The Spectrum of a Self at Work: Myself Painting by Clarence Major
Louisiana State University Press, 2008
To experience the pleasures of Myself Painting, National Book Award nominee Clarence Major's latest collection, is to visit the home studio of a hospitable and mildly, but not alarmingly, eccentric artist acquaintance who treats the guest to a BLT and a beer, while conversing quietly, with recent works and half-finished canvases awaiting attention in the background. He speaks simply, colloquially, in a tone mellowed with acceptance and experience, lacking any pretense to genius or undue eminence. He is simply a man who sees the world in the mysterious, slightly off-kilter, symbolically rich terms that artists often do.
Although the jacket copy advertises Major's incorporation of painterly techniques, particularly those of Post-Expressionism, into his verse, it remains unclear that his style would qualify as specifically Post-Expressionist, as his renderings tend to operate within an aesthetic more representational than that of, say, the kinetic splatterscapes of Jackson Pollock. Major's eye seems simply and straightforwardly Expressionist, a roving lens through which recognizable features of landscape amplify or alter to accord with internal states.
And now one has the privilege to watch the painter at work — or rather, to watch the painter watching himself at work, as the aesthetic of Myself Painting is less an immersion in the actual textures of paint on canvas, than in an artist's enhanced mode of seeing.
An opening effective on multiple levels, "The Red Bench" focuses the collection's thematic coherence. We watch the painter warm up, testing his brushes in a chromatic form of play akin to the discordant tune-ups of orchestras, or the straying notes of a piano player "before he drops full music on," in Dickinson's memorable phrase:
Pier stretches out a quarter-mile into ocean.
At its end this red bench vigorously illuminated,
As if to speak of its purpose. I sit down.
Big morning sky clear and I am small,
Grateful and grounded. Yellow oil shimmers
On ocean's hypnotic surface.
Close-cropped morning: presenting itself
As expansive. A slithering profusion:
More than yellow, yellow-orange, yellow-blue.
Purple, too, below a gleaming calmness.
I invite it in where color is needed.
Tides pound shore, leaving spray
Standing in mid-air, eye-level.
Something overturned,
I feel it, something finished,
Something returning to where it started,
To start again.
Major sets the scene and lets us know what we are in for: an obsessively visual aesthetic where other sensory input, that of smell, taste, sound and touch, recedes behind a supremely attuned visual sense.
Employing the homegrown prosody of loosely structured free verse, the musicality in Painting is less prominent — read obtrusive — than in Waiting for Sweet Betty. Attempts at philosophical encapsulation have also lost their traction amid the slippery paint textures of this new landscape. Major seems more content to simply record and let details imply their own narrative, which the successes in Sweet Betty revealed to be a fruitful stratagem. These are well-considered tradeoffs: what Myself Painting lacks in lyrical originality and philosophical depth, it transcends in the fulfillment of its unabashedly limited aspirations.
The deliberate aesthetic restrictions are fortunate. Major's style still overreaches when his social commentary becomes too explicit, as in "Black or White," an exploration of racial conflict where blacks and whites find harmony because "I love you/and that is all that matters." Another attempt at profundity reaches a similarly dubious conclusion when house and car keys are described as "things to ward off suffering."
Such overreaching, clichés, and overly explicit commentaries are rare missteps in this collection, however. Rather than being overly familiar, Major's visions are more often peopled with figures of unsettling anonymity, like those of nameless, slightly surreal life studies. Particularly haunting are the personal pronoun "she's" which, going unnamed, come to seem like the facets of a single elemental female enigma — the Muse. ("She/is always a different she," Major writes.) Study after study, the painter charts her contours, seemingly only knowable in part at any given time, as they ignite the inspiration of male artists: "In Search of a Motif for Expressive Female Figuration" finds an "unbearable lovely arm/extended, color of Tibet sunset/in a thoughtless/Degas gesture."
Major's speakers are haunted by the specters of Rembrandt (who gets at least five mentions), Cezanne, Degas, and Van Gogh. Indeed, nearly every observation is couched in the language and routine of artistic process: even a description of light itself, which "signed its name/as usual, on everything it touched." Projecting onto the landscape, Major's eye depicts even the light as an accomplished artist, proud of its work.
Intriguingly, a recognizable symbolic palette emerges: colors accumulate resonance through meanings consistently evoked. Red in particular, alarm-loud and primary, intrudes on secondary hues to signify agitations linked to feminine eros:
From "Red Brick":
No real agenda
till a tall woman,
old enough to be their mother,
wearing a mini skirt, tight, red,
crosses the park,
walking so close
they could have reached out
and touched her powerful legs.
She's headed for the street
with a long brick wall.
They gaze,
and from that moment on
no talking. Each boy goes deep
into himself for a visit
to his own unknowable connection
to that woman whose brave shadow
crawls along the wall following her,
just as the boys,
without moving, also follow her.
The flaring red of the woman's sexual power unsettles the group of boys that were rendered in tranquil hues of blue prior to her appearance, as she merges with the red of a brick wall, signifying her inaccessibility. Major has shown all, with a minimal need to tell.
Likewise, blackness often heralds an unusual or ominous turn of events, as in the surrealist "By Candlelight":
Imagine an old woman in black
is reading a book by candlelight
to a reclining nude on a bed
who is half asleep,
[…]
Inside the nude's head
the words turn to images.
[…]
And a guitar left
By an unknown person
On the table stood up
And played itself.
The music was otherworldly
[…]
When she looked,
her grandmother had turned
into a handsome man
shaped like a mandolin
and before long the two of them
were dancing
to the strange score
and begging for more
and more and more.
Increasingly musical, fanciful and uncanny in its progression, "By Candlelight" is the one poem where the reader's experience is that of the painting's own narrative, rather than that of the painter — one in which vocabulary does seemingly shake its two-dimensional nature and indeed "turn to images." The singularity of its approach makes the effect all the more startling.
The relative absence of reports from the other senses poses few dilemmas, as Major is adept at tracing narrative by visual means. He can memorably describe a crowd as a "many-headed beast" bringing mortification to a stage performer, or convincingly depict an early American settler confronting dangers for which "his whole body, though, says he is ready."
Despite their notorious egos, artists are typically unsparing in their self-portraits. Major depicts his own foibles with wry and low-key humor, and is not afraid to put a few dents in the seriousness of the artistic temperament. "When the Model Does Not Show" gently pokes fun at an assembly of artists discombobulated by the absence of their nude model, as they gradually lose their self-importance and become endearingly human, staying "to finish their coffee/or to have a second cup/and ask each other/about mutual friends/they haven't seen in a long time."
The warts-and-all approach is appropriate, for, as is memorably asserted in "Self-Portrait," a fine piece which could serve as a keynote to this collection, "nothing is more dishonest/than a self-portrait done out of love." Deliberating the various false identities he might assume, Major's speaker finally elects to "leave the canvas empty/till I know for sure. The empty canvas is about possibility."
His identity as narrator a flux of absence and presence, Major demonstrates how the artist's awareness becomes both primary and curiously auxiliary in its role as vessel for external detail.
Composed in a minor key, but intent in its engagements with self, other, and artistic process, Major's new poems are in their quiet way as absolute in purpose as the vividly tall and defiant chimney described in his last collection. Brushstrokes of gray smoke dissipate from the chimney's dark perpendicular; the windows below are candescent squares of amber. Somebody is at home, and quietly at work. As Myself Painting proves, there is nowhere else that Major needs to be.
• • •
Waiting for Sweet Poetry: Clarence Major's Waiting for Sweet Betty
Copper Canyon, 2002
Let's get this out of the way: Clarence Major's Waiting for Sweet Betty could be pared by two thirds into a slim, bright chapbook collection of unusual force—a force belied by its numbingly proper "conventional contemporary poetry by a contemporary African-American poet that's conventionally sentimental" cover design, which shows a painting of a pensive youth casting a pensive youthful gaze from a pensive pose in a chair against a wall, rendered in mustard hues best described as variations on a shade of medi-ochre. The title offers little assistance. Waiting for Sweet Betty suggests you might as well catch a few z's while you're waiting—in fact, go ahead and really get into it; Betty will probably be too sweet to wake you when she gets here. This poet's more subversive moments, which are frequent enough, might deserve something a bit more unsettling.
Now that we've ungratefully torn the wrapping from our present, let's have a look inside. The pleasures of this collection are refreshingly literary, meaning that Major tends to avoid that flashy pop-gimmick sensibility that contemporary poets employ when they become anxious we readers might suddenly remember that we're reading a book of poetry instead of displaying our $500 Ray-Bans and iPod Nano while photogenically sky-diving with Eminem into a greased pit of Girls Gone Wild on the set of Survivor, with Paris Hilton naked, inside a video game, or something. I am often reminded of a class my alma mater once offered called "Sex and Violence in Elizabethan Drama," which couldn't have begged more desperately for the attention of distractible undergraduates.
Betty only employs such strategies once or twice. "Rembrandt's Etching of a Woman Pissing" reeks not only of a certain bodily excretion but of academe's deflections of accusation of prissiness:
We know the squat.
We know the hastily lifted bundle of skirts
held firmly in potato-hands.
We know sharp eyes
in fearful scrutiny of surroundings.
It's all so natural, it's the animal.
The splash itself--out and up, away--a clean stream--
life loves life.
The poem tries a little too hard, and then, as if embarrassed by its decision to wallow in vulgarity ("pissing" having signaled its intended shock effect), seems to want to justify itself with a dubiously revelatory conclusion, that "life loves life," which is not only too general to leave a lasting impression but seems unearned.
But one phrase leaps out: "It's all so natural, it's the animal." This is clear, rings true, and has an easy swing, hinged by the comma. It also displays one of the pleasures of Major's work, its subtle musicality. Admittedly there are times, as in "Habitat: Time and Place," where this technique overreaches:
...One yellow flower of five petals,
chickweed clumsy and enchanting,
pink powder puff scraggly and scuzzy.
This place decodes me, reloads me.
Here Major throws away a good idea ("This place decodes me") in excessive cleverness with music and meaning ("reloads me"). I would have preferred more depth or detail concerning just what it means to feel "decoded" by a particular place.
When Major's musicality is unobtrusive, it provides a subtle enchantment, as when he addresses the moon in "Moon and Moonlight (At Cambria)":
Very well, stay up in your newness. I take you as you were. Empty-headed! [...]..
Cerebral and clear, clever and concise,
more mysterious before we touched you
[...]
In the old way, your ripples remain
specific and luminous over black Pacific,
and even now in your borrowed light
I see you waving back to your old skeptic.
Thus beautifully ends an unforced and genuine poem. Not uncrafted--but doing its job without seeming too crafted. The last stanza reads simply, but operates with a bit of complexity. "Specific" and "Pacific" is the blatant internal rhyme, caught later by "skeptic," but there's also a nice dialogue between "black" in the second line and "back" in the fourth, as well as an echo between "way" and "waving."
In lines from "From the Train Window Going and Coming," a cinematically visual account of landscape as seen from a passing train, Major displays his ability to select images that seem resonant with a strangely familiar significance:
I ride backwards to see what I'm missing.
[...]
We are stopping by a pasture and one cow gazes at us while
two hundred cows remain interested only in grazing.
I look forward to going back, either way.
The joy of this poem lies is its sense of mystery under mundane surfaces. At a subliminal linguistic level, it disorients us: we are riding facing backward, and we look forward to going back--either way. Which way is forward, which way back? From where to where? What at first seems simple becomes ambiguous.
The image of the one curious cow is probably my favorite in the entire book: it's an emblematic photograph. Photos don't explain themselves, and Major leaves it alone; he's taken a snapshot, and lets its mystery, charm, and resonance speak for themselves.
It's great fun to watch Major sic his rebellious imagery on his own philosophical posturing:
What was it I meant to say about
this pathetic couple in their pathetic life,
and the midget, the piazza light and shadow,
the cool interior of the church?
Ah! Anyway, apples in an orange bowl.
Apples in an orange bowl.
Being a painter, Major knows how to revel in the joy of imagery. It's unfortunate to report that this approach is less successful elsewhere. Too often, after reading similarly visual (often pastoral) accounts that make up a good deal of this collection, the reader is left wondering what Major intends to convey. Meandering off in description, too many of the endings are limp, limp, limp! They need some conceptual Viagra. They're limpotent.
These pastel canvases cry out for primary color, yearning for reincarnation as pure, hard poems full of arresting phrases: "as if shot dead with a camera"; "rotted back into the earth's terms"; "a man suspended in water and stars"; "raw red snapper on a bright blue plate./ September and the smell of pressed grapes"; "It'll take a while, they say./Postponement./They mean delay."
As shown in "Train Window," Major is skilled at structuring verses around odd symmetries and parallels. In "Inside Outside" the smells of the kitchen assert themselves into the wintry outdoors, and vice versa; a somehow delightful rhyme of "moon" and "spoon" culminates this conceit. Good poetry shows us that the seemingly driest and most wooden subject matter exists only to be lit by a spark of creative brilliance.
On the roof a giant black chimney.
The unseen part reaches into the living room
hard and straight, absolute in purpose.
If the house burns down it's the single thing
that will remain standing alone in a clearing.
("Purple California Mountains")
Major has that spark. I would love to watch him set all these houses afire, and show us what's left standing.
Louisiana State University Press, 2008
To experience the pleasures of Myself Painting, National Book Award nominee Clarence Major's latest collection, is to visit the home studio of a hospitable and mildly, but not alarmingly, eccentric artist acquaintance who treats the guest to a BLT and a beer, while conversing quietly, with recent works and half-finished canvases awaiting attention in the background. He speaks simply, colloquially, in a tone mellowed with acceptance and experience, lacking any pretense to genius or undue eminence. He is simply a man who sees the world in the mysterious, slightly off-kilter, symbolically rich terms that artists often do.
Although the jacket copy advertises Major's incorporation of painterly techniques, particularly those of Post-Expressionism, into his verse, it remains unclear that his style would qualify as specifically Post-Expressionist, as his renderings tend to operate within an aesthetic more representational than that of, say, the kinetic splatterscapes of Jackson Pollock. Major's eye seems simply and straightforwardly Expressionist, a roving lens through which recognizable features of landscape amplify or alter to accord with internal states.
And now one has the privilege to watch the painter at work — or rather, to watch the painter watching himself at work, as the aesthetic of Myself Painting is less an immersion in the actual textures of paint on canvas, than in an artist's enhanced mode of seeing.
An opening effective on multiple levels, "The Red Bench" focuses the collection's thematic coherence. We watch the painter warm up, testing his brushes in a chromatic form of play akin to the discordant tune-ups of orchestras, or the straying notes of a piano player "before he drops full music on," in Dickinson's memorable phrase:
Pier stretches out a quarter-mile into ocean.
At its end this red bench vigorously illuminated,
As if to speak of its purpose. I sit down.
Big morning sky clear and I am small,
Grateful and grounded. Yellow oil shimmers
On ocean's hypnotic surface.
Close-cropped morning: presenting itself
As expansive. A slithering profusion:
More than yellow, yellow-orange, yellow-blue.
Purple, too, below a gleaming calmness.
I invite it in where color is needed.
Tides pound shore, leaving spray
Standing in mid-air, eye-level.
Something overturned,
I feel it, something finished,
Something returning to where it started,
To start again.
Major sets the scene and lets us know what we are in for: an obsessively visual aesthetic where other sensory input, that of smell, taste, sound and touch, recedes behind a supremely attuned visual sense.
Employing the homegrown prosody of loosely structured free verse, the musicality in Painting is less prominent — read obtrusive — than in Waiting for Sweet Betty. Attempts at philosophical encapsulation have also lost their traction amid the slippery paint textures of this new landscape. Major seems more content to simply record and let details imply their own narrative, which the successes in Sweet Betty revealed to be a fruitful stratagem. These are well-considered tradeoffs: what Myself Painting lacks in lyrical originality and philosophical depth, it transcends in the fulfillment of its unabashedly limited aspirations.
The deliberate aesthetic restrictions are fortunate. Major's style still overreaches when his social commentary becomes too explicit, as in "Black or White," an exploration of racial conflict where blacks and whites find harmony because "I love you/and that is all that matters." Another attempt at profundity reaches a similarly dubious conclusion when house and car keys are described as "things to ward off suffering."
Such overreaching, clichés, and overly explicit commentaries are rare missteps in this collection, however. Rather than being overly familiar, Major's visions are more often peopled with figures of unsettling anonymity, like those of nameless, slightly surreal life studies. Particularly haunting are the personal pronoun "she's" which, going unnamed, come to seem like the facets of a single elemental female enigma — the Muse. ("She/is always a different she," Major writes.) Study after study, the painter charts her contours, seemingly only knowable in part at any given time, as they ignite the inspiration of male artists: "In Search of a Motif for Expressive Female Figuration" finds an "unbearable lovely arm/extended, color of Tibet sunset/in a thoughtless/Degas gesture."
Major's speakers are haunted by the specters of Rembrandt (who gets at least five mentions), Cezanne, Degas, and Van Gogh. Indeed, nearly every observation is couched in the language and routine of artistic process: even a description of light itself, which "signed its name/as usual, on everything it touched." Projecting onto the landscape, Major's eye depicts even the light as an accomplished artist, proud of its work.
Intriguingly, a recognizable symbolic palette emerges: colors accumulate resonance through meanings consistently evoked. Red in particular, alarm-loud and primary, intrudes on secondary hues to signify agitations linked to feminine eros:
From "Red Brick":
No real agenda
till a tall woman,
old enough to be their mother,
wearing a mini skirt, tight, red,
crosses the park,
walking so close
they could have reached out
and touched her powerful legs.
She's headed for the street
with a long brick wall.
They gaze,
and from that moment on
no talking. Each boy goes deep
into himself for a visit
to his own unknowable connection
to that woman whose brave shadow
crawls along the wall following her,
just as the boys,
without moving, also follow her.
The flaring red of the woman's sexual power unsettles the group of boys that were rendered in tranquil hues of blue prior to her appearance, as she merges with the red of a brick wall, signifying her inaccessibility. Major has shown all, with a minimal need to tell.
Likewise, blackness often heralds an unusual or ominous turn of events, as in the surrealist "By Candlelight":
Imagine an old woman in black
is reading a book by candlelight
to a reclining nude on a bed
who is half asleep,
[…]
Inside the nude's head
the words turn to images.
[…]
And a guitar left
By an unknown person
On the table stood up
And played itself.
The music was otherworldly
[…]
When she looked,
her grandmother had turned
into a handsome man
shaped like a mandolin
and before long the two of them
were dancing
to the strange score
and begging for more
and more and more.
Increasingly musical, fanciful and uncanny in its progression, "By Candlelight" is the one poem where the reader's experience is that of the painting's own narrative, rather than that of the painter — one in which vocabulary does seemingly shake its two-dimensional nature and indeed "turn to images." The singularity of its approach makes the effect all the more startling.
The relative absence of reports from the other senses poses few dilemmas, as Major is adept at tracing narrative by visual means. He can memorably describe a crowd as a "many-headed beast" bringing mortification to a stage performer, or convincingly depict an early American settler confronting dangers for which "his whole body, though, says he is ready."
Despite their notorious egos, artists are typically unsparing in their self-portraits. Major depicts his own foibles with wry and low-key humor, and is not afraid to put a few dents in the seriousness of the artistic temperament. "When the Model Does Not Show" gently pokes fun at an assembly of artists discombobulated by the absence of their nude model, as they gradually lose their self-importance and become endearingly human, staying "to finish their coffee/or to have a second cup/and ask each other/about mutual friends/they haven't seen in a long time."
The warts-and-all approach is appropriate, for, as is memorably asserted in "Self-Portrait," a fine piece which could serve as a keynote to this collection, "nothing is more dishonest/than a self-portrait done out of love." Deliberating the various false identities he might assume, Major's speaker finally elects to "leave the canvas empty/till I know for sure. The empty canvas is about possibility."
His identity as narrator a flux of absence and presence, Major demonstrates how the artist's awareness becomes both primary and curiously auxiliary in its role as vessel for external detail.
Composed in a minor key, but intent in its engagements with self, other, and artistic process, Major's new poems are in their quiet way as absolute in purpose as the vividly tall and defiant chimney described in his last collection. Brushstrokes of gray smoke dissipate from the chimney's dark perpendicular; the windows below are candescent squares of amber. Somebody is at home, and quietly at work. As Myself Painting proves, there is nowhere else that Major needs to be.
• • •
Waiting for Sweet Poetry: Clarence Major's Waiting for Sweet Betty
Copper Canyon, 2002
Let's get this out of the way: Clarence Major's Waiting for Sweet Betty could be pared by two thirds into a slim, bright chapbook collection of unusual force—a force belied by its numbingly proper "conventional contemporary poetry by a contemporary African-American poet that's conventionally sentimental" cover design, which shows a painting of a pensive youth casting a pensive youthful gaze from a pensive pose in a chair against a wall, rendered in mustard hues best described as variations on a shade of medi-ochre. The title offers little assistance. Waiting for Sweet Betty suggests you might as well catch a few z's while you're waiting—in fact, go ahead and really get into it; Betty will probably be too sweet to wake you when she gets here. This poet's more subversive moments, which are frequent enough, might deserve something a bit more unsettling.
Now that we've ungratefully torn the wrapping from our present, let's have a look inside. The pleasures of this collection are refreshingly literary, meaning that Major tends to avoid that flashy pop-gimmick sensibility that contemporary poets employ when they become anxious we readers might suddenly remember that we're reading a book of poetry instead of displaying our $500 Ray-Bans and iPod Nano while photogenically sky-diving with Eminem into a greased pit of Girls Gone Wild on the set of Survivor, with Paris Hilton naked, inside a video game, or something. I am often reminded of a class my alma mater once offered called "Sex and Violence in Elizabethan Drama," which couldn't have begged more desperately for the attention of distractible undergraduates.
Betty only employs such strategies once or twice. "Rembrandt's Etching of a Woman Pissing" reeks not only of a certain bodily excretion but of academe's deflections of accusation of prissiness:
We know the squat.
We know the hastily lifted bundle of skirts
held firmly in potato-hands.
We know sharp eyes
in fearful scrutiny of surroundings.
It's all so natural, it's the animal.
The splash itself--out and up, away--a clean stream--
life loves life.
The poem tries a little too hard, and then, as if embarrassed by its decision to wallow in vulgarity ("pissing" having signaled its intended shock effect), seems to want to justify itself with a dubiously revelatory conclusion, that "life loves life," which is not only too general to leave a lasting impression but seems unearned.
But one phrase leaps out: "It's all so natural, it's the animal." This is clear, rings true, and has an easy swing, hinged by the comma. It also displays one of the pleasures of Major's work, its subtle musicality. Admittedly there are times, as in "Habitat: Time and Place," where this technique overreaches:
...One yellow flower of five petals,
chickweed clumsy and enchanting,
pink powder puff scraggly and scuzzy.
This place decodes me, reloads me.
Here Major throws away a good idea ("This place decodes me") in excessive cleverness with music and meaning ("reloads me"). I would have preferred more depth or detail concerning just what it means to feel "decoded" by a particular place.
When Major's musicality is unobtrusive, it provides a subtle enchantment, as when he addresses the moon in "Moon and Moonlight (At Cambria)":
Very well, stay up in your newness. I take you as you were. Empty-headed! [...]..
Cerebral and clear, clever and concise,
more mysterious before we touched you
[...]
In the old way, your ripples remain
specific and luminous over black Pacific,
and even now in your borrowed light
I see you waving back to your old skeptic.
Thus beautifully ends an unforced and genuine poem. Not uncrafted--but doing its job without seeming too crafted. The last stanza reads simply, but operates with a bit of complexity. "Specific" and "Pacific" is the blatant internal rhyme, caught later by "skeptic," but there's also a nice dialogue between "black" in the second line and "back" in the fourth, as well as an echo between "way" and "waving."
In lines from "From the Train Window Going and Coming," a cinematically visual account of landscape as seen from a passing train, Major displays his ability to select images that seem resonant with a strangely familiar significance:
I ride backwards to see what I'm missing.
[...]
We are stopping by a pasture and one cow gazes at us while
two hundred cows remain interested only in grazing.
I look forward to going back, either way.
The joy of this poem lies is its sense of mystery under mundane surfaces. At a subliminal linguistic level, it disorients us: we are riding facing backward, and we look forward to going back--either way. Which way is forward, which way back? From where to where? What at first seems simple becomes ambiguous.
The image of the one curious cow is probably my favorite in the entire book: it's an emblematic photograph. Photos don't explain themselves, and Major leaves it alone; he's taken a snapshot, and lets its mystery, charm, and resonance speak for themselves.
It's great fun to watch Major sic his rebellious imagery on his own philosophical posturing:
What was it I meant to say about
this pathetic couple in their pathetic life,
and the midget, the piazza light and shadow,
the cool interior of the church?
Ah! Anyway, apples in an orange bowl.
Apples in an orange bowl.
Being a painter, Major knows how to revel in the joy of imagery. It's unfortunate to report that this approach is less successful elsewhere. Too often, after reading similarly visual (often pastoral) accounts that make up a good deal of this collection, the reader is left wondering what Major intends to convey. Meandering off in description, too many of the endings are limp, limp, limp! They need some conceptual Viagra. They're limpotent.
These pastel canvases cry out for primary color, yearning for reincarnation as pure, hard poems full of arresting phrases: "as if shot dead with a camera"; "rotted back into the earth's terms"; "a man suspended in water and stars"; "raw red snapper on a bright blue plate./ September and the smell of pressed grapes"; "It'll take a while, they say./Postponement./They mean delay."
As shown in "Train Window," Major is skilled at structuring verses around odd symmetries and parallels. In "Inside Outside" the smells of the kitchen assert themselves into the wintry outdoors, and vice versa; a somehow delightful rhyme of "moon" and "spoon" culminates this conceit. Good poetry shows us that the seemingly driest and most wooden subject matter exists only to be lit by a spark of creative brilliance.
On the roof a giant black chimney.
The unseen part reaches into the living room
hard and straight, absolute in purpose.
If the house burns down it's the single thing
that will remain standing alone in a clearing.
("Purple California Mountains")
Major has that spark. I would love to watch him set all these houses afire, and show us what's left standing.