rev. of Oubliette by Peter Richards

Oubliette
Poems by Peter Richards. Verse Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard.

If you are a poet of any seriousness, you make a style for yourself out of one essential contradiction: the “thinginess” of experience, of thinking and feeling, and especially of silence, can’t be captured by words. The most distinctive stylists of the generation of poets now in their twenties and thirties are compelling because they already understand this. They include, to name a few, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Joshua Beckman, Cate Marvin, Joe Wenderoth, Liz Powell, Joseph Lease, and Josh Weiner. Of this handful, none seems more original than Peter Richards. He is certainly the most visionary, if by visionary you mean subversive and extrasensory.

Richards’s way of dealing with this contradiction is to turn it inside out. He lets language feed off its own juices, improvising out of music and association. The obvious influences on
Oubliette, his first book, are Stevens, Ashbery, and Merwin; but, in spirit at least, the erotic playfulness in the book is closer to that of a poet like Yehuda Amichai. For Richards, life in a poem is like life in a body — most at risk, and most fully itself, when at play.

Richards likes to put a singular physical sensation at the center of a poem, a sensation that acts as a magnet for forces felt all over the body. In “The Drawstring Hisses,” the title itself is a sound flung like a line into some interior pond. It dredges up other sounds, all of them teeming with creaturely existence. At heart, Richards is an ecstatic: “could one intonate the gown of passing near  /  from the gown of passing by / my own gown would cast this cast-out ragged hue / clear beyond concession or settle for the sounds / I hear the soprano half of my insolence / request from the nudes / fanning out to a shrill / gossamer shrill. . . .”

The purpose of all this invention seems to be an education in happenstance. As if any human life — all its possibilities and tragedies — might be made simply out of accident. “With this one kiss I now accept the modern city. / . . . I accept catalogs for holiday candy need to be clearly conceived, / and bins for commingled containers color-coded for days” (“Central Square”). But to be open to possibility and play is to be open to mistake and illusion, too. The dislocations can be disturbing: “From the window with deep spoons a street lamp offers your breast. / Tonight will I take you without seeing your breast? / Spine like a staircase, leave me astray.”

In Peter Richards’s poems a terrible loneliness lurks around the edges of happenstance. It’s a metaphysical loneliness, and nothing — not even the immortality of a god — can offer protection from it: “In that, I sometimes fear I am deathless-fear for now on I’ll serve as the points / upon which various and misguided winds / can agree. They agree I’m afraid / and that fears will keep them safe” (“Remainder”).

These various and misguided forces are demonic. Underneath the surfaces of everyday life, there are “elemental powers turning somersaults,” as Czeslaw Milosz says, “and devils, mocking the naïve who believe in them.” In “A Third Tree,” Richards echoes this: “O we had sunrises / and such natural effects as a cowbell and wood violets / comprising the quiet. Where it put love to sleep I saw no good / reason proceeding and the death mask gardens can be.”

The place where erotic playfulness and metaphysical terror touch in these poems is in their syntax. Unlike most poets of his generation who use fugal structures, Richards is interested in locating the action of thinking and feeling in the flux of line-to-line movement. Most poets are stiffs in comparison. For Richards, it’s not so much that syntax focuses language as that it focuses the reader. Along with his cat’s paw sense of diction, it allows him to brew up a tonal soup that is one part tenderness, one part comic slyness, and one part awe. And it suggests that his range as a poet will be wide and continually surprising.

David Rivard’s most recent book is Bewitched Playground
(Graywolf). He is a Guggenheim fellow for 2001, and he teaches at Tufts University.