Review: To grow tired of London is to grow tired of life

Is it a problem that friends reviewing friends is business as usual in the po-biz? The Pill thinks it probably is. Nevertheless, here is a review of my friend Sara London’s new book, The Tyranny of Milk (Four Ways, 2010). At least I’m telling you this is a review of a friend’s book (I'm thanked in the acknowledgements, and I'm happy to admit to having encouraged the poet), which is more than you’ll often get elsewhere in this racket.

Is it a problem that friends blurb friends’ books? Oh yes, Gentle Reader, it is indeed. (I should say that I don’t know whether the blurbers of this book are friends of the poet.) But where we often think of the blurb problem in terms of nepotism or mutual back-scratching, it seems to me that the problem is just as frequently a matter of misrepresentation. And here, I think, on the back cover of London’s book, I’m provoked to wonder whether the poems are well served by the blurbs. Terrance Hayes emphasizes the poems’ verisimilitude, writing that London “recollects, recovers, recounts,” and characterizing her work as “clear-eyed utterance” (we’ll leave to one side the distinctly mixed character of that metaphor). This downplays the way London’s poems effect estrangement through her games with language and line. Cleopatra Mathis is closer to the mark; she captures the defamiliarization in the poems – “odd subjects are adroitly turned in the light of the familiar, while the common and ordinary are rendered strange.” This suggests, though, the surreal meeting of umbrella and sewing machine on dissecting table, that is to say a matter of content or topical strangeness, where what London really gets the weirdness from is the turn of a phrase, typically around the bend of a line.

I’m getting all cranky about the blurbs because they threaten to blur the real achievement of vision and voice in this book. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t quite articulate what I really admire about these poems: the bait-and-switch game they play with confessional conventions, and the way that game replaces the prurient interest in intimate revelations with the purposeful satisfactions of linguistic and prosodic play. To put it another way: while these poems might seem to be about the plight of a bed-wetter, say, or the sting of a mother’s tongue, or the tensions within a marriage, they are more properly seen as about how these things are filtered through, or, better, constructed in language. The vision is the voice, and these poems press the point that we see as we speak.

London's mechanics of estrangement are worth dwelling on a little. She sometimes achieves her effects by taking up the point of view of the naïve child or outsider, as when, in “Terra Incognita: As Butch Thunder Hawk Tells It,” she narrates a Lewis and Clark party member’s nose-blowing from the perspective of perplexed Lakota, or when, in “Tell Me,” a cultural alien sketches the mysteries of love and loss. In these poems, and in others whose speakers are not so distinctly estranged or estranging, London also exploits the inherent weirdness imposed by line-breaks in a loose counted verse (three or four words per line):

In my country
you might over-
hear the story
of the woman
with eleven children,
who never once
achieved orgasm
(“Tell Me”)

“But what
I remember most
are the polished
solid arms
of a dark chair
I was told
to sit quietly in,
the blond eyes
open
in the cold wood
(“First Wake”).

Elsewhere, London brings linguistic compression and indirection to bear, transforming embarrassment and awkwardness into the strange riches of insight. Here is “Mother,” one of twelve sections in a long poem entitled “Wetter”:

When she pinched
the plastic-headed
Safeway safeties,
pinning me into
lipoids of lemon
terry, she
sometimes pricked
her thumb,
sometimes
my thigh
fast with
blood toward
some destiny
of desert or sea.
No, I said, diapers
are not for me.

Notice the suspensions wrought by line-breaks (to what are those plastic heads attached?). Notice the foregrounding of sound by the densely packed alliteration both intralinear (“lipoids of lemon”) and interlinear (“thumb . . . thigh”), and assonance (“sometimes,” “thigh”), and, especially, combinations of sound repetition (“Safeway safeties”). Notice the quick shift from the literal blood of a pinprick to a figurative blood attached to destiny, the shift from the most intimately domestic space of a diapering to the symbolic vastness of desert and sea. Now, we can see this as a poem about the social difficulties of incontinence, or we can, as I think we should, see it as a poem about the transformations and control enabled by verbal craft and attention. The concluding utterance (the disavowal of diapers) is earned by the demonstration of continence that leads up to it.

When I got my copy of this book, I flipped through first of all looking for a poem I heard Sara London read some time ago. I have to confess that the poem stuck in my head partly for reasons that had little to do with it; I was sitting, at that reading, beside a woman with whom I was falling in love, and as I listened to the poem I couldn’t help noticing the way this woman was methodically unraveling the sleeve of her ragged hoodie. These two things had been joined in my head for years, and I figured, all that time, this was just a matter of simultaneity and the strange salience details take on in the context of a crush. What a revelation it was, then, to see that maybe they’d been intertwined for reasons having to do with the poem itself, or with its epigraph, for “The Odds” begins with a quotation from Cato: “There are [those] that fayneth it to hange / by an heere or twynned threde.” The poem is an eloquent apostrophe to a dead squirrel and a meditation (here’s where the title comes in) on the odds of missing the grasp in the midst of our play, our “lunging for love.” The odds, it turns out, are pretty good. Or bad, depending on how you look at it. The poem is also a fit metonym for the book as a whole, an exemplary instance of London’s own play (“A snapping branch this noon / snagged my skyward glance”), the vision synthesized by a voice modulated, channeled, engineered even, to provide something like, as the speaker in “Bad Manners” imagines, “a shadow lyric // sounding on the far side / of our carefully cantilevered love.”