Heard-Hoard by Atsuro Riley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heard-Hoard by Atsuro Riley Julian Gerwitz Atsuro Riley Heard-Hoard Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2021. 96 pages. IF YOU WANT to understand what the poet Atsuro Riley is up to, start with the title of his second collection: Heard-Hoard. This could be the name of a hymnary, a mystical almanac, or even a book of spells; the phrase promises a great store of sound and story, gathered up through generations. Sonically, its half-rhyming Old English monosyllables preview the strong, dense music for which Riley is known. Linking the two words into a kenning also immediately positions Riley in a poetic lineage from Gerard Manley Hopkins—one thinks of his poem entitled “Heaven-Haven,” for instance—to Seamus Heaney. (In Heaney’s “North,” we find the admonition: “Lie down / in the word-hoard . . .”) Most of all, the title unabashedly lies outside the naming conventions of much contemporary poetry; this book will not be like others, the title announces. Paradoxically, the book is no less unique for the fact that Riley returns here to the same terrain as his much-lauded first book, Romey’s Order (2010), which was set in the South Carolina low country where Riley grew up. Some characters recur, and two poems repeat in much-revised form. But these are profoundly different books. Romey’s Order was grounded in named geographies, a defined child-narrator (the titular Romey), the identifiable biographies of his ex-soldier father and Japanese mother, and specific memories. Heard-Hoard is far stranger, sparer, and more abstract, with more universal claims about the human condition and the powers of language. Riley is like a painter who increasingly allows color, form, and texture to be his guide, as he becomes less concerned with making the subject or the narrative explicit to the viewer and more interested in creating universal sensory, emotional, and philosophical effects. The first poem in the collection, “Crack-ler,” declares that the book will aim straight for “What came to seem to him the core // (the pulsing core),” which is “a lit / meat-mesh of heards” and “tales he’d gnawed.” The book moves deep into this “pulsing core,” a mythic realm that is hot with dirt, flesh, “meat-mesh,” and the irreducible, luminous “ember-words” of his experience. What Riley means by “the core” is visible in the brief poem “Chorus: Seed,” a snapshot of a child: “The knee-boy / bent to his daddy’s shoes / spit-gobbetting and rag-shammying // hard for shine.” This scene may seem to be generic, in a sense—with no location, temporal markers, or contextual details—but it conveys the feeling of both an intensely specific personal memory and the beginning of a myth. Riley compresses several valences into the first two lines. The boy is made into a worker down on his knees polishing shoes—and also a supplicant before the absent father, symbolized by “daddy’s shoes.” Riley’s use of the “knee” evokes the forces that interrupt the innocence of childhood—being thrown over a parent’s knee to be spanked, or even the racist playground chants using the phrase “dirty knees” to target children of Asian origin. (Heard-Hoard, like Romey’s Order, contains powerful descriptions of anti-Asian racism and violence in the communities where Riley grew up.) Here, the “bent” child seems to be the grim axis around which this family’s life revolves, almost in the way that Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus centers on that boy’s brilliantly illuminated knee. Next, the actual task—polishing the shoes—is disaggregated into two components, rendered in Riley’s characteristic diction: turning the nouns “gobbet” (which can mean a small quantity of liquid) and “shammy” (a cloth of chamois leather) into verbs that can take a gerund form. In both cases, these coinages seem almost onomatopoetic of the actions they describe, with “shammying” calling up the rapid shimmying friction of the cloth polishing the shoes. These consonant-heavy phrases convey a jumpy anxiety to please, a twanging desire to do the task right. The stanza break suspends the actions in time for a moment, before three firm, monosyllabic punches end the poem. “Shine” is...