This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo Press, 2009), by Dan Beachy-Quick
Alphabet (New Directions, 2000), by Inger Christensen
I like the book-length project, or at least I like a book-length project that feels organic in its intentions, respectful to its reader. I'm not looking for some onerous monument to an idea, or awkward gestures toward that gaunt figure of truth that has been gathering leeches in the still waters. I guess what I mean is that Beachy-Quick's and Christensen's volumes are tender and ingratiating about their ambition. They celebrate wonder, which I would say holds its own unique standing, which I would say is a stance uniquely qualified to make statements about truth.
Christensen interlaces two somewhat arbitrary forms to build her poem. Alphabet is an abecedarian poem, though the alphabetic quality appears somewhat loosened by the translation from Danish to English. The other form she uses is Fibonacci's Sequence, where each subsequent section of the poem grows with the same pattern. However these forms work and interrelate, they are really just catalysts for Christensen's endearing accumulation of simple things. Apricot trees exist, she tells us. Doves exist. Early fall exists. All of these things exist in this existing world. One can't help but feel grateful. But, as Fibonacci's Sequence pushes later sections in the book beyond a length where she could continue this easy cataloguing, Christensen takes her poem further, exploring what it actually means for the world to exist. Of course her hopeful tone from the beginning touches any subject she might include. Even nuclear weapons. Even defoliants. These things might exist, and they deserve reckoning, even if we want to be grateful for this world. And it might be that the extended section length brings about the lengthened gaze, compelling the speaker to consider all the topics.
Of course, that kind of breadth would be impossible to achieve in a slim volume of poetry. But it's the ambition that motivates it that I most admire in a book-length project. It is a gaze, but it must feel as though the poet couldn't help but attend and attend and attend to the subect at hand. Dan Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine has that feel. Last spring I got to hear Beachy-Quick give a talk about the act of reading, and the ever-expanding self-referentiality that reading accomplishes for each person. The talk dove-tailed nicely into his reading from The Whaler's Dictionary that night. But it also fits with this book, where the act of reading and the careful development and expanding of perspective are complement to one another. While Christensen's book first makes me feel her delight with the world befrore she sets about attending to more serious matters, Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine immediately attends to the dilemma of personally experiencing the world, then it uses delight, in the image, in the suddenly relevant fact, to broaden that experience, and eventually his perspective on the world. Beachy-Quick's is a carefully built book whose argument grows with the book's progress, accomplishing an expansive persuasion.
And that expansiveness is the joy I get from a good book-length project, whether geared on Christensen's whimsy, or Beachy-Quick's organic intellect.
Related Links:
This Nest, Swift Passerine
Alphabet