This, Sisyphus

by Brandon Courtney

Metaphysical in scope, transcendent in language, This, Sisyphus makes malleable received forms and rhyme to articulate what it means to face incalculable loss. Centered on the death and subsequent repatriation of a sailor who was the author’s lover and closest friend, this collection moves beyond elegiac gestalt, questioning instead a God who created an imperfect world in which death is possible and inevitable. Composed of four sections, This, Sisyphus is a rejection of Leibniz’s "best possible world,” and, more importantly, it is the author’s transubstantiated epiphany that, ultimately, in tragedy and suffering, we have only each other.

Whether wrestling God or trying to make sense and sound out of grief, Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus is a bright, urgent addition to the elegiac canon. My lord, folks, the language Courtney has found here interrupted me. Such a deep well of grief matched with such a high zenith of lyric, just as it should be. Written exquisitely and vulnerably, this is a book for anyone seeking to wander back towards the light after travelling through Death’s valley.
— Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead and [insert] boy

Trenchant, Achillean mourning soaks this book’s extraordinary sonic terrain with its indelible weight. What more definitive shape of haunting is there, This, Sisyphus implores, than finding the beloved imbuing that one element which overwhelms the recognizable world—Ocean, contained and unappeasable in all forms conventional and nonce, carnal and inanimate. Courtney’s erotic, erosive soldier’s psalms enunciate the guilt of doing what one can with the awful gift of a human life in the aftermath of another’s destruction, “building a new language / from what you left inside.”
— Justin Phillip Reed, author of Indecency

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2019

Reviews

[Théo d'Or]

The sea took it again.

They say happiness is a state of mind. I say it's a trick of the light, a reflection in the water you can never hold. There was a time I believed in forever, a time I built castles. Not real ones. The kind you build in your head, with your heart, castles made of sand.
Always sand. And the waves came. They always do. They don't wait, they just come.
Each time, I rebuild. But the sea, it takes, and I die, one more time. I've died more times that I can count. There were moments when I believed that the future was a place I wanted to go, but hope is the cruelest thing of all, because it doesn't die easily, it lingers, telling you that maybe this time the castle will hold, maybe this time the sea will spare you.

I remember once, I saw a child building a sandcastle. He worked for hours, shaping towers and gates, and tiny bridges, his eyes full of joy...And when the tide came, he didn't cry, he just watched. He watched the water take it all away, and then he started again..
I envied him. Not for his youth, nor for his joy, but for his certainty, for the way he believed in the building, even knowing the sea will come.
I don't have that anymore. And yet, I build. Because the alternative is to sit in the ruins, and rot. The sea - it doesn't love, it doesn't hate either, it just is. Maybe the point was never to keep the castle, but to keep building. And if all I ever have are these moments - fleeting moments of creation before the waves come - then let them be enough. Let them be everything.
I still have that part of me that always believe in beginning.
I no longer wait for the castle to last, I walk the shore to feel the sand, the wind, the now, and that is where I find myself.

[Kendrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tend to perceive the lyric mode as a refutation of narrative: in the absence of reason, what will we find? This view of the lyric mode appears central to Brandon Courtney's collection, This, Sisyphus. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Courtney pens a series of elegies for Ben, his best friend, who drowned to death while at sea. In this aftermath, where death is presented as a loss of reason, Courtney uses the lyric poem to escape death and transform his grief into legible terrain.

Courtney's first poem, "Comfort for a Hollow Point" begins with Ben's death. Rather than let meaning flatten into a time Before or After, Courtney holds death open to new meanings. "Admire all this symmetry", he writes to Ben, "gust and sky, / the moon - pockmarked, / migraine-gold, midnight's / arc and stranglehold". The internal rhymes of these fragments both prolong and layer death with colour and texture. The poem thus proceeds towards transformation: "tonight you will drown, / then explode as a bullet / through a barrel, surge / into a seraph-lit tunnel. / Be not afraid: you / will be a hollow point / flowering there." Death is obeyed, but its occasion marks a shift in landscape.

Split into four sections, This, Sisyphus assembles a selection of formal and free verse. The formal poems are, for the most part, deserving. Their rules allow for halting, surprising articulations of feeling. The pantoum, for example, is used by Courtney in "Wooden Star" to defer conclusion and sustain grief:

We die because we were never meant to be.
In winter, my breath hung like a chandelier, a flaw,
an intricacy. In my lungs, the ocean pricks like thorns.
We die because we were never meant to be.

The same god who gives thirst to throat, gives locusts
to the trees. Like an intricacy in my lungs, the ocean
pricks like thorns, pierces, rusts, fills my mouth
with saline. Who first gave thirst to throat?

Who gave locusts to the trees? Christ, like an echo,
the ocean is inside me, and I am thirsty for saline to fill
my mouth, for a draught to sculpt a fist of ash
from my body, blow the flame obtuse...

The body here is both wintered and oceanic, embodying grief in earthly terms to question the divine. It is transformed by the enormity of feeling.

Over the course of This, Sisyphus, Courtney progresses from the biographical to the universal, 'the universal' in this case being a Christian worldview. The final section of this book is a sonnet crown called HEXAËMERA, a retelling of the Biblical 7 days of creation. In it, Courtney questions the reason for the existence of suffering ("Show me just one untamed thing // that's walked upon the earth and not felt / pain"). I admired the poem's ambition but ultimately was left cold by its certainty, its engagement with a higher power. This, I admit, is because I found so much vulnerability in Courtney's earlier poems. "Keel", which opens the second section, is a more successful poem, I feel, about the loss of the future. Here, Courtney discloses his love for Ben:

And you,
too young to hold a gun,
too scared to brush my jaw
with your knuckles.
Even that mirage of touch
I'd live again infinitely,
even that silence, this silence,
a question never answered.
Even the answer.
Even if it killed me.

The juddering from that to this, from question to answer, lays open the speaker's feelings. While I don’t go out of my way to read lyric poetry, I find myself swept up by Courtney's words. His poems remind me of Siken's Crush and Sexton's If All The World and Love Were Young. Full of devotion, desperate to wrest closure out of the rupture death leaves behind. It is one to return to and read again.

[Dev]

I didn't rate this book when I read it. I don't know why.

It took me a long time to get through this one because I haven’t had much of a poetry brain lately, which is definitely going to color my review. I don’t remember much from the beginning other than that the grief came through. Some of the imagery was hard for me, which is to be expected. The poems where Courtney spoke directly to Ben spoke to me in particular.

My favorite poems were “Names and Words,” and “Comfort for a Future End. “Keel” parts VI and XII also stood out to me.

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

By turns gorgeous and haunting, Brandon Courtney's This Sisyphus is a sprawling and yet intimate elegy, moving deftly through violence, loss, and love during wartime. His technical skill with form is matched only by the searing lyricism that moves through each poem. This is a beautiful and important book.

[Matthew W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry collections ever. Ever.