Beyond The Bounds of Poetry

A Review of the 2002 National Book Award
for Poetry Nominees

The big surprise in last year's National Book Award for poetry was the selection of the nominees. But the surprise wasn't that the five nominated collections were so strong in their respective voices and styles, or that they were so dissimilar as to represent an especially wide range of contemporary American poetry. Rather, the big surprise was that the National Book Foundation actually nominated five novels for the poetry prize. For poetry isn't supposed to push its characters through such well-paced and wide-ranging narratives, is it? Isn't that the territory of fiction?

Albert Rios' The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press), the magical realist selection, concerns the border town Nogales, Mexico. The prefatory poem announces, "This is just about light, how suddenly / One comes upon it sometimes and is surprised."

In prose cut back to the bone, Rios illuminates the quotidian and profound in Nogales life. "The Birdman of Nogales" was "a trapper in those years, / A prospector if he found a good rock." He was "some parts animal, some parts / Shiny, and some parts so thin." Rios recalls a lost childhood and a life lived on real and imaginary borders. There are civic bands of trombones, Chinese restaurants that are really aviaries, and segregated bachelors and widows, sitting in circles, exchanging accusations over a shared fence.

But his true subject is perhaps captured in his final poem: "The reason you can't lose weight later on in life is simple enough. / It's because of how so many people you know have died, / And that you carry a little of each of them inside you."

The entwined sadness and beauty of death and grief form the hard core of Ellen Bryan Voigt's poetic story Shadow of Heaven (Norton 2002). Voigt's linked elegies take nature's wonder and mystery as their metaphoric tool. In fiercely written accounts that are both tragic and consoling, she grieves for a lost husband and child, invoking the language of nature's cruelty and unlikely beauty. "Two plumes of tree leaf / and even blossom" from a cut stump in "Apple Tree," causing Voigt to lament, "O my soul, / it is not a small thing, / to have made from three / this one, this one life."

In "Himalaya," she dreams a Tibetan cliff and a stand of firs behind a veil of blowing snow. "There was no pile of stones, laid one by one / to mark the leaden anniversaries," she writes, and asks, "Whose ghost is it, Shahid, feeds my grief-dream? / Whose loss, whose task, whose darkened nursery?"

In the book's last section, "Dooryard Flower," Voigt, Odysseus-like, turns her ship for home, a "clever captain / cruising the seas of open thought," the lucky recipient of Fortune's golden crown. "I am bringing you a sun," she sings, "a children's choir, host / of transient voices, first bright / splay in the gray exhausted world, a feast / of the dooryard flower we call butter-and-egg."

The experimental nominee is Harryette Mullen's abecedarian Sleeping With the Dictionary (U. California 2002). It is a poetry slam in a smoky bar and its avant-garde wordplay will make you bang your drink table in delight. As Miles Davis might have said, "This is some crazy shit."

Mullen's hijinx juxtapositions and mots juste for justice shower Dizzying sparks. Her poems are steeped in the rhythms of speech and song. "European Folktale Variant" hilariously rewrites Goldilocks as a streetwise indictment: "The way the story goes, a trespassing towheaded pre-teen barged into this rustic country cottage of a nuclear family of anthropomorphic bruins." The "D" section of "Jinglejangle" begins, "date rape deadhead deep sleep dikes on bikes dilly-dally / ding-a-ling ding-dang dingle-dangle."

Mullen's story concerns language, its means of expression and oppression, and how the way we tell stories creates our worlds.

Ruth Stone, the eventual winner, was born in 1915, taught creative writing all over the country, and now lives in Vermont. In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press 2002) is the work of a lifetime, reported from its near-final place of rest. The first poem introduces the book's narrator with the energy and determination of a racing train: "Time used me. / Death used me," Stone writes, "I live in Johnson City."

Stone's narrative spans the course of a 20th Century life. "At Eighty-three She Lives Alone" likens its frail and solitary subject to a piece of origami, "a paper folded swan." The title poem captures the absurdity and hope of a century's futuristic imaginings. "They are still cleaning out / pockets of wrinkled / Nazis hiding in Argentina," Stone advises, "But in the next galaxy, / certain planets will have true blue skies and drinking water."

Stone's poetry recaptures her husband, her lost loves and dwindling life. "Love lies asleep," she rhymes, "and dreams that everything / is in its gold net; / and I am caught there, too, / when I forget."

Sharon Olds' The Unswept Room (Knopf 2002) unfolds into a richly imagined memoir. She chronicles birth, love, parenthood, and the approach of life's end. In "Childhood," she writes, "I had shrugged / my mother slowly off, I lay there / taking my first breaths, as if / the air of the room was blowing me like a bubble." There's more to come, including, even, a ménage á trois with a high school sports team captain (!). It's hard to imagine writing more intimate or universal, and Olds' central character enjoys a richer life than many novel-length narrative protagonists.

But the proof that Olds, like her colleagues, has written something more than a collection of poems, lies in her sly and stunning last lines, which could as easily describe the achievement of her fellow nominees:

-- O my characters,
my imagined, here are some fancies of crumbs
from under love's table.

§ § §

Sean Carman lives in Seattle. He has written short fiction, reviews and sketch comedy for Pindeldyboz, ReadyMade, McSweeney's, and Comedy Central.

Send the URL for this work to a friend!

GO TO NEXT PAGE