What
is Amazing, by Heather Christle
Wesleyan University Press, 2012
Reviewed by Gerald Yelle
Recently released in paperback, What is Amazing is a book of poetry put
together like a good record album: Enough solid consistency to make its weak
tracks forgivable, even interesting as points of contrast with its strengths. This
is a book that hooks the reader with its quirky high-energy obsessions. It
functions not so much by rubbing words up against one another as by bringing
ideas together in ways that reveal character--the work of a mind struggling to
come to terms with what it means to be alone, or in society, or in nature, or
some combination of all three; in other words, what it means to be alive. It
does so without being self-consciously or patronizingly psychological,
confessional or poetical. This ease of voice makes it highly readable, and at
64 pages, it’s the kind of book you can read in a day.
Accessibility may be a key feature,
but that doesn’t mean it steers clear of the opaque and mysterious. The opening
poem, “The Seaside!” presents us with “a wall of great intensity and furious.” The
speaker wants to know: “Why / is all the beauty in the wall and not / in me
Captain,” It’s as if, in beginning to write, Christle immediately collides with
an immovable object: the overwhelming reality of nature, the sea, Walt Whitman,
the immensity of literary culture that could easily live without one more
voice. This only makes her more determined. “I can tell you things I’m not a
piece of foam” (3), she says at the end of the poem, and the book is under way.
The first section concerns itself primarily
with gardens, with the flowers, mosses and animals that inhabit them, and with the
elemental materials such as fire and water, that both compose and threaten them.
The best, “Self-Portrait with Fire” and “People Are a Living Structure Like a
Coral Reef,” flow with seemingly effortless energy. “The people Obviously they
loved me were warm and pink,” Christle says in the former. It’s the extremity,
the urgency, the repetition and self correction that gives this eleven line
poem its irresistible charm.
They asked me if I was on fire and
I said No no no no
no no no I did not want to make
trouble I was lying I was
on fire on my legs and on my hands
I was ashamed I tried
to hide my legs by kneeling I set
the grass on fire (4).
The latter poem, a free verse
sonnet of sorts, sings of love and windows and seeing people in windows, ending
with “Oh people You have to love / people They are so much like ourselves” (7).
While a celebratory tone outweighs
even the most painful moments of the book’s first section, the second is
characterized by anger, defiance, isolation and despair. The title of the opening
poem, “We Are Not Getting Anywhere,” states the case clearly enough, before
slipping into its deceptively simple narrative.
The shark was calling to express
his feelings
on his ugliness and his mortality
The two seemed related but the
message was choppy
Where was he calling from
The shark said to call back He was dying
He regretted that he would die soon
I did not want the message to
happen
but it was too late I’d already
heard it.
While the speaker’s relationship with
the shark may not be getting anywhere, and while it’s clear that she doesn’t
particularly want it to, the fact that she listens to his message seems to
require some effort on her part: “Perhaps I could go rent a boat” (23). The
title poem, “What is Amazing,” comes at the end of the second section, and with
it a return to the obsession with animals. With it also comes a very effective
deflating of the positive associations the title brought to the first section.
Here, “What is amazing is how / the animals won’t stop sleeping” (42), as if
anything could sleep with all the death and destruction going on. The poems are
not uniformly negative in this section, but they are uniformly well crafted. Note
the humor in “A Very Remarkable Story:”
It is shameful for a girl of my
size
to be so cowed by horticulture
so I slap myself on the rump
and now every time I open my mouth
a daisy chain crawls out (37).
What
is Amazing is composed of three sections, the first two of which are more
engaging than the third. Maybe it’s just that the third gets off to a slower
start. Its first five poems continue to work themes of absence and loss on materials
such as light, sky, people and birds, but the speaker is less active, more evocative
and contemplative. Consider the last lines of “Happy and Glorious:”
What I can say represents what I
cannot
Grey snow filling in the driveway
Flown away bird to split the noon
(46).
With “I Will Know You by Your Red
Carnation,” however, the quirky energy is back. Speaking of a lost “box
probably full of live animals / or other animals,” and of “blown out” stars, Christle
marvels that we are able, “To have lost as we have so greatly / And to discover
we still hold abundance” (50).
So how does this abundance of parts
fit together as a whole? If the first section suggests that despite its
challenges the world is an amazing place, and the second suggests that it’s
amazing that anything survives in such a chaotic war zone, the third seems to
suggest that chaos itself, as represented by the ocean, is the source of all
amazing things: “A cruller comes from there / and also once some beauty” (64);
it’s pretty amazing in itself, and it’s the source to which we’ll return.
Gerald Yelle teaches High School English. He is a member of the Florence (MA) Poets Society.
Gerald Yelle
91 Blackberry Lane
Amherst, MA 01002
