A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New & Selected Poems by Gillian Conoley
Nightboat Books, October 2019
296 pages / Amazon / Bookshop
This New & Selected collects poems from Conoley’s seven books, from 1987’s Some Gangster Pain to the present. Wide-ranging stylistically & tonally, from tight early lyrics, to a more ‘experimental’ fragmented middle period to the sprawling, yet precise new [de]compositions that transcend the distinction between lyric and narrative, there’s yet a consistency of vision, elegant freedom, or what Tongo Eisen-Martin calls a “singular energy, like an organ solo or shotgun resorting to story-telling,” throughout.
Selective amplification is often erasure, but I’m especially drawn to the transferences that occur. Sometimes the adventure “where silence/sends word” [96] may take the form of “a hatchet with which to chop at the frozen seas inside us” [273], or a:
soul made to deflate, inflate
to transfer like breath to a summer-hammock [311]
The transfers can be between the human & the non-human, life and death (or call it immortality), the ways the dead and living, night-wounds and day-wounds [155], belief and doubt, converse. In one of the 43 new pages of poetry in this book, as she meditates on her relationship with a “weak black bee,” she asks:
I wonder if courage in one world
can create an expanse in another
Is it akin to lovers who are alive in each other? [281]
This has similarities with one of the earliest poems included in this connection, “Premature Reincarnation” in which the “I” seems to be giving courage and/or expanse by figuring death not as “infinite freedom,” but:
… days of limit,
of indecipherable thought,
but soon your legs will straighten
and your arms tire and hang
so without reluctance. [10]
The early poems are troubled enough by death to ask:
If I nap in this light my grandparents rise
and mix their dominoes, their hands
rinsed of sun but bone pure.
What if I left with them,
And shed my body? Would I
Hear a single, melodious siren
Singing the power,
The glory? Or would I
live on, as the earth continues,
in death’s sediment, face to face,
these melodies strewn through me. (“Suddenly the Graves” 8)
Even the dead live “in death’s sediment;” death is no “final resting place/no closed down factory” [68], no once-and-for all transition, and ancestors’ spirits persist in the matter that sometimes becomes us. In “My Sister’s Hand in Mine,” inhabiting the soul, or at least the shoes, of the dead can also serve a kind of practical purpose in getting us beyond feelings of nostalgia and loss that even ‘little kids’ feel:
the past was a souvenir
that could propel us
from one void into another
until we grew up
like women who sold perfume
walking around
in their dead aunt’s shoes… [31]
In these early poems, she announces her project to embrace death’s ‘common deep’ as a positive force in life, listening to the “cry/ not of the living/ or dead, but the narrow between.” [5], letting it widen, trying to heed the voice that says “let us place no more constraints on the eyes of dead” [243] and if that doesn’t work, there’s always a “Pale kimono in the closet in case we had got blasé/ about death being loose in us.” [193]. It helps me when experiencing what’s often reduced to ‘grieving’ or ‘mourning’ against a backdrop of estranged secular humanism (childhood “streets/ that claimed my home/ was invisible,” [13]) that elevates mind over body and death.
The dance between the souls of the living and the dead get more intimate in the poems from Beckon [1996]. Because “We Don’t Have To Share A Fate” says “we don’t have to draw shameful conclusions,”[57] it’s tempting to read this as an un-judgmental address to one who committed suicide, to be as respectful as possible to that decision while avoiding the temptation to feel guilty for not wanting to follow suit, while avoiding object fetishization:
After the shutter releases,
I want you in the multiple, [57]
As the poem progresses, respect turns to eroticism as the speaker seems to find the entire world in their relationship. “Painterly, Epigean, Dream’s Hangover,” from Fatherless Afternoon (Profane Halo, 2005) contrasts two styles of grieving, without necessarily judging either:
A griever in a party hat
come to lay like a corpse
before the weeper. [149]
This stanza itself may seem incredibly witty and comic at first, but the next line makes it clear which mood the speaker is in:
Stifle me not with the opposite.
I almost hear the exclamation point here, a “put the lid on your wit! and let me be alone with my fructifying tears!” In this dialogue poem, grieving occasions moral reckoning and a sense of futurity leading to presents as the speaker lets the spirit of the recently dead be selfish enough to help her live more fully in emptiness than before in glut. Yet no clear distinction between living and dead takes hold. Who’s telling who “It’s bewildering but I can get you out of storage.” Or perhaps the “weeper” is the living and the “griever in a party hat” is the dead trying to cheer her up? Is it the voice of death that’s “way beyond the elucidative stage’ to end with a beautiful, or at least awe-inspiring unfinishing…to undo the merely Epigean surface of the doubting newspapers of life?
“Thank You For The Afterlife”—a new 6 page poem—is an adventure in conversing with a dead “mother figure” and/or the “Creator” [290]. The relationship dynamics are as much volatile break-up/make up as they are grieving tribute, as the you is often aggressive and antagonistic. The life of the dead is figured to be at least as lively or even restless as the death of the living:
Celestial nest, also like stress, hormone, breathing with high peaks
skeletal sensory too, combustible planetarium,
an interstitial musculature where
ceiling angels peel and flake a weather
turned glassy in which you
are the shaken narrator bundled up
taking a few trips around the block, running one loose hand over
the increasingly familiar hedges [293,4]
Yet Conoley often lets herself make room for the materialist and skeptic voice, “in this missive oblivion/where synapse thinks it saw a spirit”[ 291]—at least until it threatens to tyrannize. This mother figure may be a somewhat famous writer:
For what have you done
that so many run to surround and warm
you, a boy and a girl so porous with the air,
lunar, earthly, I try very hard to never close the parenthesis on you,
it’s one way to atone
for perhaps you are just swimming
slowly to another scribe waiting
sort of perpendicularly in the lake near the shore [294]
There’s also a critique—in the collection’s most expansive, previously unpublished recent poem, “Preparing one’s consciousness for the avatar,”—of the still economically and politically dominant Euro-centric patriarchal ethics-cloaking metaphysics at play, and part of what makes it so affectively effective is that it lets itself relent.
She accepts a working definition of avatar as “manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form,” a soul that crosses down. By contrasting it with the word “atavistic” which is rooted in the word “forefather,” it’s as if she’s warning us that much of what may pass for an avatar may be merely atavistic, but how to tell—I mean figure—the difference? Throughout the poem, she offers a series of ethical contrasts, from a game of cat and bird to the difference between “Frankenstein bewildered at his limp” (presumably referring to the god, scientist, brain, more than his monster…) as atavistic, and “the young muscled amputee in basketball shorts heading cheerfully” as “world welcomes more world in sun” [305] as more an avatar.
This sense of the “atavistic” is also evident in “Trying To Write A Poem About Ghandi,” when she writes about, “unorthodox social moralists of the 19th century/Still trying to freeze hell.” [258]
Conoley’s sprawling field [de]compositions manage to unfreeze this conspiracy of beards’ hell in various ways. In contrast to notions of eternal damnation, we get a “subrosa geological planet, with shifting hot mantels of tectonics,” [261], a garden waxing and waning, and a more dynamic sense of what’s called ‘death’—
Beloved figures die
then stop and loop
to pixelate,… [257]
In “Preparing…,” the atavistic Frankensteinian god scientist brain becomes cutting edge, ‘state of the art’ in the figure of David Hanson, of Hanson Robotics, reproducing the facial expressions and voice of an internet billionaire and ‘transhumanist’ techno optimist who defends robots on the grounds of immortality and ending world hunger. To the speaker, it’s the same-old-maleist atavism…on steroids as it were. Though the techies may invoke the disembodied possibilities of the post-human, from the perspective of what the collection’s title poem calls “the first germ of life/afloat in the swampy gale” [142], such post-human is, if anything, human all too human—but to reduce this section to its ‘argument’—implied or inferred—ignores the alternative figure she presents near this poem’s end:
Of all my friends and figures
I prefer the woman who walks in the loosest way
down the conveyor belt, along the metronomes and mechanical dolls,
like one who prefers to not be there— had nothing to do with it—
does not want to command or suggest, only to go on one’s own way
through the discordant collective sweep [314]
But even this figure must “pixelate” or live as “blooms and ducts of a repatterning” [316].
Although this book often celebrates the “pleasure/ in becoming another one/of the unlocated” [72],” and Conoley very rarely traffics in the “post-card face” of domesticity, it would be a mistake to call these transfers otherworldy or anti-social:
I fall into the lace of your gutter,
pretty nice there
and we have to wire prose into talk to get to the poem.
