Sills: Selected Poems

Abstract

Michael O'Brien. Sills: Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000. Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in the case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, I think we have to make a welcome exception. Although he published work by Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky, and many others in The Eventorium Muse in New York in the 1960s, O'Brien appears to be little known in today's circuit (for instance, the Muse isn't included in Granary's Secret Location on the Lower East Side). His earlier books are nearly impossible to find, so we need this collection to make clear what a strong voice it is that we've been missing. O'Brien is a younger contemporary of the NewYork School, but his poetry distinguishes itself from their sprawling, inclusive poetics by hearkening back to that leaner school of New Yorkers, the Objectivists. His early work is inflected with the influences of Hart Crane, French Symbolism, and Surrealism (he's translated Eluard), which is to say that he comes close at points to the nonce wit of Ashbery or Koch. But his general tendency is in a different direction, more contained and more precise. As this book traverses 40-odd years of the poet in city and country, alone and in company, at home and on the street, it traces an itinerary through what one poem calls "perceptual difficulties" (38) and what another calls "the world and its likeness" (75). These poems are stripped of decoration, and although the majority consist of short lines, O'Brien has a formal range that maintains a spark in a variety of configurations on the page, from pentameter lines to prose poems (the latter bearing none of the inertia that the form has lately been subject to). The first person pronoun appears in roughly half of these poems, although there's no doubt that someone moves behind those without it, setting them in motion: it would be impossible to conceive of them as less than lived. When the lyric "I" does appear there's usually an element of honesty in the voice, an unforced, relaxed reflexiveness, as in the following recognition of the limits of poetry as equipment for living (to use Burke's memorable phrase): I thought the poem Was a cotton I packed anger in But when morning cracked like a seed Wit was the foot I stood upon. (54) In these pages there is a Fennelosan tachography afoot that results in compressed lines with the connectives between them left out: "the best join's unseen" one poem prompts ( 111). The intervals between lines sometime link up, and sometimes do not-which is to say that this is a style that jumps and cuts between lines, leaving argument in the interstice and forcing the reader into the poem. O'Brien is more a disjunctive than a discursive poet, and there's a certain pleasure to be taken in the speed with which his poems unfold. There are clear links intermittently, but even when the join is uncertain, vagueness is held at bay by the persistence of particulars that supply a synapse between a lived world and a moving mind: A day without subtitles A line at the bank An attention blunted or dispersed An architectural ornament Seen out the window twenty times Till it compares to nothing (37) Such poetry runs the risk of mere annotation (a lineated diary), but O'Brien is fully cognizant of this: "Remarks is not literature," he writes in another poem, "Arrest is literature" (39). And arrest here comes when that architectural ornament is shifted off the shelf of the quotidian ("Seen out the window twenty times") and into the unique ("Till it compares to nothing"). The concern with comparison and with "images, "windows," "eyes," "light," and "shadows" recurs throughout Sills, suggesting that O'Brien is a poet interested in vision and animated by likeness, even while he's cautious with both. This attention to likeness and comparison comes with a strong engagement with Platonism, and a firm recognition of its limits. A quoted voice in "Skin" asks, "Why multiply entities? …