I Want Your Chair
Elaine Schwager

A House of Corners
Bertha Rogers
 

I Want Your Chair
Elaine Schwager
Rattapallax Press, NY, 2000
(112 pp. paper $14.95, cloth $24.95, both with CD)

by Vic Schermer

This is as finely-crafted a first book of poems as one is likely to see. If it is not as passionate or contorted as some of its subjects--the Holocaust, an uncle dying of cancer, a pained relationship with a mother, a suicide--, its measured contemplation of a microcosm of experience, with connotations ranging from the lightly humorous to the tragic, is nonetheless profound, sensitive, and deeply compassionate.

The poems in this collection remind me of a steeple clock I once saw in a small Swiss town. Walking along on a wonderful, cloudless day amid early Summer blossoms, I came to the central square where a "cuckoo" clock presided, beautifully proportioned, mechanically masterful, with interesting objects in motion, stopped, or briefly concealed in the internal workings. Fascinated, I thought of how it must have spent its life at the geographic crux of fateful events spanning European history, now detached and distant, now basking in nature’s surrounding bounty. So too, Elaine Schwager’s poems recount everyday and large-scale human events with profound commitment which goes to the edge of suffering, yet always transcends it, manifesting what James Wright called the "pure, clear word." In these poems, subjects and objects pass before us in words, images, metaphors, then vanish into wherever and whomever they came from. We look for their traces in other poems in the volume, sometimes finding them, and sometimes not.

The greatest among the gifts which Ms. Schwager brings to her work is parsimony. Her words and phrases do exactly what they must, with little wasted energy. The voice is constant throughout. It is the voice of gentle compassion in the face of the pain of the human condition: a holocaust survivor seeking to make sense out of senseless horror; a pregnant woman coming to terms with her weighted body (and mind); a mental patient magically making a collage of the moon’s ascent in the midst of her breakdown; lovers escaping from the "real" world in the "rose light" of the bedroom, though still aware of the tarnished world around them.

The poet shows an internalized mastery of form, using couplets, truncated lines, prose, in graceful combinations perfectly suited to their subject and sound. Thus, "In the Middle of Dinner" moves from prose poem to tight, stanzaic verse, as the tension mounts around the dying uncle’s table. "The Rose Light" redraws, in one- to three-word lines, the narrow passage within which the lovers’ desire finds fulfillment. Here, the concrete outer world co-habits with the numinous inner; the partners join on the fulcrum of love’s bivalent impulsion/repulsion, the counterpart drive-to and driven-from of rosy and bleak.

The book is organized into five sections loosely related by theme or chronology, each named for the lead poem in the section. In the first, "Was That God Asking Us To Listen?", Schwager revisits scenes and memories of the Holocaust as the child of survivors and cousin of victim, Anne Frank, while the second, "Lost Violin," records moments with the new generation of family and friends. "The Rose Light" examines love and relationships.

The poet is a practicing psychoanalyst, who devotes her fourth section to psychotherapy, mental institutions, and their Diane Arbus-like denizens, whether patients, therapists, or undistinguished supervisors. The title poem, "I Want Your Chair," seems written from the vantage of one who sits, childlike, in a bathtub amid toy boats, each representing a hallucinatory voice. The humor here is both light and dark, a with a gentle, though sometimes unsettling irony, which is characteristic of a number of the poems. The theme of multiple voices could also be taken as a symbol of the fragmentation of the modern world. The helpless challenge by the patient of the therapist’s "chair" might be understood as a parallel to Joseph K’s futile struggle with alien and abstruse authority in Kafka’s The Trial. The book is permeated with the theme of the individual’s struggle to find islands of intimacy, individuality, and tenderness in a world driven by mindless authority. In "A Wide Range of Pathology," as the therapy intern applies for a position at a mental hospital, her effort to find common ground with an obnoxious interviewer degenerates into a hilarious, encoded attempt to please.

"Free, " the fifth section, groups poems on the fractal aspects of experience, where contradictions, paradoxes and quantum leaps abide. The concluding poem of section and book is "000," an almost Cabalistic treatment of the symbolic significance of the millennial zeros, and an allusion perhaps to the present death-conscious, crisis-laden management of uncertainty, as symbolized by the cipher. The term, "enlightenment," in this poem plays doubly on the lower-case individual and upper-case collective evolution when knowledge of objective reality promised the thrill of discovering its inherent order and purpose. The poet also draws on imagery and metaphor from the unconscious to escort us on a journey to an unknown destination. She ends with a query about the effects of the Holocaust and genocide on the mind, yet with the cautiously hopeful vision of a young girl anticipating life, oblivious to the horror events of a century newly old.

Ms. Schwager’s I Want Your Chair marks the arrival of a first-rate poet. The challenge to her in future work will be to expand the range of her subject matter and technique and to turn up the intensity of her verse to reflect her own suffering, go beyond transcendence to the immanence of her own life and death. But this book is already outstanding, and I recommend it unconditionally.

(Vic Schermer reviews music and literature and conducts frequent interviews. A psychologist in private practice and clinic settings in Philadelphia, he has explored artistic consciousness (see, e.g., Graves, M. and Schermer, V., "The Wounded Male Persona and the Mysterious Feminine in the Poetry of James Wright: A Study in the Transformation of Self," The Psychoanalytic Review 85/6, Dec. 99, pp. 849-870), and presented papers on Eliot, Wright, and Dickinson respectively for the Phoenix Reading Series in New York. His poetry has appeared in Rattapallax (Vol. 1, Issue 1) and his work is among this month’s additions to Big City, Little. vlscher@voicenet.com)
 
 

Review

A House of Corners
Bertha Rogers
(Three Conditions Press 2000,
a subsidiary of The Maryland State
Poetry & Literary Society. 24 pp.)

Shades and Solids
by Diana Manister

Bertha Rogers’s poetry owes much to the style of William Carlos Williams, who grandfathered American plain-talk, but she is a visionary such as he was not. The sixth sense is her central subject; all living and material things swim in an unseen matrix, which is imperceptible yet known. Description of this phenomenon would seem impossible, yet Rogers mostly succeeds in making absence present.

Concrete worldly objects are as sharply visible in her poems as is Williams’s famous wheelbarrow, but she senses more:

But for the companion's absence, how would she summon him? The dreamer awakens, shocked to find keen experience ("Bodies on the bed; love cries, / ancient and ecstatic") displaced by an empty room.

Mirrors make frequent appearances in Rogers’s poems, as if to point to some parallel universe connected to ours. Which one is real, the solid world or its reflection? For Rogers, they both are.

This suite of poems by Bertha Rogers is worthy of comparison with the work of A.R. Ammons, Charles Wright, the Jorie Graham of A Dream of a Unified Field (though clear, not obscure), and continues the American transcendentalist tradition begun by Emerson and Thoreau. This is not the Platonism of European Romanticism that inspired Shelley to exclaim "Oh Skylark, bird thou never wert!" Rogers does not prefer some heaven of ideal forms to the living earth. For her, a bird is a bird, but her work reminds us of the bird’s connection to and dependence upon the realm of soon-to-be birds and non-birds, the paradoxical empty fullness from which birds come, thus, in Emerson's term, the "over-soul."

The spirit of Thomas Merton hovers over these poems, which are spoken from the vantage of a dispassionate witness, a contemplative. But Rogers's gravitas is inscribed in the practical, American grain. Her lines urge moderation; there are no histrionics or grandiosity in this work. She tells us straight what is valuable, as if the life of each depended on the knowledge. Like Ammons in "Easter Morning," Rogers looks at nature, views humans as nature, and looks through nature to something truer than flux. The joy she describes is not happiness, but rather, the paradoxical satisfaction gleaned from a moment of angled enlightenment,