(Reviewer: Roy Robins, Vol. 67, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2012
Drastic Dislocations is a selection of poetry from Barry Wallenstein’s six previous collections – from Beast is a Wolf with Brown Fire (1977) to Tony’s World (2009) – and includes more than sixty new poems. The selection is a shrewd one, exhibiting the poet’s peculiarly skewed and entirely unpredictable vision of contemporary life.
From poem to poem, stanza to stanza, Wallenstein’s tone shifts smoothly from robust to restrained, jubilant to jaundiced. He is a master of the almost invisible transition, the seemingly effortless metamorphosis of meaning and mood. He writes as vividly about the simple splendour of a summer day as he does when evoking what Delmore Schwartz described as ‘the famous unfathomable abyss.’
If existence is an abyss, it can best be fathomed, for Wallenstein, with family, good company, sensual experience, and, of course, the poet’s beloved jazz. (Many of these poems have been performed publicly, with live jazz accompaniment.) With its elastic inflections, Wallenstein’s verse is full of grace notes and blue streaks and surprising sideways turns into dreams of despair and cold-eyed self-assessment. He portrays pain authentically – which is to say, painfully – but also writes movingly about that most artistically unfashionable entity: human happiness.
Many of the poems in this volume are affirmative, full of an optimism that feels equalparts European and American, simultaneously measured and carefree, open to every sensation, made buoyant by the bliss of infinite possibility. Whereas in his early work, one gets a sense of a poet who does not love quite enough, in his most recent verse Wallenstein seems to possess within him inexhaustible affection.
He writes most tenderly about his family. ‘Ballad,’ a conversation between the poet and his deceased mother, is especially accomplished:
What are you doing my darling son?
I’m sitting in this boat, dear mother.
And where is your boat my son, pray tell?
At sea in the distance my mother.
The poem, with its melancholic reverie, its intermingling of past and present, child and adult, memory and dream, is simple and savagely stirring. The nursery-rhyme form carries the reader a long way, but the underlying sense of loss and anguish takes one further still.
‘Father at 85’ is similarly poignant and probing. The poem’s final line – ‘He still wants more’ – registers like a jolt of electricity. It is as powerful a refrain as Philip Levine’s ‘You can have it’ or Robert Frost’s ‘Provide, provide!’ or the words that close out Delmore Schwartz’s ‘America,
America!’: ‘more: more and more: always more.’
It seems fitting to follow Wallenstein’s family, his children, their history, from inception to adulthood, through the inter-leading rooms that form the house of this book. Here is Wallenstein in ‘Four Weeks to Birth’:
Our genes are hiding in the belly of a fish
in the skin of a belly
in the belly of a fish
floating glyphs
micro-hints of dancing ghosts.
In ‘Jessie Beforehand,’ he describes his daughter’s foetus, which ‘swims in the famous lucidity / of mother’s love and our confusion.’
Wallenstein’s verse veers, too, between admirable lucidity and not always artful confusion. There are times – most frequently in Tony’s World – where he exhibits a tendency towards unnecessary abstraction. In these instances, his jazz métier begins to feel less like an asset and more like camouflage for cryptic sentiment. But it is possible to be both jazzy and precise; both cryptic and exacting.
The titular protagonist of Tony’s World is an elusive alter ego, reminiscent of the Henry of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. At once urban prophet and holy fool, Tony is deliciously defiant and defiantly himself – he is Wallenstein’s most memorable lyrical conceit.
Perhaps surprisingly for a poet who has spent most of his life in Manhattan, some of the finest poems in this collection concentrate on the country rather than the city. Wallenstein rarely romanticizes nature, nor does he attempt to desensitize or demolish it. He is attentive in an unpretentious manner, aspiring towards understated Impressionism and gentle selfexpression. The marvellously meditative early poem, ‘A House in the Mountains,’ celebrates simple pleasure and a lovely calm, as its speaker spends hours ‘watching a valley / move through colours and into the dark.’ The naturalism in later poems is poised between classical evocation and a mordant, modern wit.
Elsewhere in the collection, Wallenstein frames his verse within the Brownean dramatic monologue, subverts fairy tales and simple rhyme, and re-makes myth. Memorable poems include the wonderfully wild ‘Roller Coaster Kid’, and ‘A Turn of Events’, which feels like Robert Frost by way of Sam Peckinpah.
Wallenstein writes deftly about ‘the gathering grace of – / going on.’ He excels at interrogating the intersection between the earthly and the outward-bound. Whereas many poets become weary with age, Wallenstein appears to feel both freed up and fired up, experimenting with form and unafraid to explore life’s pleasures and perils. Drastic Dislocations demonstrates the consistently high standard of his work these past thirty-five years.
Whether one is a long-time admirer or engaging with Wallenstein’s verse for the first time, this is a vibrant and valuable volume.
Drastic Dislocations by Barry Wallenstein, NYQ Books, New York, 2012.
Roy Robins was a 2010-11 Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts fellow. He was formerly the online editor for Granta magazine. He holds an MA degree in English Literature.
