Sight Map, by Brian Teare
(University of California Press, 2009)
Beneath every love poem there lies dishonesty. Love is never like what the poem said. And how would that poet know? My love was different. And I know True Love is different than that. And Mature Love is another thing entirely. The problem with love poetry is that love is too complicated to be nailed down by one poem. Love is wily and many-legged. Have you ever met Desire? It’s cruel. Sometimes it’s elusive. For that matter, everything about Love Relations usually stays pretty aloof. It reorders itself at will. And, poor poets, everything about love is being constantly rediscovered. No one sees this when they’re in love, but when you’re rediscovering love it’s just like when you’re first discovering it. And everyone’s said that before. So why write love poems?
Unless you’re Brian Teare’s Sight Map, because these poems understand love like the book was underneath it all along. Love changes. Love inhabits us. And trying to explain this habitation is where Teare’s book pulls away from the most common tropes used to explain love. For Teare, language literally rearranges in the first section. It’s like when our desire for love is rearranged into being loved at that moment of consummation. I really can’t celebrate this part of Teare’s book enough. Read through “Emerson’s Susquehanna” and “To Be Two,” and when you come to the third section of “To Be Two,” just listen. Lines from the poems before get reordered into this lyrically fluid tenderness. In fact, the recognition that this poem is from the poems coming before it is actually a sensual experience. I feel this poem and the warmth inside it.
If only love could always inhabit us like that. But what’s a book about love if it’s not fraught by desire? Love may be an ecstasy of togetherness, but inevitably there will have to be loneliness. And for Teare, loneliness is intimate and textured and repetition and remembering. And most of all it is landscape, and that peculiarly sharpened experience of a landscape when we suffer desire. For my reading, I focus again on the moment when a poem notices its own existence as an issue to composing more of the poem. “Sanctuary, Its Roots Sanctus” proposes a lake, but no more. Meaning a lake can’t be more than a lake. And, as is usual with poetry, this resistance to meaning is exactly what cues us to see beyond the lake to the metaphorical action the lake represents. Of course, he notes how “being / fucked is a version of prayer” while standing next to the lake. But Teare is obstinate with his resistance. He not only tells the reader, “I would like to keep it / here—the lake and its description— / before it becomes metaphor.” He repeats the description of the lake verbatim. The waves that sound like the short vowel sound of an i. The surface of the lake “nova’d” white. He repeats with the same phrasing. And then he blends this repetition into the poem as though he’s rearranging a collage. The result is that same sensuality from “To Be Two.” But where “To Be Two” gave you that heat of romance, now Teare puts you inside his reluctance. “Please don’t let me remember.” the poem says.
Teare draws the tension tight. He denies and indulges at once. It’s quite possibly the truest exercise inhabiting Sight Map. It is like a shaded light that burns brighter at the edge of the shade, giving evidence of the full lumination beneath.
Recommended links:
Sight Map
Brian Teare's homepage
Brian Teare reads "Emerson's Susquehanna," (of particular interest at Teare's homepage)
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