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This
book represents Rivera's first full-length collection to be published in the
UK, although some of the work herein has previously found publication on
these shores. 'Disturbances in the Ocean of Air' appeared in Stand in 1998 and
won first prize in the magazine's International Poetry Competition and
'Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty' - a text which incorporates
material from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American
Slave
- was published as a chapbook by Barque Press in 2006. These two very
different UK appearances reveal something interesting about Rivera's
international appeal. She was born in Mexico City, grew up in Paris and now
lives in New York City, and her multi-cultural background seems to have
informed the way in which her poems seem at once both complex and accessible
- not taking communication for granted.
The book is divided into four sections, but various threads traverse the
collection and make it read as a sustained, focused enquiry. Each section has
a small fragment placed at its opening, which in turn become the first four
parts of the title piece - the last in the book. Similarly, a five-part poem
'The Colors Project' is dispersed throughout the book at intervals, and there
also seem to be structural and thematic homologies between longer poems and
poem-sequences, such as 'Suggestions at Every Turn' and 'Poem with a Line
Drawn Across the Body'. Most remarkable is an extraordinary physical fact
about the volume which binds it together - every sixth page has a fine,
almost invisible perforation on the verso which divides it in half, top to
bottom. There is no reference to this in the book itself, and folding the
pages along the perforation does not produce effects which seem intended,
although some of them are interesting. Clearly there is a resonance with the
book's title here, and also, I would suggest, the evocative photogravure (by
Lothar Osterberg) on its cover - part of which shows dark thread stitched
through some kind of fabric. If, as the cover text suggests, Rivera invites
us to think of language itself as a perforated map ('Reading, something
relinquished | forced a 'you' onto the map.' (p.38)), then the actual perforations
suggest a kind of liminal puncturing of language's surface; a stitched seam
with the thread pulled out, or a selvedge which is capable of folding in on
itself - or over onto itself - in time, with consequences for how we might
orient ourselves within it. This seems a productive image for thinking about
how Rivera's poems proceed and captures something of her critical stance
towards language and other matters.
The opening poem 'Ars Poetica' declares: 'I am drawn to explore aspects, |
features of the seen/heard' and uses a startling image which seems to be
drawn from Saint Thomas' encounter with the risen Christ: 'I slip in your
side, | indistinct, || a moistened hand.' (p. 13) This is the beginning of
an embodied poetics that unfolds throughout the course of the book as a means
of
knowing and being known. 'Disturbances in the Ocean of Air' which comprises
numbered prose and verse sections offers observations such as: 'My head is
at the level of my mother's hand. I press my cheek against her soft smooth
hand'; 'I hear the sound of my body; it lies supine on the wet bed' and 'when
the inset crawled on my body it seemed like such a big thing' (all p. 16).
Such moments, here and throughout the book, show a negotiation of one's own
physical presence and that of others - leading almost inevitably to an
embedded discourse of desire: '"Desire without the object of desire?"' (p.
17) and later: 'we contradict, | slip into | desire dense with specks.'
('Crossed Out', p. 21)
This analysis of embodiment and desire is also fully implicated by gender,
and this is handled in a fascinating way through images of containment and
vision - windows, doors, rooms, camera - which delineate the framed spaces in
which the protagonist of these poems can move:
There was no room,
words in the way of
rooms, [...]
Shut inside a house
('Suggestions at Every Turn', p. 26)
In this poem's uneasy domestic space, the female protagonist is sitting by a
window looking down 'thinking of sinking' (p. 29) and speculates on how, if
'existence might be thrown like a dime' (p. 34), its effects could be deadly:
'from the 9th floor, drop a dime | between pauses, could kill' (p.
35). Indeed windows as a whole are full of threat: 'windows allow for the
possibility of falling, looking, breaking. | Whole lives spent in museums,
on shelves, behind windows' (p. 37). If this is a room of one's own it is far
from a refuge for the protagonist: '"it has become unbearable...turning | into
something that isn't what I was"' (p. 42).
Rivera returns to this scene in 'When the Shadow Filled Window Opens' whose
tone and syntax reminds me a little of Jennifer Moxley's poetry:
At that particular point
in the day when the sun
becomes a loaf of bread,
high enough that I can
open its container and
look out of the window,
I keep my gaze directed
away from annihilation
and worrying traces of
destruction, that abyss
of the self.
(p. 57)
This extraordinary poem tracks a thought process alive to the risk of
daydreaming, whilst confronting the thought of a female acquaintance who has
self-harmed: 'she hadn't been able to | help herself, to keep from cutting,
until now' (p. 58). This is all managed from 'the desk a place to think
quietly' in which the writer's activity is figured as building 'a great
variety of structures' in order to diminish 'the distances between thought
and action' and to examine 'things from different vantage points' (p. 60). If
this can be read as an account of Rivera's own poetics, then it seems to
describe a rigorously ethical and politicised creative practice.
The poem 'In the Frame of the Door' offers the most direct account of an
embodied poetics, in which the narrator compares her writing practice to the
way in which '"thought is written on the body"' (p. 48). In what seems like a
reflection on childhood memory, the poem negotiates 'the language of the
body', recognising how, perhaps problematically 'without someone to listen,
without language | "she couldn't enter the moral life"' (p. 49). One of the
book's most resonant images for this relationship to language emerges in
these lines:
Standing in that
courtyard (you could almost
see through language,
into its interior,
that boiling chamber; its
nouns and pronouns
revealing absence,
blockading movement)
(p.
49)
This 'turn inward' (p. 49) - with an unmistakeable pun on the turn of verse
(which occurs throughout the book) sets the scene for a kind of analysis in
which knowledge of the body of language is tantamount to self-knowledge. 'Poem
with a Line Drawn Across the Body' (p. 50) explores 'what the body gets used to' and recounts an
internalising of language during childhood: 'the child taking those words
into | the inner recesses, the corners, the cracks — / A physical calamity at
the cellular level' (p. 52) This kind of knowledge includes death as well as
desire, as in one of the book's two nods to Sylvia Plath: 'dying is an art
and we do it not so well' (p. 53). In a world in which a story can rip 'the
lines of our "self" to shreds' (p. 56), Rivera follows Simone Weil's counsel:
'"the body | plays a part in all apprenticeships" (p. 56).
The third section of the book, which incorporates fragments of Frederick
Douglass's narrative is perhaps the most direct expression of the politics
that follows from Rivera's poetics. 'Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of
Liberty' opens with '"thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty" and
this idea resonates throughout a sequence where each poem opens with a word
or phrase from the previous. In a poem which sets itself to negotiate the
difference between '"a slave in fact" and | "a slave in form"' (p. 77) it is
clear that 'the relation between a buyer and his money—| A manifestation of
"I" and "Mine"' (p. 69) has applications well beyond the history of slavery:
Greater than, lesser
than, the equation
of product equals trash
equals trade,
acquires pattern, assails
this subject, taints
(p. 71)
Even the section from 'The Colors Project' that concludes section three
contains images of contemporary forms of enslavement in the form of drug
dependency and prostitution in which the body is
emptied
filled
inebriated
impoverished
pushed into
Mauled and man-handled
(p. 79)
The final section of the book is most suggestive of the mapping metaphor, in
its minimal texts locked onto the page with as much an eye for their visual
patterning as what they disclose. These pieces resonate with incredible
poised tensions (also in evidence in Rivera's recent chapbook On the
Nature of Position and Tone (Fields Press, 2012)) around the theme
of suffering: 'suffering is always with us | does it matter what form it
takes?' (p. 91). In this 'everyday | apocalypse' (p. 100) the poet approaches
'the rapture | uncharted' (p. 83) with the mapping impulse: 'Map out the
source of panic | familiar || tension' (p. 94). Whilst asking 'what | motives
inspire our
| struggle?' (p. 85) it is clear that writing remains the means of this
struggle: that when we are 'forced to face oneself' (p. 89), we must 'wait |
until the words grow' (p. 87). This is a poetics that another of Rivera's
sources, George Oppen, might have endorsed and whom Rivera quotes in the
powerful phrase: '"the known and the unknown | touch"' (p. 92). This poem
forms an impressive conclusion to this scrupulous, intense, discriminating
and passionate book whose courage might be summed up in these further lines
from the title piece:
Our generation
grieves
immobilized by the urge
to yield
let me
bear it well
(p. 95)
It is my hope that Rivera will continue to grace our shores with her writing
for years to come.
© Scott
Thurston 2013
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