Sycamore by Kathy Fagan
(Milkweed Edition, 2017)

Reviewed by Cassandra Cleghorn

Kathy Fagan’s poems have lent their talismanic power to readers for over thirty years: in The Raft; Moving & St Rage; The Charm; Lip; and now, blessedly, Sycamore. In book after book, Fagan teases, bringing to light what we thought we knew, what we want to learn, what she has come to know, and what she will tell so as to include us in her wild unknowing.

As a volume, Sycamore displays extraordinary coherence. In a recent interview, Fagan admits that it’s something of a “project book” insofar as its subjects “consumed my days and nights and bled over into my artistic life, and as such… entered the poems, shaped the poems, and my vision of what the poems could be.” The book’s title, its stunning design (cover by Michael Kellner), and more than half the poems put trees front and center. Plantanaceae is the prominent family: the American sycamore or buttonwood, and its cousin, the London plane, trees distinguished by their stature, their hardiness in cities, and by the pale, mottled camouflage of their bark.

The opening, wildly inventive poem, “Plantanaceae Family Tree,” contains seeds of myths from Egypt and beyond, of the poems that will follow, and of poems as yet unwritten. In “Letter to What’s Mostly Missing,” Fagan plants some tree knowledge: “That’s all for now, except to say that, unlike other trees, / the sycamore’s bark can’t expand, so it just breaks off, / which accounts for its Bernini-like sheen.” She builds “Inscription” around the story of the 42,000 plane trees that have lined the Canal du Midi since the 1830s. Over the past decade, the old trees have succumbed to a fungus, and are being felled and burned by the thousands. But Fagan never sentimentalizes, “So what / if we are replaceable? Mostly I love how / we burst the prisons of our skins and shine.”

Contemporary philosopher Michael Marder might place Fagan’s tree poems in the tradition of what he calls “plant thinking,” “a way of thinking that is not only about plants, but with them,” a form of “intimacy grounded in difference.” When Fagan sees herself in or as a tree and vice-versa, or when she converses with trees and has them converse among themselves, she tries out strange and wonderful strategies of cross-species identification. In “Santa Caterina’s Tomb” and “Inscription,” she calls the sycamore her “emblem,” evoking the Catholic tradition according to which the sycamore represents clear vision of Christ. But tree is never reduced to symbol. In “Inscription,” she admits, “Mostly I love the light / they hold inside, the all-too-much and aged toujours / of them, their airborne electricities. Who’s to explain / affinities like these?”

“I may look smooth—” she tells the reader at the beginning of “Self-Portrait as Sycamore in Copper and Pearl,” and complicates the analogy right away:

                           but take a long hard                                                                                                                                                look. Take a biopsy.

    Interrogate my juices
                   under your scope &
                                you’ll survive as I have
                                                the sylvan hallelujah

    moments, bullion bars
                 fanning through the showy
                               oaks & maples & the sweet
                                            sweet gums. When blue is

    dominant all over
                the earth, atmosphere is king,
                              the air so hammers-on-
                                            strings-perfect it steals

    the voices right off
                      the birds.

Fagan’s lines move through human and tree bodies with what feels at times like laparoscopic zeal. Language is a calibrated instrument that pushes into the blight that must be discovered. At other times, Fagan’s lines exert a no less visceral, but infinitely more tender pressure on the surface. In “Sycamore in Jericho,” a poem about the diminutive tax collector, Zaccheus, who climbed the sycamore so he could see Christ, the speaker employs her reiki touch (on herself, on her reader):

    And after that, I felt, for a long time after, a weight on me then,
    a heated impression, hotter than the sun’s,
    like a word can leave or the memory of a child
    in one’s arms.

Losses of every kind also reverberate through the book’s bright air and are absorbed into its tissues. In “Letter to What’s Mostly Missing,” she writes, “In any case, one can only ask how many / names for the past there are. I am one.” We recognize the stage of life from which these poems issue. As she writes in “Black Walnuts,” “It is the season of separation & falling / Away.” What trees and humans share, Fagan might say, lifting a phrase from “Sycamore Envies the Cottonwoods Behind Your Place,” is “the one altricial need,” a species-wide certainty that each of us begins and ends in a state of fragility and perfect dependence.

In the extraordinary final poem, “Eleven-Sided Poem,” eleven tree species accost the poet after her death. “[O]ne of the whiter / sycamores who live on the river said, / Kathy, why didn’t you live in your body more?” The poet defends herself, “So, I said. Listen, you trees / (though I could not speak), / I remember dying to grow up. Standing / on tiptoe to pull my own baby / teeth.”

“Nervure” (the hollow veins in a leaf, or an insect’s wing) is one of the many poems in which the poet reaches her full lyric span and height—consistently and swervingly true, never portentous in that way poets of lesser skill can adopt as their default move: “I will die knowing less than I know now: That I bartered / my children for words and my words for love. That all my debts / were paid in full. And that when I was finally a child again myself, / scared, hungry, and cold, I was aware of none of this.” “Convent of Santa Chiara and the Poor Clares” is set in Assisi. When I read this poem, I began to think of Sycamore as providing a kind of hospice care in the archaic sense, a way station where one finds basic sustenance, but also comfort and the quiet chance for a reckoning. Such reckonings happen every few pages. In “Choral Sycamores: A Valediction,” Fagan builds an ars poetica around the figure of Daphne: “Like her / We are beheld unheld; we will not leave / The earth alive.”
  
Fagan’s way station, if at times primitive in the elemental sense of the word, is never austere. The book is full of the poet’s characteristic humor and the delight she has always taken in intricate wordplay, but is more indulgent in its pleasures than the previous books. Every pun pays unexpected dividends, windfalls of meaning. Most importantly, above Sycamore shines a sky of evident joy. At the end of “Letter to What’s Mostly Missing,” is a double gesture of tenderness offered and received: “The oak says, Let me spread / this mantle of blue over your cold marble shoulders, / Sycamore. And what can she say but yes.” We join this poet and her trees in affirmation. Sycamore warns and warms us, and deserves in return every show of love we can offer.

Spool by Matthew Cooperman
(Parlor Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Cassandra Cleghorn

Matthew Cooperman’s fifth full-length book, Spool, is—to borrow from his own ample word-hoard—ampulacious. This generous collection of spare and insistent poems both contains itself and spills over in ways the reader comes to crave: book as amphora, as sealed barrel of hypodermic needle, or even as bomb, which, according to an earlier work of the poet, “is ampulacious, fully round, goes off remaining a spread object and a startling awareness.” (Jars, barrels, hoops—the cooper who bends and mends them. Under the spell of this cooper-man’s language, I’m newly attuned to roots.) The thread thrives.

From its opening lines, Cooperman’s book reels the reader into a space that is recognizably lyric, yet also—and on principle—opposed to what Anne Waldman calls the “identity kit” we poets drag around with us. Through an extraordinarily sure touch, Cooperman mixes pastoral and “post pastoral,” love poem and elegy, abstraction and intimate detail drawn from a life, whosever it may be.  The opening stanza reads:

    time is honey
    and honey pain
    we earn it
    confusing the whip
    with the watch
    how it passes
    year after year
    a wrist with
    handcuffs all alone

Like a musician who works with implied overtones, Cooperman tricks the reader’s ear trained by ad-speak. Not money, but honey; not gain, but pain; not all along, but all alone. Elsewhere the “author was hard / of herding he,” and meaning becomes moaning. The unsounded syllables resonate. By the end of the first page, we hear the click of the cuffs lock, we feel this poet’s drive

    to ask questions
    to want answers
    a red balloon
    caught in elms
    how many times
    in this life
    in this life
    will we stop
    the honey clock

This clock recurs through the book, as does the red balloon, time as viscous as the substance in the (breakable) beaker, as buoyant as the gas in the (puncturable) bag. We watch the words morph in the last lines of this first section, “this is the / wrist to save / risk of hive.” We factor danger and pain into the sweet industry before us.

Without exception, every poem in the book is composed of three-word lines; variations play out through layout and, occasionally, typography. This supple form recalls Williams, Olson, and Creeley, and yet Cooperman’s verse is constrained beyond even these models at their most rigorously experimental. In respect to form, Olson’s presence is palpable. I can easily imagine teaching Cooperman’s book as an exploration of Olson’s “composition by field,” whereby energy is built up and discharged as each line trips the next:

    I know I’ve
    met you some
    where or wearing
    space and days

    rhyme you say
    a true blue
    next life think.

Behind or around or through the buzz and spark of the lines are further layers: at bottom, a drone or sustain or what in jazz is called the pedal tone, and the overlay of a steady thrum—heart, heat, hearth.

There are many ways into the book: Milton, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dickinson, Marvell, Bly, Duncan, Revell are named in the notes. But in my most recent reading, Williams and Creeley (not named, but everywhere present) are importantly and, as Creeley and Cooperman might say, complexly felt. The reverberations happen around particular words and situations, snatches of dialogue (“’drive,’ she said / ‘drive it fast. . .’”), and in the relation of poet to his subject. The opening lines of Paterson, Book II hover:

    Outside
                            outside myself
                                                 there is a world,
    he rumbled, subject to my incursions
    a—a world
                               (to me) at rest,
                                                 which I approach
    concretely—

Cooperman’s incursions, too, bring us along with him into and up hard against “the dredge of / city rivers,” mountains, and “vanishing woods”:

    more and more
    the day makes
    clear the day’s
    a separate mass
    I must enter
    at all costs
    the very thorn
    like locust moved
    a tree for
    all my wandering

Most often, however, Cooperman is after something smaller—that basic human unit, “the family bin,” in its “wild domesticity”: “a family is / a thing a / made thing almost / a true wall / we made this / thing true wall.”  We watch the mind at work on “blood and cradle.” “Spool 7” begins: “some more new / thinking about about / and while I’m / at it on / and through the / time of conflicting,” doing a metacognitive dance that descends into body: “the body thirsts / the pupil dilates.”

But embodiment is hardly a solution to the problems of self that are hatched in this “family linkage nest.” This poet is tender with his intimates and harsh on himself, admitting he’s “a man unplumbed” (48), “placeless / among empty loans” (47): “how I am / this difficult man / a gnarled me” (28).  Again and again, the poet finds his limits, the silences without and within. The word “autism” drops once in the book, and reverberates, bone by bone, in association with “Daughter.” We witness the toil of being the father who “know[s] not / where she goes / or how to / go to her / with articulate grace”:

    receiving      I long
    to fly and
    can’t stitch ends
    such so and
    so my tongue
    responds      its ruth
    a savage silence

The wonder of the invariable, three-word rule is that at times it propels the poem forward, feeding off resistance; while, elsewhere, the effect is a stall or heart-rending stutter: “it’s confronting what / I don’t know / what I do.” The radiant “Spool 25” contains a prayer: “patience please please / dark dark understanding.”

Then there are, of course, the spools themselves—in the names of the individual poems (numbered randomly, nonconsecutively) and in the web of countless related figures: “lathe of time / lave of shine” and “world’s quick spindle / turns coriolis hairwise.” While the three-word lines give a transverse rhythm to the eye’s movement from left to right, and back again to left margin, this work is less about warp and weft than edge and fray. Spool catches the thread of its forebears: “If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time,” says Darl in As I Lay Dying; “What common language to unravel,” asks Williams parenthetically in Paterson; and Cooperman follows with “she and me / a raveling spore / in every darkness.” While Faulkner and Williams cast their taut lines for the biggest fish, Cooperman favors coil, tangle, that which both binds and severs. The possibilities that open out from his title immeasurably extend Olson’s crude use of “kinetics” to illustrate the “machinery” of projective verse. We are ushered by Cooperman via modernist forms into new relations to time and space where “years go by / not as catches / but as drones.” He asks elsewhere, “is it we’re / free from the / surveillance when we / made the surveillance.” The effect of Cooperman’s anachronism is at once as familiar as a quilt, and vertiginous.

And yet, Cooperman rows us steadily with his “vacant oar,” paying out the tilting arcs of language that lash us to our objects, and cut between us and everything we aim at or converse with. Richard Serra presides over the book perhaps more than even the most influential poet. Cooperman offers the sculptor “a string of gratitudes,” calling him the “hovering ‘architect’ of the Spool design.” Cooperman’s book confirms my sense that poetry and sculpture are the closest cousins of the expressive arts, sharing our obsessions with objects and their making; with substance, medium, and material; with the primitive relations between nouns and verbs. Perhaps in a moment of overstatement, Serra traces all of his work to a single detail from an outing he took with his father when he was four years old. Serra recalls the “tremendous anxiety” he felt as he watched an oiler launched in the San Francisco Bay: “as the ship went through a transformation from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyant structure, free, afloat, and adrift.” Cooperman spins a parallel moment, speaking as father rather than son, and supplementing memory with what he observes and what he hopes for:

    becoming a past
    to reflect upon
    is to see
    a pond not
    time but distance
    of transport known
    a toy drags
    my son years
    discretely shapes of
    blocks he builds
    a ship so
    wanting to transform

An aching joy seeps through every line of this hard-won book. Cooperman ends “Spool 20” with a sigh, “so hard to / make real objects.” For my honey, the heft and breath of this book is as real as it gets.