Book Review (#4/11.3.07): Poetry

**** = Excellent
*** = Good
** = Fair
* = Poor

Glean, Joshua Kryah [Winner of the 2005 Nightboat Poetry Prize]: ***

In his debut collection, Glean, Joshua Kryah's lush lyricism excels in all the most important aspects of the lyric form: insistent rhythms, careful attention to sonics, dexterous use of vocabulary and diction, a contemplative yet evocative image-set, a devoutly serious brand of rhetoric, a consistent tonality, and the affect of a sincere cri de coeur.

In "Called Back, Called Back," the very first poem in the collection, Kryah writes of that which is "caught between monad and many, between almost and already"--a notion which bespeaks not only of Kryah's impressive erudition (after all, how many poets can so effortlessly slip the recondite philosophies of Herr Leibniz into a poem) but also says much about the poems of Glean themselves. This is not a work of wry conclusions--indeed, there's little to no irony in the collection, a major commendation of its quality, given its lyrical bent--but rather of persistent, and often fruitless/dispiriting searching.

As most of the poems of Glean reside in the realm of the physical, but point insistently to a metanarrative of metaphysicality, few reveal all their pleasures with a single reading. As with the work of Jorie Graham, there is such a visual lushness and conceptual denseness here that--as spare and as brief as most of these poems appear on the page--they demand and deserve numerous (and careful) re-readings.

It's tempting to believe Kryah's lyrical talents occlude a significant discursive tendency in the work; and yet, to the extent these poems exercise timeless conceptions (and misconceptions) regarding the self, it is the consummation of the self through the spirit--or perhaps through the odd spirituality of dailyness--and not a mere dictation of the disembodied eternal, that seems to be the order of the day here. If these poems are at times elusive, it is because the self is elusive; if at times obtuse, it is easily forgiven on the grounds that what clear glimpses of matter Kryah allows are so extraordinarily rendered, so tender and humane, it is hard to be frustrated with his careful lyrics for long. Consider, for instance, the sudden intrusion of the immediate into an otherwise philosophically-inclined poem, "Aubade": "By laid bare, / do you mean you won't bring this up again? / By asking me to come, do you mean to have it out?"

The self-referentiality of this work is likewise hard to miss, and even harder not to appreciate. These are poems that speak as much to themselves, and to one another, as to the reader, taking their own measure by turns, as well as the measure of the human body. As Kryah writes in "My Easter,"

Breathbloom, the resurrection lily
spent on its stem,

                                 the pale throat thrown back
             announcing--what?

Behold, all at once,
                                   the flesh-like knot

undone, each petal released, their beauty un-
mistakable and

already gone.

These poems are indeed "breathblooms" of a sort, and render their beauty and their meaning in exacting terms. In fact, in the engagingly contemplative tone of these poems it is easy to lose sight (or, rather, a touch/tactile sense) of just how sensual this work is, and how fundamentally oriented on the bare fact of bodyness these poems are (appropriate, given the collection's cover image of Thomas the Apostle fingering Jesus's wound to test the latter's corporeality). Kryah is as comfortable allocuting on the body as he is--for lack of a better nomenclature--on the soul. One section of the poem "Body as Go-Between" is exemplary:

Overmuch, the deluge, its redundancy.

Rain continuing
                                to batter the field beyond field.
It gave up holes, this body, its porous nature, the lack of it.

The way it held still (though porous).

And escaping all the while (again) the body,
its redundancy.

Or consider, from "The White No Where": "There is this deciduousness inside me..."

Few writers can write so temperately, yet still, somehow, passionately, of simple acts--like speech ([from "Dead Letter: The Venerable Bede"]: "A gash runs sideways through / the letter. It widens as words do. / Circle of speech, / elucidation, its radius, / from the stone to its brokenness, smoke / and dispersion, the hand to the palm / to the lines within it, / comes dispatch...").

Or a bird's flight ([from "Sojourner"]: "Taut and unyielding (but a little, a little) the gristle- / creak, wings swelled, / an arch of muscle and bone spread / (but a little) wider and still (a little) wider, until / what beneath, what lying in your shadow is-- / an occasion for soul or spirit or stay").

While the tendency of these poems to, at times, get lost in their own beauty does lend to the collection an occasional sense of weightlessness--and, if the poems are not digested slowly and properly, a mildly displeasing sameness--Glean is at base a series of word-environments in which one might stay longer or shorter, depending upon one's mood and inclinations. When Kryah writes, in "Wound Sequence," "Come here and talk to me / you who made my mind your home," it is easy to believe the invitation is indeed a personal one, and moreover actually sincere. Considering the skill exhibited by this collection, Kryah's is an invitation prospective readers should most definitely accept.

Ultimately, Kryah's voice is revealed as a clean, distinct, musical, perceptive, and empathetic instrument, and a reader couldn't ask for much more than that from a series of lyric poems, or from a lyric poet--especially one writing in the throes of the Age of Irony.