Moss Burning
Marianne Boruch Field Poetry Series, 1993 ISBN 0-932440-63-0 87 pp. Softcover $12.95
(Published in Sycamore Review 6.2, Summer 1994)
Moss Burning is Marianne Boruch's third and strongest collection, which is to say it ranks among the best recent books by anyone. For once a blurbist gets it right: promised a "brilliant meditation on the intersections of the visible and the invisible worlds," we find just that. The book ranges widely and inventively over familiar Boruch landscapes, with a finely calibrated eye for family detail, childhood memory, and those freighted moments of near epiphany that haunt us as we go about our ordinary business.
The epigraph, from Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," hints at this book's cohesive strength: "What do I remember / that was shaped / as this thing is shaped?" In Williams, this thing is of course the flower of both hell and love, and it is the poem itself, too, that stubborn bloom of imagination and memory. Like Williams, Boruch will nervously, insistently sing "a thousand topics / in an apple blossom," paying equal homage to the quotidian and the mysterious, fact and fancy.
I have room here to single out no more than a couple points for emphasis. One is Boruch's skill at rendering states of emotional ambivalence. I think few have sketched the feel of a marital spat more acutely, for instance, yet without the slightest tinge of confessional display. "Argument, With Migration" employs a flock of migrating cranes as a funny, sad, self-conscious Rorschach of that held-breath awkwardness in mid-quarrel before the next eruption. The poem concludes on an image groping gingerly toward the revelation that this poet is characteristically too honest to supply except in "blurred" form:
I turned
to look at you, binoculars
still in place. I fiddled with the lens: you
blurred, not blurred. You blurred again and again
as the birds dimmed into
twilight, quieting, dozing off,
whatever they do.
Surely no one has written stranger, more faceted poems about childhood, particularly schooling and religious experience. "The Boy Ghost," for instance, is a witty, tender child's eye view of miracle and adult belief; "Holy Cards" itself performs the miracle of dramatizing a "good girl's" hapless, mocking fascination with images of religious ecstasy. As in her two previous books, Boruch charms and disarms with a flexibly unpretentious voice. She is capable of dense tensile diction ("in your deliberate dark despondence," "the bleak lush bottom of things") and also of pitch- perfect colloquialism ("The money feels / stupid in my hand," "that Sara / what's-her-name Teasdale"). She is especially fond of deflating any swerve toward lofty thought with the lingo of childhood: who else has gotten more mileage out of diction like corny, jerk, cute, sappy, dopey, and goofy? Still, there is no disingenuousness here, no false modesty--just real modesty, a quality so rare it surprises as it satisfies.
Boruch's lyrics are angular and swift, her subjects typically domestic and reminiscent, but each poem is so beautifully oblique as to make summary nearly impossible. Easily the best poem in the book is "The Stairway," at seven pages the longest one she has yet published, and a stunning achievement. In a series of spare anecdotes it meditates upon the powers and limitations of imagination, managing to illuminate without pretending to comprehend what Emerson termed "the stairway of surprise," which I take to be that half-glimpsed, half-taken-on-faith entrance into pure visionary experience.
Only a full reading could do "The Stairway" justice, but the following section ought to give a sense of her range and control:
Even of things we love, what remains?
Of summer, say, one image maybe--a car,
a gravel road
too little for the map, how
one of us stopped arguing, violent at the gears
backed up to see that deer alone
and slow, right
at us in the field, chewing the soybean's
ordinary leaf.
All pause is ancient though minutes
speed like light. Forget coming from
or going to, a story
breaks to threads, worn down by details
until the last detail floats
like a stick in water, two sticks.
That deer we save
for when the room gets dark, his curious look, or how young
he was, stupid, an easy shot
in growth that low, or the wide-brimmed leaf
--this stays--oh, each
bigger than his tongue.
The field shrinks then billows up.
One's lithe
and seasick with it.
I emerge from such passages a little seasick myself at the blend of resonant detail and elusive whole. The mysteries of love, time, and memory have found their apt embodiment, though every story we tell about them may break into threads, though the deer of memory will resist turning into symbols, and though we must, if we are honest, admit that our biggest personal revelations tend to happen on a road "too little for the map." The full poem is a wonder, in a book that wonderfully looks and looks again at the very notion of wonderment.
