Fagan, Kathy. MOVING
& ST RAGE. Denton: U of North Texas P, 1999. 66p.
$12.95
The complex and pervasive nature of language is examined and laid
bare in
Kathy Fagan's new book, MOVING & ST RAGE. The book begins with
poems that
investigate the symbolic nature of letters and consider the
complicated way
image, sound, emotion, and idea combine to make meaning. In
"Portrait of a
Girl as the Letter A," the letter A, and by extension language,
is a
mutable image whose meaning expands as the poem unfolds,
As in -line or -frame.
As
in alpha, angel,
Arms
of a merciful Jesus
Extended.
As in clockhands
Signing
7:25, compass
On
point, cloak rounding
A
corner.
The transformation from one image to the next rests, finally, with
the girl
of the title, "the letter of / the name she stands for." A
kind of love
poem, whose object of affection is at once the letter and the girl,
this
poem makes no effort to fix the language in place, but tries instead
to
mark its movements, its path from the abstract and symbolic to the
concrete
and specific, the girl, "so like herself." In poems rich
with complex
metaphor and powerful lyricism, in MOVING & ST RAGE Fagan
observes and
studies the deeply personal and acutely public nature of language.
The title poem of MOVING & ST RAGE focuses again on a
letter, in this case
the O missing from a billboard. The poem is rich with images both
surprising and precise, as Fagan creates a narrative to fill the
space left
by the missing O. The letter's absence suggests the story of Moving
and St
Rage "who'd met on the grassy medians of myth / to pledge those
troths the
gods grow jealous of: / there are limits placed on endless
love." The two
are "cursed to live / beyond their primes" and "to
ride a wheel of common
failures / that is hope turning up / and regret coming down, and
that makes
a sound like / See Me See
Me." Fagan's ability to envision and locate
alternative meanings in commonplace images, words, sounds, and even
emotions, as she does in this poem, is one of the unique strengths
of this
book. Throughout, Fagan uses language to fill the gaps in
consciousness,
the moments where understanding is just beyond reach.
As a result, in the poems collected here Fagan finds words
and language in
unusual places, and language becomes a kind of image in and of
itself. In
"The End of the Story," she writes "It could be the
beginning or the end of
winter / in that space revealed between snow and soil / ours to read
like
all good words." In "Altitude," a remarkable poem
where images are barely
held together by Fagan's carefully and deliberately made lines, the
smoke
from a censer becomes desire, which in turn becomes, "a
language made
legible / on buoyant tongues." And in the second section of
"Triptych," the
book's final poem, fog rising off a river
became a river
detached
from its source,
like
the visible
breaths
the women let go of
along with their words
in the winter air.
In "Driving It," one of the book's strongest and most
compelling poems, the
song of the cardinal becomes human language: "Here I / Here I /
Here I am
am am am am am am." Throughout MOVING & ST RAGE Fagan
examines our human
need to read and comprehend even (or especially) that which defies
understanding-the forms we see in fog and smoke, the songs of
birds-and
finds that things are more than they seem. She seeks out these blank
spaces
in understanding and finds ways in which language can fill them, can
make
them meaningful in new ways.
Even grief and loss, which are central themes in this book,
are
emptinesses that can be explored and, perhaps, illuminated through
image,
sound, and word. In "Grief, " Fagan writes "There is
a bell inside this
sadness / And a hand that rings it."
We live in language, this book tells
us, and it is here, in the words, their sounds, their shapes, that
one can
find a kind of iconography, one that might comfort us in grief, help
us
make sense of the senseless. In "Revisionary Instruments
I," the first in a
series of poems in MOVING & ST RAGE, Fagan writes "What
revisionary
instruments our hearts are . . . how merciful our misremembrance."
This, Fagan's second book and the winner of the Vassar Miller
Prize in
Poetry from the University of North Texas Press, is lyrical and
intelligent. The poems in MOVING & ST RAGE are built,
beautifully, of
subtle narratives, compelling music, images that are both fresh and
concise. In "Elemental," Fagan writes of
stories
with their edges
glowing
not
gilded no
but
the glow before
the
page burns black
that
line where the fire
is
and was and is again
that
glissade
like
lightening.
The poems in MOVING & ST RAGE mark the places where "fire /
is and was and
is again." Fagan's poems remind us of the power in language,
and more
precisely in poetry, to construct meaning where there has been,
before,
only smoke, ash, flame, and shadow.
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