Rope Bridges

Abstract

Page 18 American Book Review Rope Bridges Laurel Blossom Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds Angela Ball University of Pittsburgh Press http://www.upress.pitt.edu 72 pages; paper, $14.00 In her fifth collection, winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), Angela Ball clowns around with the language (“branches— / Willow, olive, 1st National”) while at the same time exploring serious questions concerning the dualism of the world: “reality and appearance…subject and object, I and thou, being and nothingness, / Jean-Paul Sartre and John Stuart Mill, tractor and trailer, oyster /And pearl.” Ball’s aim appears to be to bridge these gaps, to render separation “[n]onexistent.” “MyAudition” puts the case directly: “I want to be you” (“your audacious frugality / And steamy existentialism, your resemblance / To a first-growth forest”). Ironically, these highly self-conscious poems reinforce the distance between things and our language for things, thereby undermining, deliberately or otherwise, their own risky enterprise. Ball makes her aesthetic antecedents clear: poems dedicated to French surrealists Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire ; poems addressed to British romantics Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth; references to Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, André Breton, and other twentieth-century (and earlier) artists and writers (“the marvelous troublemakers”) with whom she feels an affinity. One might say these colleagues, also, represent two different worlds, but Ball takes up the challenge of reconciling them in a quirky, rich poetic blend that works, in the surrealist tradition, to “abandon the pursuit of sense” precisely because, to the romantic imagination, “sense” turns “revelations into laundry.” Ball’s usually engaging wit ranges from wordplay (“The sewing arrives / But the needles have gone back into their haystacks”) to visual puns (“WAITRESS CAPS / Which have transmigrated… / To taxi roofs”), from the slantwise political (“Achilles’legs were sweet, and almost completely insured”) to the paradoxical profound (“We live honest lives / Of deception. If you’re together, don’t come”). Readers whose sympathies do not run to the Dadaesque may balk at super-conscious metaphors like the ones that appear, for instance, in “My Conference with Guillaume Apollinaire”: “A rhinoceros treasured her three-ring binder, a sax /Wanted to mate with a swan, a swan wanted to mate with saffron,” etc.; nor may they favor illogical juxtapositions like those in “Less-than-Stylish Ennui.” Arch conceits like “The Dress with Books on It Is Too Small” simply do not work. But, even without “getting” certain of these poems, willing readers will be carried along by the inventiveness of Ball’s language and imagination, especially in such poems as “Closet of Desserts,” “High-Rise,” or “My Boyfriend: A Confession.” Ball’s poems are anything but Confessional. Her “I” is a construct hovering somewhere between a recognizable persona and an abstract Ashberian “eye.” Presumably, Angela Ball has, or had, sisters; presumably, she has, or had, a mother and a father, though not necessarily this mother and father, not necessarily these sisters. However, an occasional piece of what might be the poet’s very female emotional or erotic biography does crop up. Such expressions of apparently personal experience can serve as entry points into the poems as a whole. In “What to Wear for Divorce,” for instance, she advises a sheepish deception: “Wear something worn first / By a wolf.” In “Once” she reveals, “Once I imagined a daughter named Maeve, / Not a clinic, a handful of Kleenex, / And an uncomfortable ride home.” And in “Boathouse” she describes a romantic moment as “The day I heard masculine laughter / From behind a door, and the cinnamon stick / In my tea began its unwrapping.” Reading this line, it’s difficult not to feel one’s own damp clothes coming off. These highly self-conscious poems reinforce the distance between things and our language for things. Gradually, recurring images attract attention: how often, for instance, the word “bridge” appears; how often Ball refers to modes of transportation, especially cars and trains; how the ordinary (the “real”) and the unexpected (the “surreal”) live side by side, like the carnival in the Kmart lot or...