First book puts Maggie Dietz in storied company

Review: Perennial Fall
By Maggie Dietz
University of Chicago Press, 2006

M

aggie Dietz is that rare poet who "arrived" even before her first book was published.
"Arrived" to the point where an important literary figure was quoted in a national magazine, listing "talking to Maggie Dietz" as a favorite activity. "Arrived" as a fellow/writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, as a lecturer at Boston University and as co-editor of a major poetry anthology.
  What's more is her status was warranted by her poetry which, appearing in literary magazines, more than hinted at jaw-dropping promise. When I read "Bright Lament." I jotted her name in the margin of a notebook.

    ... here in the half-life
    Of morning, I read that death
    Undid another come undone,
    A girl who the note she left said
    I am tired. Already tired
    And twelve years old and gone.

W

hen I read, "Perpetual Between" in Salmagundi, I dispatched a letter to the editors gushing that this was important work ... still knowing nothing about Dietz beyond those               Maggie Dietz
two poems.
  So Perennial Fall was atop a very short list of must-haves even before it was published. This year, 2006, also saw the publication of a very strong collection of poems, Averno which all but prompted this reviewer to question whether we actually needed any more poets beyond its author, Louise Gluck. Not surprisingly, Gluck's poems, such as "Circe's Lament," have have tended to stand out from similar contexts.
  Perennial Fall is up to this standard. In fact, will venture to say that while Averno is the 2006 work of the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Perennial Fall represents the 2006 publication of a successor. While I've sort of set out to find the diamond in the rough, rather than in the academic press, a gem is a gem.

  One can easily agree with New York Times reviewer David Kirby that a poet truly being "down to earth" on nature is a refreshing development ...

    the trees are tired
    of meaning, sick of providing
    mystery, parallels, consolation.

  And YES! I wish I'd said that.


D

ietz has this whispering morbidity that almost sounds, well, British:

    When did this body grow into this bed?

  This kind of phrasing doses such ambitious poems as "Speaking for Andrew," in which the titled deceased, A.G., becomes (to put it in pedestrian terms) to her what Syd Barrett was to the later Pink Floyd. Dietz uses the poet's stance as the Celtic Witta tradition prescribes projecting one's self to gain the vision of the hawk or other animal, or to gain the properties of a stone or tree. "Speaking for Andrew" certainly have that acid-trip agape moment of revelation:

    ... My opening. And through it rang a chorus of every voice
    that ever was. I heard them each and all and in that moment
    knew, for just a moment, what it means to love and suffer,
    please believe me, what it is to die and lie.

D

ietz uses subtle humor to diffuse a pervading awareness of nature and spirituality: Through the course of a day, the sun moves laboriously, not as God, but "God's ox." She gives us, "the river dragged its heels." Still, there are enough hints at the sensibility of imagism without its boundaries. Her speaker commands nature in the manner of H.D.:

    Perennial fall, come cool the cliffs,
    bring quiet, sulfur, early dark.
    Represent as you must: dusk, dying, ends
    and row us into winter's water ...

  Indeed, her "Colleen in Sonoma," is Dietz's "Helen," albeit a Helen with cow shit on her shoes for whom

    The stars over the fenced yard were
    often asterisks, marking exceptions.

  In other words, a Helen ... compromised. A "real" woman persona, not a mythological archetype. This subtly deconstructive approach to the methodology of H.D. is fervently postmodern but it's very subtle, very appealing, very ... classy. This also affords Dietz some accessibility. It may be a road not taken ... but we can at least see what she likes.


I

n his New York Times review, Kirby expressed a lack of enthusiasm for poems in the collection lacking such "smart-mouth" comment, the works he calls "metaphysical" poems.
"Perpetual Between" is one of those poems.

    ... The instrument
    a hinge. The mood hinged upon
    the song. The song a hinge. And you
    and I -- o metaphysicians -- hinges.

  Certainly some time after we learned to say (as metaphysians) that "everything is relative"; we learned also that one thing is always becoming another, that we are in the process of becoming. We began, also, to "mind the gap," as posted warnings alert London underground passengers of the gap between the platform and the train. In metaphysics, the space between is to be considered as well as the object.
  Postmodern poetry expresses this consciousness in terms of what has been identified as anti-closural elements. Some poets and scholars are finding now that this approach is dated ... that, as Ewa Chrusciel of Spoon River Poetry Review pointed out to me, "we find that we need to put something back" if we take something out.

  There is something more than metaphysics going on in Dietz's poem. She seems to be intuitively aware that that postmodern poetry has been largely built on these "anti-closural" elements and with "Perpetual Between," she seems to put a lid on it, summing up that whole approach to poetry in a dozen sparse lines ending -- of course -- with an anti-closural element, a something that always leads to another:

    ... The moment opens,
    closes, opens, closes. The night. The clock.
    The thought. The heart. The door. The breath.

  Read this poem aloud and you'll get the idea of the "space" an anti-closural element can create. It's drama, of course: As if every waking moment in our lives is drama -- which it is in a sense -- the sense that poetry can show us. So this isn't strictly metaphysical, no; it's a poem about poetry.

  This a very hard-edged example from the book, which is generally more personal, more earthy. It does reflect, however, a vibration that extends throughout, and that is an idea about supply. Something which is lost becomes something else. Look carefully at that vacated space:

    Good shades, and the rumpled bed
    Still open, still unmade.

  Seeing, Dietz reminds us, begins when the object is no longer there to be seen. I think, at this particular time in history, her words must resonate with a great many who have lost, and are seeking and discovering.

-- Robert Preuss

Robert Preuss's work appears in the September 2006 issue of The Modern Review. He edits Poets Collective.