Jackson McCarthy, Portrait
Portrait is a beautiful book, absolutely of its time, with its vulnerability, beauty and emotional intensity, and knowingly part, too, of a long tradition of lyric poetry, taking up time-honoured lyric strategies ranging from the sonnet form, to the triangulated love relationship. Vulnerability, beauty and emotional intensity are of course themselves time-honoured lyric qualities, as are the equally contemporary obsessions with death, nostalgia, memory and the body – but no other poet brings all these aspects of the lyric together with quite the combination of control and passion, reverence and originality, seriousness and irony that Jackson achieves in this quietly spectacular collection.
The sonnet “Adam” sets up this relation to the lyric at the very start of the collection (following only the lovely “Prelude,” a poem of Modernist formal perfection about walking past a funeral, a kind of miniature version of Auden’s Old Masters). A sonnet, and a love poem, “Adam” is an ode to a man whose beauty is enhanced by the way he holds a red oil cannister (so much depends upon the red oil cannister), but it is also a joke about the speaker’s pose as a lyric poet, with the sonnet’s twist in the final couplet being the self-conscious performance of the poet’s lyric interiority, “for a crowd had gathered like black water / to hear these: my innermost thoughts.” This is one of several sonnets throughout the collection, all of them artful and witty, jolting the reader into surprise at every twist.
The arguably more contemporary, arguably even older form of the spell is taken up, too, in a series of three poems, “Make me of the body spell,” “Love your messy hair spell,” and “Moonlight Spell.” The last of these refers to the magic that, as readers, we can experience working on us: “If poetry could make you love me, / it would, I think.” The use of the subjunctive here beautifully combines the lover’s diffidence and a Shakespearean confidence as a poet: if poetry could, it would. And the sonnet, ending with the doors locked, the command to “show me things / show me more,” ultimately seems confident on both counts, even as the work of the poet (to show, to show more) is handed over to the lover. The confidence is part of the magic, as is the twisting artfulness, and a lyric sound-patterning is also part of the magic, of this and other poems in the collection.
In the centre of the collection are a set of surreal prose poems, quite different from the poems surrounding them in style. The first poem begins with a mention of John Ashbery, and the dream logic of Ashbery’s poems flourishes here in the prose format. What are the fifty swans doing in the back of the boy’s truck, and what is he planning to do with them? The speaker – grown older in the course of the poem – doesn’t know, and nor do we. But seven swans recur in the final poem in this sequence, belonging to the speaker’s son and, once again, in the back of a truck, mysterious and unreadable. The son, like the speaker of the first poem, has grown older, the way, of course, sons are wont to do. Are they seven of those first fifty swans, or a new generation of swans altogether? But never mind the swans! The son’s beauty, his return home, is so moving to the father, “it is like the end of an opera,” and he listens to the wisdom his son has to impart ,“a stirring mantra that revealed a simple truth.” And here is the truth, in the poem, even as the poem’s final last line proclaims its own impossibility: “It was too late, for I had already written the poem.”
Comedy and belatedness, and the comedy of belatedness, livens these wonderfully entertaining, mysterious and wise prose poems as they liven the collection as a whole. Nostalgia, memory, backward glances, and the bookending of mortality not only recur from one poem to another, giving individual poems their dark shine, but are suggested too in the way the collection as a whole is so artfully arranged. Beginning with a “Prelude,” and ending with a “Song” that is also a “Foregone conclusion,” the collection is arranged symmetrically around the prose poem sequence at its centre, with echoes and repetitions adding to the book’s resonance.
What I am saying is: Even if you know and love the poems by Jackson McCarthy you have already read, you have a discovery in store for you, of the intricate beauty and glittering depths of this collection as a whole.
Portrait is a beautiful book, absolutely of its time, with its vulnerability, beauty and emotional intensity, and knowingly part, too, of a long tradition of lyric poetry, taking up time-honoured lyric strategies ranging from the sonnet form, to the triangulated love relationship. Vulnerability, beauty and emotional intensity are of course themselves time-honoured lyric qualities, as are the equally contemporary obsessions with death, nostalgia, memory and the body – but no other poet brings all these aspects of the lyric together with quite the combination of control and passion, reverence and originality, seriousness and irony that Jackson achieves in this quietly spectacular collection.
The sonnet “Adam” sets up this relation to the lyric at the very start of the collection (following only the lovely “Prelude,” a poem of Modernist formal perfection about walking past a funeral, a kind of miniature version of Auden’s Old Masters). A sonnet, and a love poem, “Adam” is an ode to a man whose beauty is enhanced by the way he holds a red oil cannister (so much depends upon the red oil cannister), but it is also a joke about the speaker’s pose as a lyric poet, with the sonnet’s twist in the final couplet being the self-conscious performance of the poet’s lyric interiority, “for a crowd had gathered like black water / to hear these: my innermost thoughts.” This is one of several sonnets throughout the collection, all of them artful and witty, jolting the reader into surprise at every twist.
The arguably more contemporary, arguably even older form of the spell is taken up, too, in a series of three poems, “Make me of the body spell,” “Love your messy hair spell,” and “Moonlight Spell.” The last of these refers to the magic that, as readers, we can experience working on us: “If poetry could make you love me, / it would, I think.” The use of the subjunctive here beautifully combines the lover’s diffidence and a Shakespearean confidence as a poet: if poetry could, it would. And the sonnet, ending with the doors locked, the command to “show me things / show me more,” ultimately seems confident on both counts, even as the work of the poet (to show, to show more) is handed over to the lover. The confidence is part of the magic, as is the twisting artfulness, and a lyric sound-patterning is also part of the magic, of this and other poems in the collection.
In the centre of the collection are a set of surreal prose poems, quite different from the poems surrounding them in style. The first poem begins with a mention of John Ashbery, and the dream logic of Ashbery’s poems flourishes here in the prose format. What are the fifty swans doing in the back of the boy’s truck, and what is he planning to do with them? The speaker – grown older in the course of the poem – doesn’t know, and nor do we. But seven swans recur in the final poem in this sequence, belonging to the speaker’s son and, once again, in the back of a truck, mysterious and unreadable. The son, like the speaker of the first poem, has grown older, the way, of course, sons are wont to do. Are they seven of those first fifty swans, or a new generation of swans altogether? But never mind the swans! The son’s beauty, his return home, is so moving to the father, “it is like the end of an opera,” and he listens to the wisdom his son has to impart ,“a stirring mantra that revealed a simple truth.” And here is the truth, in the poem, even as the poem’s final last line proclaims its own impossibility: “It was too late, for I had already written the poem.”
Comedy and belatedness, and the comedy of belatedness, livens these wonderfully entertaining, mysterious and wise prose poems as they liven the collection as a whole. Nostalgia, memory, backward glances, and the bookending of mortality not only recur from one poem to another, giving individual poems their dark shine, but are suggested too in the way the collection as a whole is so artfully arranged. Beginning with a “Prelude,” and ending with a “Song” that is also a “Foregone conclusion,” the collection is arranged symmetrically around the prose poem sequence at its centre, with echoes and repetitions adding to the book’s resonance.
What I am saying is: Even if you know and love the poems by Jackson McCarthy you have already read, you have a discovery in store for you, of the intricate beauty and glittering depths of this collection as a whole.
