Glean (Nightboat Books, 2007)
by Joshua Kryah
91 pp.
Not everyone presumes a transparency to the language they use, least of all poets. Yes, someone asking for an apple probably doesn’t need deconstruction to reveal another meaning beneath their request. And, yes, I know making a statement like this in a review for a book of poetry is simplistic. In poetry circles (and we poets like to stand in really tight-knit circles), we presume language is not perfect, and if someone is asking for an apple, at least if it’s in a poem, we need to be ready for all the connotations that object might carry with it. In fact, I think it’s not just that poets are aware of the complications language carry, we kind of delight in it. I mean, it’s all we have, unless someone plans to make an anthology of Grecian urns (“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”) or of poets mimicking interpretive dances (I’ll leave that task to the imaginative anthology editing published by University of Iowa Press). Until then, however transparent or connoted, our poems will be filled up with words and the language they concede themselves to.
In Joshua Kryah’s Glean, language is a crafted instrument the poem’s speaker relies on to express his devotion. I should make clear, I’m not thinking here of language as a music, that makes the poems sing (though these poems do sing). The real focus is Kryah’s speaker and the way his language becomes a felt thing—a sensation in the chest and the throat and mouth. Kind of like the sensation when reading Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior with Sudden Joy. But different. For Shaughnessy, language is crass, grotesque, and conspicuous. She makes every effort to push the reader’s face into the poem’s language, kind of like Bre’r Rabbit getting thrown in the briar patch. Or maybe it’s more like the fear Bre’r Fox has of the briar patch. It seems to me Shaughnessy intends for the poem to remain outside the reader’s actual experience. The poems push away from the reader, eventually eliciting a strange intuition that invites the reader inside.
Kryah has other intentions. Language can still be an acknowledged transaction, but it is something unique and precious offered up by the speaker to an unnamed and absent addressee. Instead of the poems pushing the reader away, they invite him inside to witness the importance words have in offering worship. For Kryah’s speaker language fills the inescapable absence; it becomes the only proof that the addressee might exist. In contrasting between this silence and the presence language affords, what devotee wouldn’t sense a corporeality to the word he speaks? “There is this deciduousness inside me.” (from “The White No Where”) “what others might have called / alms this my flower offering / its involute petals” (from “Apologia”).
These poems are a constant negotiation, a complicated honesty trying to touch what the speaker can’t physically touch. And yet, the reader is lured to empathy—a result of Kryah’s easy, sensuous style. It takes a subtle hand to convince a reader of sincerity—subtle but equally intense. Fortunately, Kryah accomplishes both with this impressive first book.
Related Links:
Glean
Joshua Kryah's official web site
