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Eliot Cardinaux |
First,
the title: Dreadsummer.
Before I’d read a single poem, the title bespoke (to me) some call
of the wild, a terrible loss, a subject matter emotionally wrenching,
like Heathcliff and Catherine tragic love. And I was wrong, but I was
close. This chapbook of poems by Eliot Cardinaux turns out to be much
subtler and more musical than my cheap dramatic expectations, but I
would not be exaggerating to call the poems odd, like dreams, and
arresting, invasive, suggestive, and large
in their
life upon the page. They live.
To
go straight to a poem that clasps you in its arms and
then—wonderfully—lets you go, “To Osip Mandelstam,” the young
poet speaks directly to the great Russian. He “lays these things
down for the first time,” he says, “in a grave,” and ends up
“saying these things out loud.” That is how the poem ends, with a
spoken voice, a bare, respectful, and dedicated
voice that hints of Whitman’s wide embrace or Louise Glück’s
lucid garden secrecy or the strange (yet common) unforgettable
imagery of Elizabeth Bishop.
But
Cardinaux is no imitator; he is not afraid to lay down his own word
or phrase, seemingly detached, and let it fend or float for itself.
In the book’s first poem “Sigil” he writes, “I grieve my
splinter out”; in “Procession” it’s “Your breathing broke
across the bow,” and then “I walk with my nostrils down.”
Splinter! Nostrils! Breathing an ocean wave! The man has perfect
pitch, and produces heartbreaking and thrilling images. He is
thoughtful. He fulfills his subjects. His poems are intimate,
evocative, assertive, exquisitely sensitive to all that’s alive,
and he does it with a few words. He reveals the catastrophe of
existence, the completeness of loss, and the phantom mind of a rose
that, in the final poem, “A present history of air,”
grows deep
in the azure,
keeping
one thought to
itself,
that the present
is history.
If
you care to slow down, you can hear the internal rhymes and personal
rhythms.
There
is something new about Eliot Cardinaux’s voice, too, or perhaps
reborn. He can conjure little sparks of Akhmatova, cries of the
innocent in Blake, touches of Frost. And he has a sense of humor. “A
snake was charmed / on the eve of possession” begins the poem
“Allegory”; but it takes a serious turn soon enough, as one image
consumes another in a “lover’s last poem / whose head witnessed
everything at once.” Everything at once? Whose head? Whose
everything? We are not instructed. Cardinaux continues:
Their
escape is the smoke
from
a flame that erases
everything
but absence
for
your rage to fill:
black
water
under
the light of migraines
a
bullet
brought
weak death two scales.
We’re
talking notches on belts and musical events. These poems play with
words seriously but wittily; they require one’s full attention.
They are for quiet readers who have some literary familiarity, can
catch a hint, can see a line go into a cartwheel, and are attentive
to spoken sounds and imagined images.
