1 book review
On The English Boat by Donald Revell
Donald Revell’s language has a relation of depth to surface, gravity to buoyancy, that is unique in contemporary poetry. His words seem native to solitudes deeper than most poetry can reach, and yet they have an ease and freedom that is uncanny given their remoteness. This uncanniness, if that’s the word, runs throughout his poetry, of which The English Boat is the fifteenth book (in addition to several volumes of prose and translations). Style and locale have changed throughout his life—from more formal to less to somewhere in between; from the Bronx of his youth to his coming of age in the cultural milieu of the Sixties to his adulthood in the American West—but beneath that development—which is after all nothing less than life itself—this peculiar quality of language, this tone, abides.
Words often seem to have settled down on their referents for the first time, with an awkwardness utterly natural:
Tell the taut-strung higher calendars
I’ve a margent in mind and new words
Hope to say, catastrophe to hear,
Old confederates and inwood apples
Where apples never shone.
(“Pericles,” 5)
“Margent” is an archaic form of “margin”; and yet here the archaic signifies the nascence of the language, rather than its obsolescence. At other times Revell’s words seem to come in a trance, skirting regular syntax altogether:
The spoken wish for a violin
Ermine of eighteen identical cypresses
Jagged index visionary without law
God’s signature Mary’s human impress
(“Devotion,” 7)
Even where Revell’s poems are not so thoroughly “without law,” it often feels as if every line in the poem is the first line, and that the lines could be rearranged at random, if to do so were not to violate the integrity of specific, actual acts of attention. And it is the insistence on this integrity that ballasts the poems’ freedom. In “The Glens of Cithaeron,” the recasting of the Actaeon myth that closes the book, Revell writes:
Time was, questions were put, clear as water.
The Goddess bathed, and time was the soft smile
Of water catching the sunlight on her.
And the sunlight, let’s be clear, was sheer murder.
Into the same creature, no human word
Leaps twice. Given to frenzy, nakedness
Smiles upon the breaking of men and dogs.
(51)
The clarity of water is not the opposite of obscurity, but of opacity; one should try to see everything, Revell seems to say—questions, the goddess’s nakedness, sunlight, “human words”—as clearly as one sees the transparent water. But crucially, the act of seeing must take place within a Heraclitan continuity. The attention must take in the whole event, and here, in a beautifully Ovidian way, the dance of eye and mind combines and recombines the elements of the myth into the new poem. Otherwise it remains inert—a poem not animated by poetry.
Revell’s freedom is tinged with melancholy, and The English Boat is the work of a person confronting the accumulation of loss that every life entails. Its epigraph—“Now all is done; bring home the bride again,” from Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion”—shows a concern for the proper conduct of the end of something. It invents a kind of rite of expiration: something must be done to recognize the end; the end releases us from all but that responsibility. But where “Epithalamion” returns again and again to its refrain, Revell characteristically allows his poems simply to end with an unaffectedness that conveys grace; it recognizes the end as the end rather than as climax or closure. In “Leontes,” the poem that opens the book, Revell ends by saying: “We are so happy. The sunlight grows weaker. / Reunion shakes the world. Let us speak of it,” (3). To “speak of it,” then, is the book’s ritual charge. “The Parlor City” (a nickname, the internet informs me, for Binghamton, New York, where Revell attended the State University of New York) returns to the association of twilight and the making and breaking of unions, then ends by simply letting the grammar run itself out:
So many years have passed high time
We turned away as if from wedding vows
In a loose vein of broken petals
Beau cheval given away girls
Being strangers now.
(13)
But for all its quietness (its piety, Revell might say), his melancholy is enthusiastic in the etymological sense that he is possessed, and therefore animated, by it. It is a melancholy with vehement passion at its core, a detachment that does not deny the claims of the thing it is detached from: “Agony was shy once, and solid ransom,” (19); “I am angry to be alone with you,” (19).
Revell elsewhere refers to the “inertial motion of ritual”—inertial, as opposed to the recursive motion of “Epithalamion.” He embodies this inertial motion most characteristically by using the grammatical copula, which balances one value against another using a form of the verb “to be.” The poems’ great, inimitable trick is how their tone, the center of gravity that holds them steady, permits them to say persuasively, sometimes preposterously, that one thing indeed is another; and that is comes to be invested with more ontological weight than a mere equals sign:
Berries are nice, Lady.
Grishkin is nice, Lullay.
The soul of Toulouse rots through.
Creation is one way. Creation
Is the other way too.
(“Fresh Dante,” 11)
Revell practices what Richard Ellman, writing about Yeats, called affirmative capability (in contrast to John Keats’s more famous notion of negative capability). In Revell’s Christian context, this affirmation is called kerygma. Kerygma, in the New Testament, means preaching, proclaiming, announcing. It implies inspiration: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor . . . ” (Luke 4:18). I suspect Revell would applaud the King James translators’ use of “upon” here, expressing as it does that the spirit comes from outside, and works upon rather than within the person. Like his predecessors Robert Creeley (whom Charles Olson dubbed “the figure of outward”) and Robin Blaser (whose great essay on Jack Spicer is called “The Practice of Outside”), Revell sees the work of poetry as taking place outside the individual psyche: as he writes in Invisible Green, his volume of selected prose, “Poetry asserts the consequence of delight, i.e. an outside and worldly life where purposes are real . . .” (27).
As recently as 2007’s The Art of Attention, Revell wholly embraced the canon and values of the New American Poetry: “How I wish Charles Olson were my weatherman!” (17). In the last decade, however, he seems to have arrived at a more catholic view—not by making an abrupt change of tack, but by withdrawing to a place from which the differences between William Carlos Williams and, for example, Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, seem to vanish, and canons become imaginary landscapes such as those Revell has traveled throughout his life, Arcadias classical (as in Arcady, his elegy for his sister, derived in part from Poussin’s neoclassical landscapes) and, more recently, English: the nostalgic pastoral England of Francis Kilvert. One could indeed read the book’s title as an echo of Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, where dérèglement of the senses is replaced by the numinous allure of Albion. Formally, Revell’s Englishness manifests itself most straightforwardly in his use of the sonnet in several individual poems as well as the sequences “A Chaplet for Mary: Six Flowers” and “Homage to Samuel Daniel: Eight Sonnets.” Revell’s sonnets are loose and unrhymed; of the classical formal features they generally retain only the length of fourteen lines, the duration most familiar to Western lyric poetry. But more radically the poems turn from the form’s traditional aim of resisting the destructive force of time, the task of erecting Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s “moment’s monument,” and embrace time’s openness:
Time might be anything, even the least
Portion of shadow in the blaze, that helpless
Hare of darkness in the hawk’s world.
I’d forgotten, in the haste of me, to reach
Backwards into time one hand. Come along.
(“Rapture,” 26)
And when one does come along, one finds oneself in the present:
I’ve seen a rainbow where no rain ever was
The colors were slain children of the wind
Alive again because time might be anything,
And earth a broken astrolabe
Plunged into blackness by force of sunlight
These latter days.
(26)
“The gospel according to this moment,” as Revell quotes Henry David Thoreau—kerygma again. I imagine Revell’s Christianity is an unusual pill to swallow for believers and non-believers alike, because it manifests itself almost entirely in the kerygmatic act. There is little biblical or doctrinal content in Revell’s poems and prose; his Christianity, like that of Anne Hutchinson (whose testimony Revell memorably engages in “Outbreak,” from 1998’s There are Three) is antinomian: it believes that grace releases one from law—much as, in Revell’s poetry, gestural grace releases the poem from the “laws” of formal closure. So his kerygma, as Robert Creeley would say, “denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside” itself (Collected Essays, 473). Therefore, those for whom questions of Christian theology have purchase would be frustrated by his having little to say directly, while those who do not would feel suspicious—what’s he hiding?
But Revell is a poet who renounces guile: “Who would wish to be known as crafty?” (Art, 13). And if it may strike some as unreasonable to dismiss wily Odysseus and elevate his literary descendant pious Aeneas on the basis of their epithets (as Revell does in his prose), that unreasonableness has also has resulted in a body of work unique in its commitment to simplicity not only as a literary style, but as a philosophical position as well—a “stance toward reality,” as Olson would say. Revell’s poetry admits no distinction between real and ideal, even for the sake of its subversion: “Fact is, faith is, appearance and reality remain tenderly intimate at the origin of poems,” (Art, 12). The present realizes eternity.
Stephen Williams is a poet living in Chicago. He edits Aurochs.