Companion Grasses

by Brian Teare

These adventurous poems search for answers about what it means to dwell in a particular place. Exploring the cities, coasts, forests, and mountains of Northern California and New England, the poems in this collection immerse themselves in the specifics of bioregion and microclimate, and take special note of the cycle of death and rebirth that plays out dramatically in California’s chaparral and grasslands. Inspired by Transcendentalism, Companion Grasses sees the sacred in the workings of the material world, but its indebtedness to the ecological tradition of California poets unearths evidence in the sensual materiality of words themselves. Creating ecologically rich landscapes and highly rhythmic inscapes, the poems set seasonal and human dramas side-by-side and assess their relationship.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

A former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fund for Poetry, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, the Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and National Book Award longlisted Doomstead Days. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he is an Associate Professor at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Reviews

[Inverted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Teare is an extremely gifted samabitch, that at times I suspect he shows off just because he can. The first two sections are very polished, to the point wherein the poems begin to feel synthetic. His overall obsession with language as both medium and site, although impressive, can be disengaging.

However, the last two poems, "To begin with desire" and Star Thistle, written for his father and his friend (the poet Reginald Shepard) respectively, are clear exceptions. These poems are distinct in tone, tempo, and temper. They feel less refined, more intimate, genuine. They made me cry.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Companion Grasses is a good book of poems, even a great book of poems, but perhaps not my favorite book of poems. There were some poems I absolutely adored. "Quakinggrass", "Star Thistle," and "Atlas Peak" are my three favorite poems, all incredibly inventive, observant, and sensitive. Unfortunately, I didn't love "Transcendental Grammar Crown", which makes up the entire second section of the book and found there (especially in that poem) to be just a little too much Emerson and Thoreau working their way into Teare's influences and thought processes for my taste. That being said, these were stunningly well-crafted poems with a lot of feeling and a really exciting location in the field of American poetics. The poems teeter on the edge of LANGUAGE poetry and other intellectualizing movements that aim to destabilize communication or make language totally its own goal like in this passage from "Susurrus Stanas":

pure ruin a stanza open
to weather the pool's rim
still tinted an "aquatic" blue
stanza as in stance as in
a way of standing the way of
wild iris

or in "Little Errand"

I gather the rain

in both noun
& verb. The way

the river banks
its flood, floods
its banks, quiver's

grammar I carry

noiseless, easy
over my shoulder.

To aim is--I think
of his mouth.
Wet ripe apple's

scent : sugar,

leather. To aim,
is a shaft tipped

with adamant. Angle,
grasp, aim is a way
to hope to take

Formally, the collection experiments with play between regularity and irregularity, a number of poems that deploy closely, shaped couplets (like in "White Graphite) and others, like "Atlas Peak", that discover the possibilities of arranging words all over the page, of blocks of prose in the middle of the poem, or forcing you to read two different sentences concurrently so that they interfere with one another in really interesting ways: "so the corral enclosed / flattened, fanned out, / something / a pearlescent gray / if only it was our wish for it / where lately had slept / as our wish for the grasses / what?-- / was also it's shape." These lines are arranges so as to form two columns in alternation with the final line below and between them, each column forming a kind of utterance all its own.
Thematically, these poems dealt sensitively and carefully with sexuality, the environment, and loss. Teare is not afraid of sadness or of optimism and he deftly blends them both with precision and love for the subject of each of the poems, even as he troubles the idea of poems having subjects. Not the easiest collection of poems, nor my favorite, but well worth reading. Not too inaccessible, but also thoughtprovoking and engaging.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much space in these poems, I get a little lost in them, don't recognize most of the tethers (references) other than physical description of the land. Grief abounds. But I will also be returning to these to learn and to rest.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just. wow. What a powerful book, richly richly researched but also richly, vastly felt. One I will come back to again and again.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

i just feel like he's the poet of the bay area

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love.

[Maureen Alsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Companion to whom, without wince—what desire? Into the light of solitude, there is refraction. “A beach without moon/mere rumor,” Brian Teare’s entry poem “White Graphite” composed of perfectly clipped couplets, inseparable stanzas, no end stops, draws the reader (as if in homage to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) “onward and outward” (wherein) “nothing collapses”… and “the smallest sprout shows there really is no death.”
Teare’s poems in Companion Grasses grow anew, tuft over tuft. Teare writes, “touch here & I give/way to elsewhere:” for readers are shown that to die within love is to die “different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” and as Emily Dickinson in her poem on love resounds, “Doubt me, my dim companion!”
This new millennium poetry emerges within a monumental movement, a wave, rippling across politics, poetics, and ecology. Evolution when one is living in it may be difficult, if not impossible, to observe. Teare’s poetry bridges this imperceptivity between past, current, and future aspects of literary ecologies paying deep homage to poetry’s aural origins. Teare’s poems are sculpted in a beautiful accordance of shape and sound, a convergence of musical space, the sky stretching its wide banner wide.
…Inside the red gate we paused, rust on fingers; a chain held the path behind us
shut. Up, past the abandoned corral, through bracken, after a felled tree forked
the way, rightwards up & even steeper, lay the ridge. But we paused under a bare
oak where trucks had once stuck—leaves glutted their ruts. We paused, day
empty of horses. We, absent the sweetness of hay.
Teare develops earthbound passages in the poem, “Atlas Peak.” The poem as a landscape is etched between aerial swoops that utilize white space: cloud, air, breath, lighter verse, and where musical notes accelerate, then are underscored, grounded by encounters of prose:

eastward the peak

rose to the west

over the plateau the ridge crested

& felled

to the valley’s trough—

Left
then unto meadow; unto countless contradictory crisscrossed winnowed
ways across its acreage; left unto burrs & thistle slivering our shins, unto branch-
slap unto scratch & welt; left until upward dead-end & backtrack led us
to where the tree’s tilt split the earth we’d wanted to stand at edge of, to where
wander showed us sundown led in its crown, horizon its root in air.

The “day empty of horses” empties deeper, empties the abstraction of self into transformative movement. The imprint of the poem’s movement on the body enacts the poem as the body; the body, the pioneer of another evolution. We witness old growth within parameters of belonging to a newness of mind, millennium.

Teare’s poetry resonates with both a subtle and overt approbation as the collection cherishes the gifts of those writers, composers, philosophers, whose work fills the architectures of poetry and poetry’s evolution. For example, it is not accidental that Charles Ives, a composer whose work experienced greater recognition following his death (though he composed urgently and furiously all throughout his life), and who was known for unusual development of musical composition, is woven into the careful grassland threads. Perhaps the evolution of poetics reveals itself, as Teare writes, in “the value of anything,” and as the multitudes’ values are transposed, expressed revealed, like the grasses, what space voices fill in unity and in absence. Teare’s citations are multifold, yet the poems are fully unique, his expression singular and in adherence to the understanding that one voice holds the language of so many.


Previously published online at Prick of the Spindle: https://prickofthespindle.org/categor...

[Charity Yost Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received Teare's book for Christmas because it was on a 2013 must-read poetry collection list and got around to incorporating it into my daily reading almost three years later. After reading it, I agree with its placement on that list. It also created a nice contrast to the Milosz anthology of which I've been giving myself simultaneous doses. Teare is nothing like Milosz in form; he often abandons capitalization, punctuation, and left-alignment. Still, the images are rustic in both without seeming nature-saturated. (At the beginning of the collection, Teare writes in short lines, "I gather the rain/ in both noun/ & verb. The way/ the river banks/ its flood, floods/ its banks.") The theme of the book somewhat morphs throughout so that had I only read the first and last poems, I would have assumed they were from different collections. (In the end, Teare keeps the idea of earth, but less of nature and more of humanity, writing in such long lines, "The Earth/ undoes itself as each life undoes itself & to what end// is what terrifies me as after the hike/ I try with salve to soothe the blisters that deepen & weep weird clear fluid.") Without the variation of this book, I may not have survived the "From the Rising of the Sun" in the Milosz. Companion Grasses was en excellent, even serendipitous, pairing, and I would gladly read it again, letting it stand on its own next time.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is meant to invoke Whitman's amative love, and the orders of the poem of male companionship and influence. However, the orders returned to, again and again, are not the identity politics of Seventies lesbian feminism, which drew Teare into poetry, but the eco-poetics of the New England Transcendentalists, and the elegaic mode of "to say goodbye is specific | as the node where grass branches and stem | intends inflorescence" -- that last word is probably the volume's favorite. The experimental poetics seems, though, often at odds with the companionability of the craft, full of nonce sonnets and mimetically mirroring forms. Poem by poem can seem in its making rather too comfortable in its initiatory enactment of poetic orders (the book ends in an aspirational reading list). Two elegies culminate the volume, but the first, "Atlas Peak," is in fact a country house poem, full of praise for the poet's patron's wildflowers and welcoming walking paths. Teare runs into a bother when he over-invests in these orders of autopoesis like the "wreading" that hails one's tradition even as the poet cites it. But then over-investment is an ethos of amative love, not just on a day when one says goodbye.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Formalistic monomania has its rewards, when paired with a sensitive intelligence:

...at first, in the first half of the book, you don't know where the music keeps slipping off to. But that's the thing with this book: it's still there, but pieces of rhythm and song have fallen between (been erased by) the blank cracks and chasms separating the words and sentence fragments in each poem (or, they hang on for dear life in a few places; thin, tenuous threads barely keeping certain relations together). It's as if e.e. cummings got together with Edmond Jabes to deconstruct the lyrical voice in this guy (who also has the eye of a Gary Snyder for the natural world). Maybe that's his overarching goal (to dismantle lyrical poetry), but unlike so many other "experimental" poets, he never lets his cerebral goals overwhelm an attentive perception of the world.

Also, the final poem, in memory of a good friend/loved one who had recently died, is heart-wrenching...esp. with its intertwining (in a Merleau-Ponty sense?) of the perceptual/feeling planes with the natural world...this piece, alone, is well worth the price of admission.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

imagination ends

each day in pre-fab

ruin America

this place that outlives

its own demise

(from "Susurrus Stanzas")

This book is like a field guide to many kinds of grief-- grief over the loss of specific people (there are poems dedicated to the poet's late father and also the poet Reginald Shepherd, who died in 2008) but also I read them as elegies for the natural world and the individual's relation to it:

nothing else can grow --you would know is it soul the fern

interrupts itself to reproduce it is easier to ask now

if grammar better follows nature to die in cycle than culture

in ruin the gaps are different aren't they

(from "Fossils Tremble")

At the risk of sounding sentimental or corny, I have to say that reading this book is the closest I've come to a spiritual experience in a long time.

[Holly Fortune · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brian Teare's book is an instant delight for any reader who enjoys a good Whitman, Heidegger, or Thoreau reference. In fact, they underscore a good deal of this collection. Although there were particular poems saturated with latin or prosaic vocabulary, others welcomed simplistic verse; given the nature of Teare's educational background, I'd have to allow some leeway as his knowledge is definitely expansive.

If anything, the last poem "Star Thistle" makes the collection well worth a read. "if we die to become nothing but matter so that Being itself might continue, / grounded by ground itself, // such a sweet thing out of such corruptions!" (100).

[L.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are veins of blood so different from tributaries of rivers? Is the way grass in the wind might blow dark on one side, and flip to silver on the other so different from the way we might turn a dark thought in our heads to see the brighter aspect from another perspective?

Briane Teare’s fifth full-length book of poetry, Companion Grasses, offers a new perspective on the human relationship with nature.

Ready my review here on the incomparable Litseen: http://litseen.com/?p=13264

[William Reichard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, solid collection of poetry. The voice is very clear and strong, and the rhythm of the language, once you fall into it, is hypnotizing. The imagery is so lush, I could see, feel, smell the places Teare conjures. There are cycles of death and rebirth here, on the human level, and on the more-than-human level. A wonderful book!

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an A-mazing book. Kind of speechless at the moment.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

just not my wheelhouse. maybe i'll give this another read another time.