Banquet of Ash

For artists, middle age is freighted with aesthetic drama. For poets, it’s also often a period of formal metamorphoses. Midlife crisis is a term too loaded with risible associations to be useful here. The transformation seems more a matter of taking inventory, the poet alighting on a doubt or an intuition and having a good look around. Evolutions during this period are frequent and substantial: the seriocomic alibi of Brazil in Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel (1965), the plastic pharmacopoeia of Frederick Seidel’s Sunrise (1979), Les Murray’s confessional word machines in Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), and Karen Solie’s eschewing of the hard-luck plains in The Caiplie Caves (2019). Each represents a significant departure written during the poet’s middle years. Here the provisional conclusions of the early work lie exhausted, and the delights and disappointments of a late style are as yet undisclosed. Such an interim invites its own risks and abdications. It is simultaneously a little death and a return to life.

Jana Prikryl’s third collection, Midwood (W.W. Norton, 2022), is in part a study of this vantage; the speaker of her poems is in some ways the vantage of middle age personified. Prikryl, who is 47, wrote these poems during the long mornings of the first COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020. Isolation suffuses the work, acting as a ruminative fluid in which to suspend her apprehensions. The poems’ environments and technologies are contemplative: the windowsill and the camera, the fire escape and the audio cassette, the mirror and the fisheye. They seem to enforce passivity—being primarily things the speaker looks through or listens to—though they end up performing a useful sleight of hand. They activate change, serving as a means of recall, a portal into other places and times, different landscapes, contrary ideas, and states of mind lost or found. They carry readers no less than the poet backward and forward into the imagined past and the crenelated present.

The moments of greatest intensity are those in which previous versions of the speaker present themselves—flipped through like a deck of cards—the fact of their extraordinary variance giving rise to her present-day wonder or despair. Prikryl often makes use of erotic memory to instigate these appearances, the poems serving as way stations of sexual maturity. There is the youthful insecurity of the pillow talk in “Traveling Play”: “for once I could tell your idea of me was changing / in due time you might have to take my mind seriously”; the imperiousness of “Trundle Bed,” in which the speaker recalls a man—“a bearded conglomerate”—whom “she resisted as far as was prudent, / past that I felt nothing”; the careless confidence of “The Noncello”: “still center of a crowded bar [...] / went up to him, said what I can’t remember / except my tone / the fool aware of his position, embracing it”; or the fatalism of “The Connection,” in which an older speaker can’t quite convince herself to regret what has come before: “even had I been kinder to my first rush of love / for you it would’ve come to nothing, our destination.” These instances—dynamically interwoven with present-day observations—are like listening to competing frequencies; readers lean forward to parse the static. Here the past and present are separately but simultaneously audible.

Prikryl has always been interested in amalgamates, instabilities, and periods of transition, what, in Midwood’s “The Painter,” she calls “the two verticals between / coming and going.” Her previous collections, The After Party (2016) and No Matter (2019), are marked by their sense of fluidity, of perceptions and situations changing like states of matter. The city is her setting in those books, a New York both painfully specific in its intimacy and universally metropolitan, the whole of it palimpsestic like a much-used text. Its apartments, bars, shops, and parks—the spaces of keen if fleeting memory—are legible only insofar as readers attain the fluency of mixed signals. These earlier books are filled with moments of refused or conflicted perception, as in “Binocular,” from No Matter, a meditation on vision, as complicated by a glass eye: “if anything’s lost by this, / all of it, if it spoke, might name the cost of its wit- / -nesslessness.” The depiction of the visible world’s uncertainty—the “weightless / unauthored” information the eye beholds—is the kind of disorienting moment one comes to cherish in Prikryl’s work. Her tools of vantage are also means of a deliciously subtle manipulation.

Midwood, though, strikes me as a thing somewhat apart, a strange, ecstatic, semi-pastoral crack up in which the suggestion of permanence provokes and challenges Prikryl’s impulse toward transient gesture. It abandons some of what Louise Glück calls “armored virtuosity” in favor of something that feels almost (but not quite) careening, a work at war with its own sense of control. Any examination of the book must begin and end with the 24-part titular poem, in which trees are both examined and spoken to. Each section serves as a sort of eye to the great storm of urban miscellany surrounding it. The result is an elegant formal machinery whirring about a sleek, mysterious center. Readers consort with the trees some two dozen times, rarely without a sense of awe or disquiet. The cadence at which they appear—roughly once every three to five poems, though sometimes more quickly—may have some formal justification, but it feels intuitive, arriving with the cryptic though right-seeming logic of a dream. The messages of the trees are also dreamlike in their obscure advisements. They sometimes serve as oblique examples for humanity: “you stand looking gently / down shaking heads / preparing us, your very slow branches saying little.” But preparing us for what? For the pain of change, perhaps, or something more ominous and final. There is a lovely, mournful patina about these short, numbered dispatches, a quality that approaches resignation. “What can the plants do but endure this closeness,” the poet asks in “Midwood 8.” And what can a person do—similarly burdened with persistence through time—but the very same?

That question of endurance, by no means assured, haunts many of the poems. It is sometimes expressed in an aphoristic flourish, as in “The Need,” in which a shopkeeper in a dream, “magnificent / in her indifference,” refuses the speaker her means of entry, “unmoved by the variety / of my rhetorical turns, refusing to give us / the key because there was no key.” It also manifests in the intimation of extraordinary pain, as in “Another Time,” when a group of Boy Scouts observed by the speaker calls to mind a doctor in Rome who’d advised her that she’d lost her baby: “The heartbeat’s gone // it’s very common, he said.” Readers think back to those costumed boys, what their youth, their very presence, may have wrought within her. These collisions of time, place, and expectation create a destabilized poetics, wherein discontinuity becomes a strategy for survival. Consider “How Kind,” in which a set of admissions cascades, the ache of self-knowledge managed by way of line breaks like surgical incisions: “the possible is here / in every judgment I try on / against myself,” or the agitations of “High Tide,” which juxtaposes the cinematic grief (“the headmaster weeping in closeup”), rapid commemoration (“a mural appeared”), and pitiless forgetfulness (“the pupils already loaded on the cars above, roaring toward the mainland”) that attend the drowning of a schoolgirl. This unexpectedness is wielded not for the purposes of cheap surprise but as a last-ditch effort to make sense of inexplicable lives.

Prikryl’s poems free themselves of the contexts they put forth to justify their existence. The observed Boy Scouts, for instance, “started another time in me.” There are no straight lines and no clean landings. The harbored images—whiskey decanters, weddings in France, blocks of limestone, swimming children, lindens and sycamores—attain their own mass and gravity. They warp the logic of sequence and splinter the narrative readers believe they are following. Rarely confined to a single register, these peculiar, wounding scenes jitter and pivot, the apocalyptic becoming the personal becoming the apocryphal. This is part of the pleasure of reading Prikryl’s poems, the sense of exhilaration that accompanies their disintegrations, the little moments of free fall before something stable is once more given—some unexpected image or situation—to stand upon.

These precarious footholds are hewed into evocative, often bucolic environments. References to topography abound: mountains, ravines, summits, valleys, hills, slopes, descents, and inclines. These are as much psychological landmasses as physical features, a geology of middle age. It’s there from the earliest poems, as in “Midwood 1”: “There in the ravine the place / that’s deepest, / bent.” An intention is set here. A life will be mapped, one adjacent to abysses and apogees alike. In “A Banquet,” latent anxiety follows a couple biking down a hill: “But having braked all the way to the floor of the valley / it dawned on us the slope we’d have to climb.” They come upon the site of a fire—midlife, a banquet of ash—which they anxiously leave behind, though not without a final realization: “so you said let’s go home, but look / the hill we came down is as steep as the hill ahead of us.” These techniques are also used in poems about youth. “Field Trip,” in which Prikryl deploys the same intimate topographies to suggest the bafflements of childhood, hangs on its seeking after acceptance or companionship: “I felt too inward, unwilling to immerse myself / though down that slope / I’d picked up a small jacket / to carry the rest of the day in case I found its owner.”

A cast of recurrent characters populates these poems. In addition to an intimate, nebulous you, there is “the baby,” “the boy,” “the little man,” the “apartment man.” They are children, family members, boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, though there is something of the stranger about each of them. The speaker tries to pierce their essential, compact strangeness, as of the “apartment man,” “lit by that hint of a smile / neither sweet nor cynical, / independent.” They emerge from a background tableau, briefly taking center stage before wandering off, though not out of earshot. The recurrence of these figures and the repetition of certain names across different poems—“The Noncello,” “Another Visit,” the numbered “Midwood” poems—create a vortex of refrain, an almost roundelay-like quality. Particular lines, too, are repeated in multiple poems. When readers recognize them, sometimes dozens of pages later, there is an uncanny experience of recall. One of the most powerful examples occurs in “A Lido” and “A Sample,” which begin with the same line: an "earthquake woke the baby.” Such is the force of memory in Midwood, a tectonic action loosed upon the folds and faults of time. Readers are drawn into the experience by way of this repetition, mirroring the action of remembrance: first as quake, then as aftershock.

The book’s final poem, “Second Nocturnal,” returns to the fire escape from which so many scenes have been observed and transformed:

The glass bowl the moon makes of the sky
held off, someone was sorting cutlery below
 
leaves shushed, here and there traffic sobbed
yet it was as though the ocean, five miles away, had come over
as good as if waves rush in under this fire escape
What would I do then?
I’d have it all, at the edge of the element we share
I’d have no more of wanting

What does it mean that it was “as good as if” the ocean had come to her? Is this threat or fantasy? There are intimations of climate change—how could there not be?—of rising seas, the metropolis become an undersea grotto. But there is also the welcoming of a different kind of oblivion, one that seems to promise a removal from time and need and the network of selves that anchor the speaker to her past. This is perhaps the dream of midlife: to begin again, to have somehow absorbed what has been learned while casting it off for good.

When that staggering question appears—one the book has been building toward—it stops readers in their tracks: “What would I do then?” This is the only punctuation used in Midwood and the only capital letter (save I) used to begin a new line. It is meant to be isolated, a provocation or challenge, though the speaker’s answer—“I’d have it all”—is surprising in its appetite, its forgiveness of the petty (sorted cutlery) and the sad (sobbing traffic), even its strangely moving sense of gratitude. And who, finally, is the we with whom she shares this ending? I took it to mean the trees of the “Midwood” cycle, those silent, swaying beings with whom she comes to identify in “Midwood 20”: “this is what they are, like me // annoying strivers / in constant danger of making bad choices.” Though it could just as easily be “the baby” or “the boy,” the "apartment man,” the ever-present “you.” Behind every image extends a history of transactions read and re-read over the course of Midwood. To interpret this final poem, readers must also still in some sense be reading the first. Just as the speaker is neither up on a fire escape nor in “the place / that's deepest," but rather somehow between them, so too do readers blur in these pages, remembering moments and repeated words, meeting with strange figures, running downhill, or climbing the next rise. If midlife has brought Midwood, readers must be grateful for its startling, unreconciled, and compassionate view. Though at times despairing, this is not the work of despair. Rather, Prikryl’s poems uncover a consoling order within the richness of catastrophe: “the absence of meaning / also is a guide.”