rags in the hands of a narcoleptic duster

In his review (Jacket 33, July 2007), of Remants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006) Ben Hickman uses the term “rhapsodic,” and I felt a little breakthrough. Because that is the way I have been reading Dara Wier’s tenth collection, for the wild tilt-a-whirl ride of the changing moods and images.

I found a review by Cynthia Arrieu King (Octopus magazine issue 8 ) that made direct correlations between the poems and the U.S. poliltical situation. The wolf in “Incident on the Road to the Capital,” for exampe, is a direct correlation to the President (who at that time would have been George W. Bush):

A wolf had grown tired of his character and sought
to find a means to transform himself into something
more vicious, more deadly.

And I’ll have to admit it’s tempting here. It’s a darkly amusing poem:

. . . When he
ran into me the other day on his journey to consult the
oracle of escalated suffering we shared a table in the
shade of a parasol tree . . . He
didn’t look like a very serious wolf. I think he was
missing a real opportunity.

Harder for me in poems like “A Mirage in the Margins of Realia,” where we seem to be caught in the hinterlands of some dream with snippets of a thousand old movies — or maybe it’s just a Flannery O’Connor story:

I went back into where there were mules in the barn
There were owls lined up on the rafters
There were cats with many kittens attached
There was an army blanket draped over a haybale
A canteen with its cap on & a hole shot through it

. . .

Somewhere far off in a corner, I could see the
Back of someone’s head half-reflected in a shaving
Mirror . . there was a window with a net tacked
Over it, I went through its meshes with no one knowing.

The problem with King’s reading is that it focusses on the political anger at the expense of the humor. Hickman finds Wier’s humor too gentle for the demands of LANGUAGE poetry — he accuses her of “attempts at cleverness which read like Charles Bernstein for dinner parties:” — and her overtly political poems too sentimental. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the Bush years are over and I’m no longer infuriated by everything that comes out of the White House. I’ve been rather enjoying the poems as a general sort of commentary on our way of life and the dilemma in which we’re caught. Or maybe I prefer my LANGUAGE poetry of a dinner party lightness. Or maybe just because it’s summer, I mostly have read these poems for the occasional wonderful images I find, like these opening lines to “The Shadows”

To be like a spider a kid’s captured
In a bug house and forgetten on a bench
Beneath a room inside a hemlock in the far off
Corner of the garden, then its raining

Or the beginning of my favorite poem in the book, “Riding with Plato on a North Bound Train:”

Everything Plato ever started should
Because of his chains remain in the purely
Philosophical realms of variation on an argument,
Shouldn’t it, said one of the grackles high up
On the wire where so many grackles stopped to
Recharge or listen in to human exchanges for
Amusement purposes only.

I love this not only for that grackle, who comes as such a surprise, but also for its sounds.

Remnants of Hannah is my first experience reading Dara Wier. I’m told she’s a wonderful reader, but I’m also told that this is not her best book. That might be the book just before this one, Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), which won the 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award. In Remnants of Hannah, at any rate, I find her work more approachable than that of John Ashbery, who is said to be an influence. Ashbery describes her work like this:

“It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.”

I will not call myself transformed. But it was a good read. And I’m no doubt better for the experience of this intriguing poet.

Some more poems by Dara Weir.