in awe

As the French would say, Quelle une bummier. I thought my review of Dorothea Lasky’s thrilling and seductive poetry collection Awe was slated to appear somewhere, but alas, it hath been usurped by someone else’s very thoughtful and nice take on the matter. Anyway, I shall now share it here, in case anyone cares. I really enjoyed this energetic collection, and found that it did exceedingly pleasant, zinging things to my brain and spine. I’ve already read it several times, and perhaps you should too.

This makes an exceedingly long blog post. For that, and for everything else, I apologize.

It is perhaps too easy to excuse American readers for ignoring poetry, barricading ourselves behind the justification that “the strength of American poetry depends on the fact that hardly anybody notices it,” as James Longenbach wrote recently in the New York Times. But how can we look away, even for an instant, from a lively collection like Dorothea Lasky’s debut “Awe,” from these muscular poems that prove, as Lasky writes, “the alphabet is full of blood”? Lasky tackles the problem of poetry in “The Sign Element and the Ability of the Speech Animal”: “A poem is like a sparkly ring,” she writes, “It must be glittering at different points as the light hits it. / Its great vision of art is one of simultaneity” -- a sensible if ambitious definition that she eventually rejects (“So says you and you know nothing”). Still, it is helpful to think of these poems as gems of simultaneity, since their defining characteristic is one of unlikely juxtaposition.

The poems in “Awe” are mashups of the sacred and profane, transcribing a world in which angels and God locate themselves alongside forests, subway trains, and boob jobs. Lasky possesses an unsentimental attention for the spiritual, for things living in the heads and hearts (sometimes literally) of other creatures. “Awe: a Dialogue” is a raw exchange between heartbroken narrator and faceless interlocutor: “And is love art? / No, art is nothing like fire / And how do you feel? / I am burning / And what is happening? / My spirit is ascending, my soul is trapped / And what is trapping it? / God. God and awe.” The poem acknowledges that love, like God, is difficult for a person to believe in unless she feels it burning this way inside her, an understanding that allows Lasky to write about God in a way that feels intimate and refreshing. One of the poems is titled “Love is the Answer to God’s Question” – “God is love,” minus the flower power.

Because it’s not as if we are bombarded here by hippie-dippie love, peace, and togetherness. The imagery throughout the book is an intense, unfiltered, almost exhausting palette of birds, snow, ice, blood, red, the sun. There are many mouths, much rot and decay, and the most common action is one of devouring. The collection’s unique voice is characterized by a juxtaposition I kept thinking of as “the sacred and the valley girl” but which is probably more accurately an acknowledgement that a one can be a young woman living in the world and still be profound. Deep thoughts come here, as they tend to in life, bookended by the trivial: “Art cannot be without love./There are no paintings done out of hunger./That is longing you are thinking of, not hunger.…I am eating tropical jelly beans and drinking coffee./I have just gotten satsuma body wash.” Similarly, a poem that begins with the startling command, “Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary,” is called “Whatever you paid for that sweater, it was worth it.” Lasky’s voice is sly, brave, winkingly funny. She knows that “The Mouth of the Universe is Screaming Now in Agony” can be a suitable title for a poem that starts with the seemingly mundane old story, “If Travis meets Monica but does not like Monica / then what’s the use?” Right – even Travis and Monica can scream in agony.

There is more to discover here, too, particularly a beguiling series of observations about the peculiar power of female friendships. Repeatedly in these poems Lasky reaches out to her friends. In “Toast to my Friend or Why Friendship is the Best Kind of Love,” she writes: “Here on the front porches of our lives, / I toast to you, with goblet raised. / And the house of our lives too, glittering / with decay.” Lasky zeros in on what it is to be in one’s twenties, at once world-weary and keenly aware that you are still on the front porch of your life, creating an identity and a world for yourself made up, in part, of friends. She writes fluently about the love between friends and the love between lovers, acknowledging the unique powers of both. On one hand, “Never So In Love” captures in a few spare lines one of the great mysteries of romance: how people become more attractive once they are unavailable. On the other hand, in “Poem for my Best Friend,” she writes, “When you are loved, life fills in you / And there is reason for us all.” The love between friends is a different thing altogether, and though it can have the heft of a love affair, friendship rarely gets such thoughtful attention as in these poems.

This study of the varied flavors of love hearkens back, in the end, to the collection’s preoccupation with the inexplicable and the spiritual. In the final dreamscape-y poem, Lasky’s narrator moves past husband and mother to a friend who is “having a baby. / And she handed me the baby and I kissed its bleeding head. / And we sang songs together and being each other / We kissed each other lovingly for the very first time. / And the world opened up and great light shown.” This intense, unnameable love – not being with each other but “being each other” -- is described with imagery both biblical and apocalyptic, calling to mind the magnetic light of near-death-experience. God is love, indeed.

But perhaps we should not be surprised to find so many ideas, observations, and revelations packed into this energetic collection. After all, towards the end of the poem “The Sign Element and the Ability of the Speech Animal,” Lasky provides what may be a far more satisfying metaphor for a poem than a “sparkly ring”: “Here we stand at the feet of the specialized elephant. / Its translucent spine echoing out all we’ve ever known of death.” Poetry may be a specialized elephant, but hey, its translucent spine echoes out all we know of death, or, that matter, of life.