Revolver by Robyn Schiff

Abstract

colorado review 182 GRACE: Come. We girls are not supposed to be out after dark. Lorca writes: “the arrival of the duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane.” This poem addressing the horrors in Uganda creates a radical shift in the book and, perhaps, a radical shift in the silencing of the girls’ voices. Smith brings our poetic attention to this tragedy as we can no longer turn away our ears from this darkness. It takes duende to name a collection of poems Duende. Smith convincingly earns the title as her work passionately interrogates how death infuses every aspect of life with both awe and terror. As Lorca reminds us, “The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it.” Reading Smith’s Duende, we too are transformed. Revolver, by Robyn Schiff Kuhl House, 2008 reviewed by Dave Snyder To Novalis, the late-eighteenth-century German poet, the heart of Romanticism was defamiliarizing the familiar. Great advances in natural philosophy had divested the world of a strangeness that could be reclaimed, in Novalis’s words, by “romanticizing the world”; a process, as Christopher John Murray puts it the Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, “wherein all aspects of the universe become identified with the subject, and are thereby refined and ennobled ad infinitum.” Robyn Schiff’s Revolver represents a revision of this philosophy in a contemporary context. Each poem in the book takes an object or effect from the real world and destabilizes our understanding of it by applying a variety of poetic, historic, and personal associations and contexts. The real is confounded, made strange. While many of the objects come from the 1851 Great Exhibition, the contexts that envelop them are remarkably varied. A poem initially about a famous dress designed by Salvador Dali turns to a second half concerned primarily with CRSP09 nonfiction.indd 182 1/30/2009 12:55:50 PM 183 Book Notes Nazis and lycanthropy. The poem itself pleads, “what kind of world is this?” But as evinced in this example, Schiff is not “romanticizing the world.” Unlike Novalis, her subjects are not “refined” nor “ennobled” through the course of the work; rather they are decayed , hailed, and humbled (if not humiliated). Take, for example, the singularly captivating “Project Huia,” which Schiff dedicates “for my fifth wedding anniversary,” written in descending quatrains. The huia of the title is an extinct New Zealand bird that exhibited a great deal of physical difference between the genders and has recently been the subject of attempted cloning. In the space between each stanza, Schiff readjusts her focus with breathtaking ease—now to a pile of high school rugby players, now to a Chicago barbershop—finding lines and images that scatter our understanding of this bird, the natural world, survival, and human relationships: —The same force that arranges it the first time also dropped a struck tree on the last bucardo on Earth. The last of something Drains every day. Watch it go. I don’t love you anymore. I love you. I don’t love you anymore. Who can trust a daisy with regenerating petals? . . . This is an anniversary poem that ends with the line “an acid fountain, I cannot withdraw my offer,” and in this we find a violence and vulnerability, less palpable in Schiff’s earlier book Worth. This darker character is no more present than in “Project Paperclip ,” the longest, most complex poem, and the final one in Revolver. Evoking a breathtaking variety of associations, Schiff touches on nearly every category created in the book: violence, unrest, betrayal, pestilence, beauty, decay, and categorization itself. Beginning with—and taking its title from—a program that recruited Nazi scientists to the U.S. space program, the poem quickly digresses into Chinese furniture design, invasive insects, and on to writing. Here, from one of the poem’s sextet asides, she makes clear her process in this book: CRSP09 nonfiction.indd 183 1/30/2009 12:55:50 PM colorado review 184 (Perhaps memory is precise but when the room around a favorite...