Desolation: Souvenir

by Paul Hoover

Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover’s desolation : souvenir began as a “filling in” of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster’s translation of Mallarmé’s grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover’s writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: “when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat.” Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem’s 50 pages offers a phrase that becomes the title of its opposite number at the other end of the manuscript. The result is a haunting echoic effect that becomes especially rich as the phrases “cross” at the middle of the sequence. At times, the poem mourns the loss of the earth itself: “what will be enough / when the earth / contains no one / will the harvest still be full” and “no bees in the hive, no hive / sound returns to its bell.” Inspired by his reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the companion poem, “The Windows (The Actual Acts),” consists of a series of philosophical propositions in everyday language: “An object is the actual awaiting further action. / It can wait a long time. / Time is fresh in objects even when they decay. / You can’t give one example of time getting old.” Another series of thoughts begins: “Have you every gazed from a window to see if everything’s still there? / And see your own face in the glass, superimposed on the view? / Consciousness rests among its objects. / Which makes the objects restless.” Long established as a poet of wit and intelligence, Paul Hoover now establishes himself as an important voice of deep emotional resonance and far ranging vision.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read both of these treatises as my father was dying and took great comfort from the more mournful, lyrical "desolation: souvenir." It considers what falls away and what stays. Its structure is brilliant. What is a line in one poem in one half becomes the title of a poem in the other half as if what appears to be a fragment becomes fully developed depending on where it falls in the pattern. The first title "infant at the entrance" becomes the first line in the last poem, and the title of the last poem "words are nearly gone" the first line of the first poem, and so the poems interweave. And don't we fracture thusly when we experience loss, find the pieces that matter, and through them perceive a greater pattern?

"The Windows (The Actual Acts)" continues this discussion at the level of actual existence through a more light-hearted string of aphorisms about poetry, philosophy, logic and other transparencies. This line captures exactly how I first understood infinity: "Infinity means: farther than we can see."

A keeper.