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Lifting the Stone: Poems
Book by Sommer, Jason
94 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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January 10, 2012
The closing sentence of "Amnesia" opens Lifting the Stone on a brilliant stroke:
For some minutes, whosoever I was was
breathing in the original light of wakening,
from the belly like a singer: in, quick
as delight, and out -- a slow stream which tumbled
from sibilance to something like speech,
and when I knew I had laughed, and thought of it
as the call of a late-dreamer under a sun
high enough to reach over garden trees,
no answer to anything else in creation he'd name,
not the pluck of a nerve, but there in the voice
as a kind of proof that beneath the sad facts to come
to say in time was a laugh like a given note
of the earliest music of the animal
who speaks and will remember -- I, by then, had
of course already long returned to myself.
Here, as the long last sentence overrides the line, the prerogatives of language gather force and wash back against the self otherwise casting about for the authority to shape, to gather utter experience. The essentially modest syntax flattens the metre, protracts the sentence in its quarrel with the line, and privileges speech over any merely ornamental linguistic insistence on word-choice, a logic all on the side of rhetoric, of working through moments to clarify meaning.
The book's thematic insistence on commentary results in a tone that's not always poetic (it can dwindle into anecdote), but it carries a joker in the complexly modeled psychic relation of language to knowledge necessitated by Sommer's experience as a second generation survivor of the European death camps, a complex always threatening to undertow the volume's domestic poems toward some nullity, and most evident in the volume's extraordinary enactment of a coming-into-knowledge, "Meyer Tsits and the Children," a poem based on Roman Vishniac's book of photographs from the lost Europe of the 1930s. "Meyer Tsits" is a Munkacs autistic captured in a Vishniac photograph published after the war. For Sommer, the photo occasions the opportunity for son to ask father (a labor camps survivor) to provide part of a story otherwise occluded from the poet-son's view. This poem about self-intelligibility enacts, fascinatingly, the process of accountability, and reading, that goes into making records -- writing being one form of making records -- while defending accountability from record-making, and record-making from writing. The human needs finding function in these activities are beautifully triangulated by the poem.
For some minutes, whosoever I was was
breathing in the original light of wakening,
from the belly like a singer: in, quick
as delight, and out -- a slow stream which tumbled
from sibilance to something like speech,
and when I knew I had laughed, and thought of it
as the call of a late-dreamer under a sun
high enough to reach over garden trees,
no answer to anything else in creation he'd name,
not the pluck of a nerve, but there in the voice
as a kind of proof that beneath the sad facts to come
to say in time was a laugh like a given note
of the earliest music of the animal
who speaks and will remember -- I, by then, had
of course already long returned to myself.
Here, as the long last sentence overrides the line, the prerogatives of language gather force and wash back against the self otherwise casting about for the authority to shape, to gather utter experience. The essentially modest syntax flattens the metre, protracts the sentence in its quarrel with the line, and privileges speech over any merely ornamental linguistic insistence on word-choice, a logic all on the side of rhetoric, of working through moments to clarify meaning.
The book's thematic insistence on commentary results in a tone that's not always poetic (it can dwindle into anecdote), but it carries a joker in the complexly modeled psychic relation of language to knowledge necessitated by Sommer's experience as a second generation survivor of the European death camps, a complex always threatening to undertow the volume's domestic poems toward some nullity, and most evident in the volume's extraordinary enactment of a coming-into-knowledge, "Meyer Tsits and the Children," a poem based on Roman Vishniac's book of photographs from the lost Europe of the 1930s. "Meyer Tsits" is a Munkacs autistic captured in a Vishniac photograph published after the war. For Sommer, the photo occasions the opportunity for son to ask father (a labor camps survivor) to provide part of a story otherwise occluded from the poet-son's view. This poem about self-intelligibility enacts, fascinatingly, the process of accountability, and reading, that goes into making records -- writing being one form of making records -- while defending accountability from record-making, and record-making from writing. The human needs finding function in these activities are beautifully triangulated by the poem.
Displaying 1 of 1 review