The Ravenous Eye

Reviewing Meghan O’Rourke's, Halflife.  Norton, 2007.  87 pp.

Valerie Reed

Is it possible to say anything new about looking, or about poetry’s relationship to that endless task?  “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works,” Ezra Pound wrote (though he had his own ideas about what an image was).  Vision is, of course, entangled with knowledge in the Western imagination in a hundred different ways, but it is also tied to desire, with its tantalizing combination of presence and absence: one can see but not touch, see but not feel, see but not possess. 

Halflife, Meghan O’Rourke’s first book of poems, takes as its epigraph a passage by the German novelist and essayist W.G. Sebald that points to precisely such a complex of vision, knowledge, and desire: “the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person…kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.”  There is at times a hunger for and in looking that has more to do with appetite and pleasure – as well as their reverse sides, repulsion, repletion, loss – than with knowledge, strictly speaking.  And it is this idea of the ravenous eye, with all its implications, that drives the opening poem of Halflife, “Meditations on a Moth”:

These opening lines suggest the riot of visual overstimulation that will follow: colors and lights, words themselves flashing like neon signs (“amount due, amount due”).  And if the poem begins by suggesting, frankly, an exhaustion in the face of all this looking, it also makes clear that exhaustion is no excuse for dereliction of duty: “Here – look.  No, look,” it insists, acknowledging “the brute blind glare of snow in sun” only to demand: “Look again.”  This poem, like many of the poems that will follow, speaks in the voice of one addicted to seeing, sick with vision yet unable to turn away from the pleasure it offers.

It is this kind of breathless pursuit of the electric-lit world that also drives the book’s title poem, which begins: “The blue square of light / in the window across the street / never goes dark – // the cathodes, the cordage, the atoms / working the hem of dusk.”  O’Rourke’s fascination with light and color is obvious here.  But the thing about being a poet obsessed with vision is that you always have to find ways to translate images into language; a poem works by words, not colors.  When a few lines later the poem continues: “the trees loaded with radium, colors like guns, // red pock-pock red and the sea yellow up, / yellow down – / the blue hour, the waiting,” it’s the inclusion of the names of those primary colors in a staccato line that presents the effect of “colors like guns,” not the image of the colors themselves.  O’Rourke is at her best when her language is like this: brittle, sharp, and sparkling, with rhythm serving to increase the speed, hone the danger.  The best moments in these poems are the ones in which language seems on the verge of getting away from itself, as it accelerates toward violence or sets its world of images spinning out of control.  O’Rourke seems more than willing to use words purely for the delight or rhythmic utility of their sounds, irrespective of meaning; and when the rhymes come, they are tightly-compressed, silly and simple in the best way, like nursery rhymes: “In the bedroom the moon is a dented spoon, / cold, getting colder, so hurry sleep, come creep into bed, let’s get it over with” (“Sleep”).  But this echo of the intoxicating nonsense of fairy tales or nursery rhymes also reminds us of the darkness that drives them: “Sleep” continues: “lay me down and close my eyes / and tell me whip, tell me winnow, tell me sweet tell me skittish / tell me no tell me no such thing / tell me straw into gold tell me crept into fire / tell me lost all my money tell me hoarded, verboten.”

As the poems proceed, this sense of flashy foreboding is transformed into a sense of ever more present violence.  Most often, though, the speaker in these poems is neither the perpetrator of violence nor its victim but an observer, or one who comes after the fact to recount what she has only heard second hand.  The poem “Sandy Hook” begins: “The fire burned my cousin here, / first in his bed in the bungalow garage, / then at the lock, scratching in fear.” The rhythm and rhyme, still echoing the singsong of nursery rhymes, draws us in and then creates a scene of conflagration we cannot bear to turn away from: “Quick, quick.  The trundle bed / burned.  The violin, unpracticed, burned. / The keys of the body, burned.  Yellow, red, / the turning leaves.  The burning / thing, ablaze, a living shroud: smoke, air, bone, / a licking; then the carbonite no one looks at twice.” Here, the question of vision will take a more urgent turn.  The speakers of these poems are at once oddly disconnected and compelled to watch, riveted to the screen, you might say – we are still not far here from the eye that has done “so much looking.”  This is all strange and seductive, voyeuristic and guilt-inducing; just as you want to condemn the poems’ own voyeurism, you notice that you’re standing next to them, looking too.  The poems are dares, defying us not to get caught up in the spectacle.

Yet the farther the poems push this idea, the more problematic it becomes.  “Still Life Amongst Partial Outlines,” the second section of the book, presents a series of poems about close encounters with violence: one describes the uncanny experience (“like looking in a mirror and discovering someone else’s face”) of finding a newspaper article about two girls, one of them named Meghan O’Rourke, who were raped and tortured in a Vermont park.  This part of the book in particular explores the complexity of emotion – fear, fascination, guilt – that surrounds the sense that a single breath separates a poem’s speaker from terrible violence.  But sometimes here, that gap becomes a gulf of the most banal kind, and the dangers and delights of walking closer to the fire become more like the experience of getting cheap thrills from the evening news.  Worse, that banality is often accompanied by a prosaic style that lets the tension in its language go slack.  “I was playing tag / with my brother and a friend / whose name I can’t recall,” the second poem in the sequence tells us; but there’s just no reason to spend a whole line on that poor kid’s forgotten name.  The fourth poem, apparently ripped from the headlines, describes a power line that fell and “last week silenced a couple // whose car broke down in the flooded road / as they stepped out into the puddle – zap! – their bodies // still pliant.”  Again, there is nothing sharp or arresting about this language, and that zap! comes across as more crude than anything else. 

In poems like this there is always a danger of romanticizing violence, or aestheticizing it, or glamorizing it; when they toe that fine line successfully, it is exhilarating.  But when they get it wrong, the effect is not so much offensive as dull.  The last poem of the sequence begins, “My eyes hurt.  A translucent sheet / has grown over them” – suggesting that too much looking and not enough direct experience may lead to an increasingly unbridgeable gulf between viewer and viewed, poet and world.  But at times here, that distance comes across not as a meaningful problem in its own right, but simply as a failure of poetic language.

The fourth section of the book does a better job with this.  Like the second section, it consists mostly of a linked sequence of poems, this one under the collective title “Two Sisters.”  Every second poem is titled “The Lost Sister,” and, taken together with the epigraph to the sequence, the whole thing presents variations on the theme of a twin sister lost in the womb, never known but always, in some sense, spectrally present in the life of the sister who survived.  Here again, then, one might say that the dominant theme is one of a hairs-breadth escape from disaster, but this time around it is more intimate, more complex, and more skillfully realized.  Here is the first of these poems in its entirety:

This poem gets right, I think, what too many of the earlier poems get wrong; one can unravel the puzzle of its underlying narrative if one wants to, but it doesn’t just present a narrative and ask us to take it for poetry.  The language is taut, surprising, compelling, driven – once again – by an insistent rhythm.  In fact, the language of this whole group of poems is so dead-on that even a prose poem comes across as more lyrical than some of the verse poems earlier in the book: “I could swim underwater.  I could make trains rattle with speed – could close my eyes and press the cold center pole in the first car, the living tendril in it, and find what fed.”

The final poem of the collection, “Knives of Light,” returns us to the dangers and pleasures of vision, beginning with a little piece of trivia about the painter Pierre Bonnard that, again, slides into the prosaic mode (“In his studio, on a canvas stretched and primed, / Bonnard kept bits of silver paper / to catch light: so he could work / in the poorest-lit hotel or a friend’s home”).  But the final lines of the poem whittle down the encyclopedia piece into something really striking: “Bits of silver turn in the breeze, / knives of light and appetite. / They want to be used.”  Just before those last lines, the poem also offers a comment from Bonnard himself, written, we are told, not long before he died: “I am only beginning to understand.  I should start all over again.”  What drives and fascinates the poems of Halflife, ultimately, is a desire for vision, for a knowledge of and through vision, which can never be satisfied, and which is all the more seductive for being so.  Thus it is no surprise that the poems fare best when they enact this seduction themselves.