Book Review
BY STEPHEN MASSIMILLA
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The Lifeblood of Consciousness, of Love
and Loss
Ruth Danon’s work may seem to be by turns “postmodern” and “Surreal,” but the allure of her style never displaces the sense of a living, breathing presence in the sea of fragmentation. This is the paradoxical wonder of Limitless Tiny Boat: What from a certain perspective is vast, strange, abstract, and ungraspable is, at the same time, spare, heartfelt, and irreducibly human. And the drama and trepidation of the heart is often conveyed in, beside, or through what is tellingly quotidian—the food slowly chewed, “the gloves, partly worn,” “bees in the garden and wasps in the wall.”
Still, how can we come to terms with desire? It is both a part of us and not. In “Outward,” where boat imagery and building imagery both figure, “Desire / is interfering with me.” And what if that desire is often for the immediacy of experience? The speaker goes on to consider the moment toward which things tend: “how to account for it /without falsifying the record.” But who is even doing the speaking, given that “I is not a name”? Any notion that this poem is an abstract exploration of dis-solution or a heady exercise in deconstruction runs up against the emotional and sensual immediacy of Danon’s work. The apprehension of “The water still to cross” is too strong to be merely an idea, and there is also the fact of now, the intense reality of “this. Acute. / This certainty.”
What we both can and cannot grasp is not only the self, the sea, and the moment at hand. We move through a variety of times and climes. There are the clouds, which could begin or end anywhere and “could be below us if we happen to be on a plane” (“Without Prepositions We Cannot Understand Clouds”), and the sun “bleaching out the scarred and pitted wood” (“Bearing the Weight of Snow”). Danon invites us to question where almost anything begins or ends. And are our lives, our desires, as unfathomable as the entire universe?
The second section of the book, entitled Echoes, explores the mythic and “scientific” dimensions of this theme of limitlessness, and of its lovers and discontents. The nymph Echo herself “(a creature of desire and longing, much like ourselves)”, is, we are told, now a singularity, a black hole, a phenomenon out of math and physics. This claim is as quirky and funny as it is painful. The mythical lover Echo has become as disembodied as she once was physical, and as contemporary as she once was ancient Greek: “Now she is mapped acoustically and calibrated digitally. She is everywhere and nowhere, and we see that was always the plan” (”Preface”). In the poem “Singularity,” this poor neglected nymph is reduced to the formal components of the poem that describes her diminution—that is, to “Anaphora // And // Rhyme.” Even this is hardly the end of her painful transformation. In “Echo’s calling,” her longing returns “as speech fractured // in air.” An elemental sense of loss also comes through in the short poem “Echoes Pain”:
Echo is phantom limb. She shivers
as if she exists. She has never forgotten
her body or how much she loved it.
Indeed, this whole book is haunted by echoes of an out-of-body experience. Witness the ghostly, inchoate figures hovering in the oceanic realm on the cover (an image by Danon’s husband, the painter Gary Buckendorf). But surprisingly, Echo’s journey is still far from over. In “Echo Over,” she becomes not only sound moving though air, not only memory, but “The memory of memory.” Her echoing cannot be over, not as long as she is echoing all over again.
Entitled Code Blue, the third section of Limitless Tiny Boat almost takes us under. Here we plummet to the hibernal depths of “Living in the Cold” and of “Writing the Disaster.” The latter poem (after Blanchot) is full of cold and hurt and desperation: “Something’s so wrong in the house of birds,” it begins—only later to conclude with little sense of restoration or recompense: “I know myself only for what I was at the time / And that was not enough.” Lost opportunity, consternation, and desperation are palpable here, as in the poem “Crossing,” where the speaker recalls her anxious effort to make it to her dying mother’s deathbed in time by flying over the Tappan Zee Bridge—a bridge that she feels is about to collapse. She still swings from it in her nightmares to this day.
I love these occasions when the speaker plumbs the abyss. I am reminded of the plea at the end of the earlier poem “Piracy,” where poignancies of mythos, metaphor, and utterance come together startlingly: “I will give you whatever I have. I will return what I took. I will hold out my hands, I will never name names. I will throw down my gloves. I will take you on, I will hoist sails, fly flags, wear white in the dark.” Even if this is an importunate gesture in a dream, it reads as something that had to be said.
In fact, insofar as dream-work and word-work are the products of desire, we are always on the verge of returning what we took, holding out our hands, coming full circle. The entire paradoxical journey of life—and of Limitless Tiny Boat—is one inseparable from the processes of language and dreams. Words, Danon’s speaker affirms, “are the only boat I have.” This journey of paradox, of sensitive intelligence, catches at every impulse, every snag—be it of love, of danger, of pain, of the opportunity and loss glimpsed in every moment. We are carried along amidst objects and narratives that struggle to take shape before they dissolve. This dreamlike process, which defines every waking moment, is not the upshot of a stylistic decision: It is the lifeblood of consciousness, of love and loss, of suffering and joy, of poetry itself.
Limitless Tiny Boat
By Ruth Danon
Blazevox, 2015
Sounds like a wonderful work.
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