈥�

Part of Graber鈥檚 mastery is in shifting from narrative to metaphorical logic seamlessly: America begins as the landscape in which she receives word of the landscape itself through these postcards; then the act of reception limns something about the concept of America: it is a 鈥渕ailbox鈥� that contains 鈥渕erely the idea of listening,鈥� indicating a country of talkers and bloggers, social media posts and podcasts, assuming (perhaps, often, foolishly) someone is listening to us. But who among us is listening? Graber lets the question sit, shifting to scientists 鈥渨ho announced this week / that the universe should not exist.鈥�

The nature of existence, its borders, its textures, is at the core of this collection: 鈥渉ow tired I am of death & how tired I am of flailing against it,鈥� one speaker rails in 鈥淕reetings from Richmond (or Thinking of Elizabeth Bishop & Everything Else in the World).鈥� This grandiose scope (emphasized by the title of this particular poem) is not tongue-in-cheek, 21st century irony; Graber really is interested in听everything. And it鈥檚 marvelous; it reminds me that I鈥檓 interested in everything too, though often it feels like I am only interested in naps and cats.

When life is crowned in despair, as it inevitably is in this century, it can be hard to feel soft, to allow for gentleness; these poems are as tender as they are smart. In 鈥淥n the Eve of Spring Break,鈥� another poem about everything, Daylight Savings is the catalyzing image; the poem begins 鈥淒aylight Savings. As though minutes might be bankable, as though there could be more or less of them simply by our agreeing to make it so.鈥� From there Graber shifts to the weather (these brainy poems are always grounded in place), to a student 鈥渄espairing in the chair beside my desk,鈥� to the speaker鈥檚 daydreams of travel, to a friend who 鈥渨aited a decade for her first husband to stop loving his second wife.鈥� Where are we going, you might wonder? But, as with our own minds, sometimes we must depart from the initial conundrum to resolve it; Graber circles back at the end of the poem to Daylight Savings: 鈥淚t鈥檚 simple: We鈥檇 rather set out in the dark than arrive there. If wisdom is a myth, it is one of the better ones. More exacting in its ways than love鈥攆or, unlike love, it schools us again & again in its own limitations.鈥�

If you haven鈥檛 abandoned this review yet to go read this book, well then, I am not sure what more I can say to you. Perhaps you need to be convinced that this collection is formally dexterous; you鈥檙e in luck鈥攊t is! While Graber thrives in the long line, often making use of prose poems, I am most impressed by her use of, for lack of a better term, broken tercets, which appear in multiple poems, including the long sequenced poem, 鈥淚mpasto for the Parietal,鈥� which is grounded in the discovery of the Chauvet Cave paintings. The form aligns well with Graber鈥檚 project of figuring things out, even if things are, as they are, impossible to figure out entirely. In the second section of the poem Graber writes,

Sometimes, late at night, I read the hypotheses:

the possible meanings

of the Paleolithic art.

Or I reread the old essays of Loren Eiseley,

who proposed all life might be a backward yearning toward the dark.

The dropped lines indicate a parsing, a way in which 鈥渢he possible meanings鈥� are filled with lacunae, riddled with absences. However, this sense of brokenness is balanced by couplets that offer respite from the fragmentary nature of knowledge; here鈥檚 the opening of the third section:

In high school, I liked to walk along the shore & dream about the boy

who sat in front of me in math class. How he wore his sun-bleached hair

in a pony tail & how he could solve the most difficult calculus equations

at the board without effort, even though he鈥檇 just been outside at lunch

with his friends getting stoned.

The only living things in sight

were the little sandpipers & the black-headed laughing gulls[.]

Here, the tidy packaging of the couplets provides some clarity鈥攖he boy solves the difficult math; however, the boy, we learn, is stoned, and we can feel the speaker questioning how a mind can be sharp and dull at once, and to brace against that riddle, turns outward, to the birds, the coast, to life.

It is easy, and often sound, to feel brutalized by the horrors of this century; they crowd our vision, they crow to us as we gaze into the mottled crystal balls of our screens; these poems do not ignore these travesties, but allow us the essential relief of zooming out鈥攐f seeing, for example, the ruined marriage beside the moon, 鈥渟o bright, so close, that the grass, dusted with white / light, threw down a thousand crisp, thin shadows鈥� (鈥淪elf-Portrait with Moon鈥�). These poems remind us that we are, like wisdom, as Bishop indicates and to which Graber alludes, each of us听, and there is comfort in passage, in the impossibility of stasis, in听becoming听as the essence of being.