Persea Books 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
The Whole Show
In a 1980 interview, Charles Simic addressed the frequent appearance of dogs in his poems: “I don’t want to say I love dogs, but I’ve always been amazed by dogs. Of all animals they seem to resemble humans more than any others; they’re kind of pathetic, melancholy, silly, faithful.” I’ve also heard Simic say to a group of young poets (myself among them) that a dog is at times employed as an unfortunate quick-fix in an aimless poem—a faulty attempt to reroute drivel into the pathetic, melancholy, silly, faithful.
Good dog poems emerge not when the dog is a sentimental band-aid, but when the poet appears to have curiously watched “creature” in a focused, Williams kind of way. Kate Northrop is a competent watcher. “The Dog” that opens her second book is seen with its nose “to the trail of some circling / / missing thing.” The stage is set for a quasi-observational book of poems called Things Are Disappearing Here.
Northrop writes poems that are best described as “publishable”—the kind of stuff that anyone who’s pawed through submissions for a poetry magazine would surely recognize as standouts. They are crisp, clean, chiseled; they are good with animals, and often provide sublime finishes. Here’s the ending to “Night, Museum Garden”:
A few taxis
pass on the avenue, and further
the moon goes by, but again
silently, like a boat rowed over an empty pool.
A healthy mix of the natural and the unexpected. Oft-romantic endings, but romantic endings you can trust. “The Visitor” concludes:
at twilight, I am waiting
without a letter, a ticket, for you,who by the curve of the woods
and at the lip of the frayed lake, are like twilight:
when leaving, appear there—
It’s “poetic,” but it’s also poetry. Northrop is mostly in control of her romantic impulses, occasionally letting something slip by (“A longing—without clear / definition—pervades” or “I saw you everywhere, / an effervescence”); when this occurs, the care and gravity offered in each line break morph into abstracted melodrama. But her attention to detail makes every poem in the book warrant reading at least once. Worthy, publishable poems in observation of real things: more cleanly, the things that can be accounted for in the absence of everything else.
In “Ghost Crab,” a person is a addressed who creeps towards the sea (as ghost crab might) on account of the ineffable:
but you will not be able to remain, not
in that emptiness: the cool on your armsis the cool remove of moonlight.
Being at the beach always means being away from the beach a short while later. Boundless metaphorical possibilities, underscored by the notion that to be surrounded by anything is to be enshrouded by what’s not there. Our narrator has the capacity to visualize absence by offering what’s actually there and at times waxing philosophical. Anyone who’s moved from one home to another might recognize the sensations urging forth “Now over the Empty Apartment”:
and that is the window where sky drew back and night came on,
where the planes banked in
scheduled and flashing from the west—
Even amid the stress of packing and hauling, moving from a home always leads to an abundance of “this is where this happened, that is where that happened” nostalgia. Northrop handles it nicely: not at all teary, but with the awareness that to leave the apartment means to leave the entire landscape, which included distant planes whose schedules were determined by something even more distant. Disconnectivity and absence are everywhere.
Some circling missing person comes back now and again throughout the book, as in the beginning of “…Apartment”: “You in the door look back / and are no longer there.” There’s some subtle tip-toeing around the absence of a romantic relationship, but the middle-of-the-road degree of focus might make you scramble for something more deeply broken-hearted and punch-you-in-the-face-fantastic à la Belieu in Black Box. Northrop’s abstract ideas related to absence are more interesting than the narrator’s personal life, and are the greatest subject of interest. Yet I'm left with the sense that at least a handful of these clean, publishable, poems are unrelated (“The Countess,” for example, in which the only “disappearing things” are hundreds of dead young girls murdered by Elizabeth Báthory: a random switch whereby Northrop is suddenly competent historian rather than competent observer.) Still the unrelated poems work more effectively than the half-hearted attempts at bringing in the absence of romantic love.
In a 1972 interview, Simic noted “everybody is a philosopher after a couple of glasses of wine, in my case an optimistic philosopher.” 30 years later he told The New York Times he was a “cheerful pessimist.” Northrop’s mind feels tied up somewhere in that mix. Two great Ashbery lines address the “soul” in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “But how far can it swim out through the eyes / And still return safely to its nest?” How long in a review for a Kate Northrop book can I swim out and discuss poets like Simic (whose poetry, incidentally, is completely unlike Northrop's) and still return safely to my Northrop-nest? Am I too distracted; would that be my fault or Northrop’s?—tough to say, but in the end my feeling is that she already has the lyric touch; now the crazed philosophical poet left primping in the dressing room deserves a chance onstage.
Also by Kate Northrop:
Back Through Interruption
