Αιώνες

by Max Ritvo

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2016

About the author

Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. Ritvo's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among many other publications.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first encounter with the poetry of Max Ritvo occurred when the New York Times published his obituary last month. He was only 25, a casualty of Ewing sarcoma. After googling him and reading all his poems that were available online, including the heartbreakingly beautiful "The Final Voicemails" (Parnassus: Poetry in Review) and "Afternoon" (Boston Review), I unhesitatingly purchased both his published poetry collections, sight unseen: the full-length book Four Reincarnations (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2016 and currently available for preorder) and the 32-page chapbook Aeons (selected by Jean Valentine as a winner of the prestigious Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014).

Aeons doesn't include "The Final Voicemails" or "Afternoon," which I'm guessing will be included in Four Reincarnations instead. The poems in Aeons feel like products of an earlier, somewhat more oblique, more Abstract Expressionist stage of Ritvo's career, a fact that initially seems odd given that the publication dates of the two collections are less than two years apart but makes more sense when you consider how many rapid evolutions a typical poet's outlook and writing style undergo when they are in their twenties. And Ritvo is no typical poet.

I frequently think of poetry critic Greg Orr's essay "Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry", which, roughly speaking, posits that, just as role-playing-game characters can excel in strength, intelligence, dexterity, and constitution, but rarely excel in more than one or two of these areas at once, so poets can excel in story, structure, music, or imagination. If I were forced to classify Ritvo according to this rubric, then he is a poet of Imagination, as exemplified in this exhilaratingly weird yet entirely logically consistent passage from "The Universe of Healthy People":

Every time I smash a computer
it gets smashed into tiny, perfect computers.
If I continue at this, I could make a thinking salt.

But there is evidence in these poems that Ritvo could also be considered a poet of Music, albeit an unusual sort of Music. Whereas the commonplace teaching is that adjectives are tools of the Devil and should be rooted out of serious writing at all costs, I was tickled to find that Ritvo has the originality of mind to defy the commonplace teaching and often uses adjectives to great effect, as in the following passages, in which it is the peculiar adjectives he picks that carry the day:

In this world, everything is a miracle:
The rupture of every cell is an unpatterned caprice
adored by a doddering God. ("Pharaoh")

and

I have spoken to you of heaven--
I simply meant
the eyes are suns that see;
seeing is the faces' nervous, delicious Lord. ("Still")

Regardless of what temperament it is by which this poet arrives at beauty and emotion, it is beauty and emotion that he ultimately arrives at. There are quite a few gorgeous poems in here -- the joyful haiku-like three-liner "I'm Still Laughing," the Marvellesque metaphysical rumination on trees "The King," which exploits the power of sentence fragments in the most killer way -- but perhaps the strongest, most untiringly rereadable poems in this collection are the heartrending and profound elegies that bear the epigraph "for Melissa Carroll" (Carroll, an artist friend of Ritvo, also succumbed to Ewing sarcoma). An example is "The Hands of My Painter," which I recommend reading in its entirety, here: http://victoriaselbach.com/wp-content...

And this stark passage from "Limp Snow Angels" is one of my new favorite verse passages about snow, worthy to stand beside Apollinaire's "La Blanche Neige":

We call it snow
when the parts of God,

too small to bear, contest our bodies
for the possession of our smallest sensations.

This snow brings suffering to the only thing small enough
to have lived peaceably next to suffering.

[Christina Papadopoulou · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a deeper wholeness than life
and its white tunnel of projects:
It is being forgiven
when you have done nothing.

***

No one can speak the language you will rewrite.
I know this isn't the heaven we wanted.
What ever is?

***

We call it snow
when the parts of God,
too small to bear, contest our bodies
for the possession of our smallest sensations.

***

What was the wish supposed to be?
Do I wish we were dancing?

[Xenia Germeni · Rating 4 out of 5]

δυνατό με πολύ ορμή κα παλμό. ενας άνθρωπος που ήθελε να ζήσει...μπραβο στις εκδόσεις σαιξπηρικόν