Cherishing a Perilous World
BUCKLEY, CHRISTOPHER
Writers & Writing CHERISHING A PERILOUS WORLD BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY It has been a very long time since I have read a work of poetry as consciously and deftly orchestrated as Sherod...
...By making the familiar exotic, The Southern Reaches permits our lives and complex perceptions to glow before us...
...It seems Santos had a military father, and moved around a lot when he wasaboy...
...Again, Santos' gift for imagery, for the salient particular, and his exquisite sense of Une and voice give us verse whose understatement and calm texture make its subject all the more unnerving...
...and there, a young man, who From his earliest years, had obviously moved In the freshest waters of Faubourg Saint-Germain...
...Or there, grand and aloof, the dowager Duchess, Her powdered jaws closing on a morsel Of food like a primitive shellfish closing On a spore...
...He then discovers a telescope fixed with "the utter detachment / Of a soul" upon a work of conceptual art hanging in the Jardin des Plantes...
...The political dimension emerges fully in the fourth and final section, and Santos treats it with characteristic subtlety...
...Placed in France, they enact themselves in isolated areas far from the cities...
...Especially striking in this sequence are "Driving Outof theKeys," "Inspiration" and the wonderful love poem "Work...
...It is a moving and fitting coda...
...Hope and Memory—the one/The shadow over what's to come, /The other over some still / Unimaginable past—which / Will not leave us reconciled...
...Here is the final, stunning image: ...a LearJet wafted into vapor out on the tarmac's run, the way Common quartzstone gives Off heat which seems to come From inside itself, and not, In fact, from that moreThan-imaginably-nuclear sun Which every morning starts Up so illusionless, and every Evening slow-dissolves On the blue and otherwise Planetary hills, like a Valium Breaking up on the tongue...
...But we were children then, and so turning our faces away from each other we began to feel, as children will, that inner, rank seeping, like a blood trace on the tongue, which calls them up from everywhere, and from all around us, rising like field music from out of the ground, those darkly twinned spirits come lolling on the air of our most intimate mistakes...
...Gypsy," about a stripper /contortionist in a tent show, is an unlikely but completely successful account of a young boy's growing apprehension of the inevitable transformation of innocence into maturity...
...But suddenly the poem turns, and shows us the poor of the real world, whose faces are pressed to the outside of that glass...
...The opening lines present a crowd of demonstrators marching through Paris, while a woman leans from her window and calls out to the street below...
...18.50...
...As elsewhere, the poem proceeds from political to spiritual regions...
...They make us realize that we could all be the children of paradise once again—and that we all could just as easily lose, through greed and destruction, that very paradise which is the earth...
...Such specificity anchors Santos' perceptions in experience...
...And in case the reach from earth to that other place somewhere in the air escapes our grasp, a little further on Santos reminds us of "Unamuno's dual illusions...
...Santos shows with remarkable effect how an expert control of language and syntax can shape and pace a tight narrative...
...With "The Enormous Aquarium, situated at the start of the third section almost exactly in the middle of the book, Santos begins to develop a more sobering vision...
...And yet, For all of that, he carried A kind of lightness out Onto the green and Slippery steppingstones (As though the body, 1 Imagined, were inside The soul): counterBalanced like a skater...
...The forms appear to be climbing Except that's not the way People really climb in trees, So hopefully, their heads upLifted toward the highest Limbs as though each had left Some precious thing in those Topmost leaves, a thing, Or so they'd have us Believe, so fragile and so Clear to them (like aprivate Image each carried inside Of a Paradise where there are No trees) they've had to take off All their clothes to even Try and reach it there...
...Although Santos delicately intertwines important themes, he has subtly given himself over to his subjects, with the result that his language and manner are modest and accessible...
...When the fragile barrier breaks, one realm will pour into and usurp the other...
...Even a spot as beautiful and serene as the Luxembourg Gardens is marred by the shadow of a catastrophic future...
...Both poems first make you want to read them out loud to yourself, and then to friends—their rhythms are exact and elegant, never rising above their subjects, never allowing a syllable to escape or overstep the sure sense of line, as in this passage from "Farmland": now the grackles were nesting there, their plicate tails working at the air sliding like deep water toward evening, and now the windows of the drying sheds stayed lit all night with acetylene lamps, their canted roofs glowing beneath the moon as though a sea-salt inked its phosphor in for good, as though, even there, the huge, unbroken whale bones rose, silent and shadowless through the rippling ground...
...We are made to feel the loss of childhood, the passage to a terrible "adulthood," whose politics and conventions in a nuclear age threaten the most remote "reaches" on earth—as well as the planet itself...
...Throughout this grouping the poet skillfully renders the details of place to obliquely recreate a historical moment...
...Nineteen Fifty-Five" is a marvelous long poem that precisely conveys a boy's vague sense of terror during that era of new wars and of the coalescence of a new political status quo...
...The last poem in this volume is the broadest in scope and the most thematically direct...
...Christopher Buckley, a new con tributor to The New Leader, teaches English at West Chester University in Pennsylvania...
...and rubbed by a brightness we could not see, we began to feel we had entered the place of all secret and all singing things: it was as though we'd stepped beyond the threshold of the world to hold each other now differently, now closer together, not weighing on ourselves, or in our arms...
...A Sunday Visit to Koalinga's" chronicles a significant episode in the life of a child, as it depicts a young boy waiting outside a house for his older brother to return from a sexual encounter inside...
...For those who are used to reading collections of individual poems instead of a book where they work in concert, "The Easter Manifestations" should make all the lights come on by illuminating the heart of Santos' conception...
...A boy and girl have made up a bonding or marriage ceremony, and at night they meet among the gravestones: ...We were more alone than either of us had ever been...
...Close to the test site we have the desert, the wasted land, where the only things growing are the poisonous oleanders...
...The first section imagines a state of innocence, a purity of world and soul that is at the same time constituted from concrete places and events...
...Aquarium" is about the division of consciousness and class as the poet sees it...
...The poem is neither obvious nor sensational...
...The poet walks by the Arènes de Lutèce, a small coliseum left by the Romans when they occupied Lutèce, now Paris...
...Santos' mastery of his craft, of form, sound and music, is astounding...
...Section two illustrates the next stage in the individual's evolving sense of the world, in his slow divestiture of innocence...
...Nearthe Desert TestSites" is such an octual poem that it is truly unsettling...
...Writers & Writing CHERISHING A PERILOUS WORLD BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY It has been a very long time since I have read a work of poetry as consciously and deftly orchestrated as Sherod Santos' The Southern Reaches (Wesleyan, 67pp...
...Two of the most powerful and resonant poems come at the end ofthe book...
...Simultaneously, it rings true and is apocalyptic, representing the daily sunset and the shape and color of nuclear fission, the "testing" of the bomb—that presence ever-present...
...Of the many poems in this section about the spirit's emergence into worldly flesh, "The Children of Paradise" perhaps best represents that motif...
...Thus "Photographs of My Father (Public Gardens Berlin, 1948)" evokes the Nazi atrocities of World War II with its closing picture of "...troop trains passing/Just off to one side, trailing small bits of ash...
...These poems of sustained beauty are also works of love and conscience...
...The deceptively titled "Homage to the Impressionist Painters" begins: Two small boys crouched beside A remote-control panel In the Luxembourg Gardens are guiding their Nuclear submarine down Beneath the crowded waters Of the sailing-pond...
...Through precise and poignant witnessing, through memorable lines and images, the poet enables us to recognize both the cherished and the perilous particulars of our world...
...The book concerns itself with the notion and the facts of empire and the effect they have onus individually and collectively...
...The traces of this larger existence are esoteric, but also lovely and immediate: On his clothes The lavish scent of pomade and lemonBlossom talc...
...Now the verses acquire an ominous quality...
...The Gypsy Carnival" and "Farmland Beside the Loire" are strong with his gifts...
...Rather, it focuses on an atmosphere of sensuality, and on the boy's awareness of feelings and sensations just beyond his ken...
...The disturbing image of the Valium dissolving tells us about ourselves: tranquil, (tranquilized), looking the other way...
...Like the others, it is set in an exotic locale and is not simply about memory...
...Its subject isa"GrandHotel," symbolizing the old world of wealth and power that is comfortably and complacently seated, as it were, behind a glass: A Serbian officer whose organdy plume Was like the blow of spume off some great Blue whale...
...There is also a Holiday Inn poised like a silo, or a match...
...The Midwest, marriage, work and love are explored, and the tone is lightly domestic...
...The poem might be the perfect coefficient for the anxious circumstances we've accepted to live in...
...The park's trees have been filled with body casts of men and women that have apparently been infused with chlorophyll so that they will "live" with the trees...
...the notions of empire and the dangers of the late 20th century start to surface...
...Sherod Santos transports us back to the universal memories of childhood's island paradise, and then forward to the startling yet common realities of a world whose nations have acquired the ability to destroy themselves and their planet...
...At the edge of each experience there is always the burden and consequence of knowledge...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 1
