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| Chloe Garcia Roberts |
Chloe Garcia Roberts amid the Spaces of Poetry
in her new book THE REVEAL
article
by Michael T Steffen
There’s a great joy in recovering lost
and forgotten things, even the old lost things of language we call archaisms.
This accounts for one of the true delights Chloe Garcia Roberts brings us with
her new book of poems THE REVEAL (ISBN 978-1-93489-45-6) from Noemi Press. The
titles of the poems, somewhat elaborate, hinting at paradox or suspended with
grammatical complexity, are reminiscent of old anthology titles, first lines
from Emily Dickinson (“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”) or one of
Shakespeare’s sonnets (“That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold”). Thus
Garcia Roberts gives us: IN ORDER TO SEE A TRUTH IN DARKNESS ; THOUGH
TRANSPARENT IN THE DAY, AT NIGHT LIKE GLASS I BECOME A MIRROR. Some of the
titles go postmodern in their old Baroque constructions and metaphysical
evocations: I AM A SUSPENSION, NOT A SOLUTION ; ONCE WHEN LIGHT RETURNED AFTER
A BLACKOUT, I FOUND MY FACE PRESSED INTO A WALL ASKING FOR HELP ; FREEDOM IS
THE THICKET WITH WHICH YOU FILL YOUR DELINEATED AIR.
The book’s leading title, THE REVEAL, does something of its own. Words
such as “shoot”, “fly” and “find” like Brock Holt play different positions with
ease. Without changing forms, they can be either nouns or verbs. You play on
the stage when you stage a play. But “reveal” does not do this so readily. Only
very recently, mostly in context of media disclosures or TV drama denouements,
has it been used and accepted as a noun. “Revelation” is its normative noun
form. So the effect of the title THE REVEAL, especially in context with the other grander, old-style titles, is
one of peculiarity. On the book cover the article THE is set almost a line
above REVEAL, denoting spaces, perhaps for a fill-in-the-blank sentence, like
THE_____ REVEAL______. This is not “reveals” with an “s”, so we are dealing
with a third-person plural, required by the definite article, for the subject
noun. For example: THE MOVEMENTS IN THE CURTAIN REVEAL THE CAT
IN THE WINDOWSILL.
Because the titles are given all in capitals (mimicking the majority
solution to resolving grammatical and typographical uncertainties), there is
support for the idea of gaps between THE and REVEAL. This carries over to the
furled lining of the hemi-stitches in the poems themselves, leaving gaps of
delineation and silence down across the page. One very concrete definition of
poetry lies in the deliberate margins of its composition and presentation,
denoting the metaphysical speech of silence, transposed as “DARKNESS” in the
book’s first title and remarkable opening statement:
IN
ORDER TO SEE A TRUTH IN DARKNESS
Listen
for its edge.
The
border always —silhouetted,
glancing—
divines
the real from
the
form.
The fragmentary lining gives rise to
different contextual possibilities. Written out as an
ordinary sentence, there is a definite sense to the statement, “I know only one
voice in the swarm and am not interested and refuse to see the cloud, the skin,
you wreathe it in.” The meaning draws particularly to “the one voice in the
swarm.” But lined out as it is in the poem, we get something with more
amplitude and a much wider reach:
I
know
only
one voice in the
swarm
and
am not interested
and
refuse to see
the
cloud,
the
skin,
you
wreathe it in (page 3).
Given these spaces, the eye is apt to
land on “I know…and am not interested…and refuse to see…”—a credo of diffidence
we may generally own while not wanting to, yet helpless in the barrage and
volume of information we are prone to, in the spill out 24/7 holding the world
in our hands, in our cell phones, IPODs and tablets, everywhere we go, let
alone whatever newspaper or book in non-updateable print we happen to pick up.
These notions from the first page reflect back to the contemporary sense of
“REVEAL” as a noun, indicating a media news disclosure, that a Hollywood couple
has had a fallout, or that another personality has come out of the closet.
Trivia. In its short form, the word means substantially less than it does in
its traditional form, revelation, which distinguishes poetry as a created and
significant form of writing.
It’s reassuring when poems delving at confinement, within one’s room,
can be suggestively reflective of what’s going on outside around the house. It
affirms the continuity, in Seamus Heaney’s terms, between center and
circumference, fruit and tree. This is so even if Garcia Roberts’ poems robe
themselves with much referential plumage in the way of language poems,
anonymously assertive without formal regard for completion: I AM A SUSPENSION,
NOT A RESOLUTION—speaking by turns in defense of her sources of inspiration, by
turns in her own defense.
Who precisely her counterpart is… In one passage she describes the
process of disintegration between structure and surface:
Bathe
the body from the bones
and
only the us is left,
leafing
silently beneath. (page 7)
Most captivating about Garcia Roberts is her
deliberation in earnest. These poems are written, not scribbled or edited like
show poodles. She keeps her readerly self, that inheritance, at hand for light
in its different senses of wit, affirmation and elucidation.
