TINFISH # 7

"The small thing, it is good. / The thing and its shadow meet in the small thing," 
she begins.  But the poem mimics an academic transcription of an ancient Greek fragment, 
"number of lines lost unknown."  A series of appended parenthetical notes flit from JFK 
to Baudelaire to Sappho to HD to the Beatles.  "Ancient Greek / Berliner Also," the first 
poem in Liz Waldner's new volume Homing Devices, rehearses disconnection, fragmentation, 
getting lost.  The thing doesn't seem to be able to find its shadow because‹or even 
though?‹"thisalphabet is verysmall."

	Yet by the time we reach the three longer poems that end the volume, "The Burden
of a Prayer," "The Singing Underneath," and "Homing Devices," the cramped and desolate
space that dominates the book's opening movement accommodates the shape of "SweetBee 
Smoothfield," the addressee of the embarrassingly simple lyrical core‹"I need you,"
"I love you"‹of the poet's quest to "unnot the nots" in "some essentially 
non-essential in between" that might turn into a meeting place for her and her 
lover.  Smoothfield is the sweet bee that gathers the poet's pollen, tucking it 
into "those hinge-joint knees like memorial arches to also ephemeral crustacean 
kin, moments, monuments, to non-selves beneath their own notice."  Those crustacean 
kin are more small things, ants as alphabets, whose trails across paper mimic maps 
or scores or poems, figures oblivious enough to their own notice to elicit "the 
singing underneath," and so become the cyphers the poet hopes will help her finally
spell her way, lexically or magically, home.  "The ant runs circles around the place 
I keep for you, text, score, washable globe, diagrams from the dictionary, dioramas 
from the museum, map, sentence, x marks the spot, you are here. Me. Too."

	In between is a glittering drift of words, signifiers melting into one another 
across a field of eclectic allusion and free association.  The physical sites criss-cross 
America from Southern Mississippi to Vermont and NY, NY to LA, while the cultural and 
literary landscape ranges from Ananke, Augustine, and Andromache to Blake, Baudelaire, 
and Berryman, from Genesis and Gaia to the Enola Gay, Tikal to Treblinka, Mary Magdalene 
to Maypo, Job to Janis Joplin, Eurydice to Elvis, Osiris to Oz, and Quetzlcoatl to the 
Here n Queer Social Club.  Sometimes Waldner slips her way through homonyms and 
multilingual puns, as when the chorus of "Hansel Und Gretel Also" follows the 
trail of crumbs from "Rodeway Inn. / all the way in" to "no room in in" to "no room, 
so manger. in. / voilà, bulimia. in."  Sometimes the words assemble images: "the arcing 
shape of the double ax, of the crescent moon, of the stalagmite, of the bull's horn, of 
the bird's wing, of the egg's shell‹the arcing shape of the snow along the window sill, 
the face outside in the dark looking in, the flow formed and fixed by the frame."  
Sometimes allusions collide and light up, as when pathetic Lear thinking dead Ophelia 
breathes segues into the simulacral redemption of old soldiers disobediently abandoning 
their roles during a tv reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg.  Sometimes these tightly 
constructed lyrics estrange language by insisting on its solidity, as in the insanely 
precise, numbered statements in "The Grass is on the Grass:" "1) A dog and a cow are on 
the mountain. / 2) Sheep have hearts; cows, too, have hearts."  Sometimes the words fade 
before our eyes, as in the slowly disappearing refrain of "Quartet."

	Almost always the words make time, memory, language, and quotation brush up against 
the delineate desire and its devices.  The trick is to make the pathos of lost love 
invest the act of writing itself.  "Now I am writing my way into now, again and still, 
now, now, full of then."  In poem after poem Waldner's crafty intelligence manages to 
transform the poet watching herself watching herself writing into a way of building a 
believable, brittle refuge from an irredeemable past.

	With its panoply of symmetries, echoes, ironies, and cross references, Homing 
Devices demands that it be read as a sequence rather than a mere collection.  This 
is an excellent, rich volume of poetry, challenging, harrowing, funny, convincing.  
Rarely does one find such vulnerability and sadness so luxuriantly, inventively 
dressed out, so playful, so cured.

Ida Yoshinaga	present tense / eleg(ac)y for george
Bill Luoma	from Ode
Renee Gladman	Sometime late January
Bobbie West	Random Access Memory
Stephen Oliver	Pat Boone & Tonto
Steve Carll	[untitled]
Michael McPherson	Misogyny
John Olson	All Things Being Equal
Summi Kaipa	Swallow the Water, Hiccup
Jason Olive Trans. Joe Balaz	Blue-Hula-Blue
Dan Featherston	L is for Lexical
Rob Wilson	Hawai'i Kai Mornings
Hugh Steinberg	A Cure for Ghosts
John Tranter	My Story
Kathy D.K.K. Banggo	Surfing Alone at Silver Stairs
Jonathan Brannen	from Deaccessioned Landscapes
Louis Armand	from linkage(s)
John Kinsella	Noble Gestures
Coral Hull	from The Moon Rocket Crashes on Planet Trauma
Murray Edmond	Wholly Daze
Hsia Yu Trans. Steve Bradbury	Eight Poems
John Rieder	Book Review: Liz Waldner's Homing Devices