FAME, Kevin McGrath. Saint Julian Press, 2053 Cortlandt,
Suite 200, Houston, Texas 77008, 2023, 253 pages, $25.00 paperback,
Unlike
most contemporary poetry being written in the English language—particularly contemporary
American poetry—the poetics and structure of FAME are not what Megan Fernandes,
author of I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023) calls an “artifice
of mess.”
Kevin McGrath describes poetry in
the Afterword, and enacts on every one of its 252 pages of tight, what he calls
regulated verse, as not existing “except in a formal and harmonious state… that
forceful coherence suppl[ying] us with our necessity and location….”
Written
primarily in iambic tetrameter, fitting almost always seven stanzas (centered) per
page, dividing this long poem (it cannot really be called a collection) into
four parts that McGrath lays out for the reader on page two (“I - 2”) as “four
winds.”
There are
four winds about the world
That move within the human soul
First – the strange attraction going
Between
a girl and boy
The second takes us on in time
So that we might look back
At the residence and procession
Of what is lost upon our way
The third is the emptiness that
Fills up our breathing days
As we go toward our source
Its quietness makes us more still
The final air is that of beauty
Quick ephemeral always true
The breeze that makes substantial
Everything we do not know
Song of what we cannot say
The center or subject matter
or tension in Fame is a recreation of the hero’s journey of Achilles as
emblematic of the “one narrative in this world,” this work reflecting that
pattern in each of its four sections of 1) the Attraction between male and
female; 2) Time’s arrow; 3) Emptiness; and 4) Beauty.
Reminiscent
of the adoration passages spoken by the writer of The Song of Songs from
the Biblical canon (e.g. “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art
fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks…thy lips are like a thread of
scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a
pomegranate within thy locks”—from Chapter 4, vs 1-3), are the one-hundred
pages of section I, of which stanzas from I-21 and I-22 follow:
I-21
They come
and go and trespass
Freighted
with desire
Young women of the spring
In their summer dresses
Crocus yellow hyacinth
Their golden shoulders bare
A
green text burning
Sweet
upon their lips
I-22
The nature
of my love is this
I witness you as no other
When you are mine to hold
Refining our warm volume
I love your
bones and your smell
A scent of leaves and rain
At the hollows of your joints
My hands confess their love
And in section I-67, a long piece
defining the essence of love, we seem to have an answer to the above passages,
at least in part:
Love
gives us tongues and insight
It fills us with concupiscence
Without
love we are empty creatures
Phantoms who
cannot speak nor touch
His voice
removed my loneliness
Just as his
strength took my lust
In his person I find a home
And in his sleep I find rest
Many references to
“Time” in section II are told “slant” as Dickinson suggested and exemplified: (“Being
drawn by the not-having / And then in the satisfaction / We still miss the
conclusion / To this long endless call” from II-2; “There is only one day ever
/ In our live and one occasion / For vision to be complete” from II-4; and “These
slow hours are insufficient / For you [to] sleep far away content / Unaware of
how life could rest” from II-7 are examples.) However, in II-23 McGrath speaks
more directly to “Time” from a subjective perspective:
On my
sixty-sixth year on earth
I walked out for distraction
Loving the
sand loving the dust
The unmasking of the air
A firm wind
from off the lake
Was bevel on the hot light
As if
desperate for release
For destiny to be complete
The
distance were hazy and
The low brown hills at rest
As my years
gathered close
Awaiting their dismissal
So much
time so little place
So little achieved in living
Yes this is
where my heart stays
Where I wish to sleep
Section
III brings us to “…the emptiness that / Fills up our breathing days.” Examples
of images that haunt these lines are “…a field / Surrounded by speechless
stones” (III-1); a “perfect sphere” that “appears when we close / Our eyes and
there is no sound” (III-2); “…life is a mirror…/ …no one is truly present”
(III-3); “light becomes quiet // / The river empty of boats / No one works the
ridged fields” and “…an infinite sea” where we “ Submerge and leave no trace”
(III-5); “…a river made of shadow / Flowing deep into the earth” (III-8); a
“universe…made of night / Of coldness…/ …no shadows moving / Among silent
minerals” (III-9); “A glass of water…consumed / … / …life becomes invisible”
(III-12); and again, “…a mirror / …. / Called solitude when we / Become absent
from ourselves” (III-18). And yet, McGrath never falls into despair, holding
onto a belief in love—"When love calls from a distance // …no one sleeps
nor deceases” (III-13)—and a belief in beauty, which is the focus of Section
IV.
There are
three causes here
Driving us among the days
Drawing us through time
Where beauty
is unspeakable [italics mine]
In
section four, the first three sections (attraction between lovers; time’s
arrow; emptiness; and beauty) are re-capitulated and emerge from McGrath’s pen
as birds and other winged creatures (swallows, fireflies, dragonflies, kestrels,
and falcons, e.g.) to carry love aloft, epitomized by the love of Achilles
(IV-15):
Achilles you loved too much
You went beyond this world
Only your
horses knew your way
And there was no zero at all
This first stanza re-introduces
Achilles and the reader understands that McGrath has been writing about him all
along:
Your song
became beautiful
Perfectly
light and sonorous
You went so
far out of time
Unbound by
the breath of words
In III-14, McGrath opens with a
passage that captures, for this reader, perhaps the most insistent of the many
themes in this dense, yet musically lyrical tome:
The choirs
that compose our lives
Birds cicadas wind rainfall
Someone call out our name
When there is no one present
So we lightly part the air
With words or with footsteps
A
vast immortal order we
Do not observe yet inhabit
In Fame, Kevin McGrath parts
the air with music that rivals the best of classical poetry, drawing from all
three genres: the dramatic, the narrative, and the lyrical. Readers will be
elevated to musical and ideational heights for generations to come, reading
this epic poem, so unusual these days for its beauty of language and coherence of
thought.
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