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The Book of What Stays
For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist’s wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews’s finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 11, 2021
The Book of What Stays is a debut collection by the poet, James Crews. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, it draws together a palisade of love poems to crown its middle section: One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes, a series of poems drawing upon and responding to the oeuvre of conceptualist/minimalist artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
I was drawn to this collection because of One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes, so I begin with appreciation. I am deeply indebted to Felix's aesthetics and wanted to see how Crews pays homage. Crews's approach is to draw upon the motifs of Felix's art -- lightbulbs, candies, clocks, gold, kitsch -- and make use of them as lodestones to tell the story of Felix and Ross (his partner)'s life. The minimalist symbols thus inform the personal narrative of Felix and Ross's life, persisting and then falling to the ravages of the AIDS crisis of the late '80s and '90s.
One section, "(Golden)", for example, makes use of the colour to talk about both the beauty of a sunrise and Ross's wasting body, unable to control his bodily processes. The poem ends with a reference to the work that inspired it: "The sun wove its golden threads around our eyes, and, like the strands of a beaded curtain, the light parted for us. We held our breaths." Curtains in Felix's work play with moments of passage and transition -- from one room to another, from living to death. Aware of the greater conceit he has set his poems in, Crews's imagery rings like a bell.
Unfortunately, when one leaves the world of Felix and Ross's life, I find myself struggling to appreciate Crews's poems. He writes with a level of abstractness that I have difficulty getting into. In his poem, "Foreshadowing", he begins: "Snow clouds fill the sky like a power / you never knew you had." What of the snow clouds relates to power, much less mine? The poetic move of invoking "you" is used to build intimacy, but it should not be a substitute for clarity of meaning. The ending lines likewise feel entangled, halting: "Colour / always returns, if slowly, to the earth like the self / you thought you already were all winter." The mixing of returning colour, of change, and the stasis of the self and winter seems overly complicated.
My prevailing sense was that Crews needed to better delineate his poems' worlds. The opening and closing poems are good examples of where Crews succeeds or fails: "Palomino", which begins the collection, opens itself too much to the world. The speaker tries to develop a symbology of nature and man-made violence: "I tried to discern the tragedy - bullet, / beating, or disease - and could not blame her", he says of the horse for leaving him. Entire poems are hidden in each of the three tragedies. On the other hand, "The Bees Have Not Yet Left Us" begins with a panoply of human ills before focusing on a human connection, of the speaker holding out a bouquet of hyacinths to another man, pollen scattering, "this dust and air we are somehow / still breathing together". This movement away from violence towards love is quietly affecting.
I struggled with this collection, putting it down multiple times. All it needed, I felt, was a greater care to sleeve insights into bodies that best present them. Maybe it was not for me, though I wanted to like it. 3 stars.
I was drawn to this collection because of One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes, so I begin with appreciation. I am deeply indebted to Felix's aesthetics and wanted to see how Crews pays homage. Crews's approach is to draw upon the motifs of Felix's art -- lightbulbs, candies, clocks, gold, kitsch -- and make use of them as lodestones to tell the story of Felix and Ross (his partner)'s life. The minimalist symbols thus inform the personal narrative of Felix and Ross's life, persisting and then falling to the ravages of the AIDS crisis of the late '80s and '90s.
One section, "(Golden)", for example, makes use of the colour to talk about both the beauty of a sunrise and Ross's wasting body, unable to control his bodily processes. The poem ends with a reference to the work that inspired it: "The sun wove its golden threads around our eyes, and, like the strands of a beaded curtain, the light parted for us. We held our breaths." Curtains in Felix's work play with moments of passage and transition -- from one room to another, from living to death. Aware of the greater conceit he has set his poems in, Crews's imagery rings like a bell.
Unfortunately, when one leaves the world of Felix and Ross's life, I find myself struggling to appreciate Crews's poems. He writes with a level of abstractness that I have difficulty getting into. In his poem, "Foreshadowing", he begins: "Snow clouds fill the sky like a power / you never knew you had." What of the snow clouds relates to power, much less mine? The poetic move of invoking "you" is used to build intimacy, but it should not be a substitute for clarity of meaning. The ending lines likewise feel entangled, halting: "Colour / always returns, if slowly, to the earth like the self / you thought you already were all winter." The mixing of returning colour, of change, and the stasis of the self and winter seems overly complicated.
My prevailing sense was that Crews needed to better delineate his poems' worlds. The opening and closing poems are good examples of where Crews succeeds or fails: "Palomino", which begins the collection, opens itself too much to the world. The speaker tries to develop a symbology of nature and man-made violence: "I tried to discern the tragedy - bullet, / beating, or disease - and could not blame her", he says of the horse for leaving him. Entire poems are hidden in each of the three tragedies. On the other hand, "The Bees Have Not Yet Left Us" begins with a panoply of human ills before focusing on a human connection, of the speaker holding out a bouquet of hyacinths to another man, pollen scattering, "this dust and air we are somehow / still breathing together". This movement away from violence towards love is quietly affecting.
I struggled with this collection, putting it down multiple times. All it needed, I felt, was a greater care to sleeve insights into bodies that best present them. Maybe it was not for me, though I wanted to like it. 3 stars.
November 22, 2015
Love it so much, I'm teaching it!
July 8, 2013
The ekphrastic middle section was by far the best part of this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews