Sills: Selected Poems

Abstract

Michael O'Brien. Sills: Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000. Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, think we have to make a welcome exception. Although he published work by Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky, and many others in The Eventorium Muse in New York in 1960s, O'Brien appears to be little known in today's circuit (for instance, Muse isn't included in Granary's Secret Location on Lower East Side). His earlier books are nearly impossible to find, so we need this collection to make clear what a strong voice it is that we've been missing. O'Brien is a younger contemporary of NewYork School, but his poetry distinguishes itself from their sprawling, inclusive poetics by hearkening back to that leaner school of New Yorkers, Objectivists. His early work is inflected with influences of Hart Crane, French Symbolism, and Surrealism (he's translated Eluard), which is to say that he comes close at points to nonce wit of Ashbery or Koch. But his general tendency is in a different direction, more contained and more precise. As this book traverses 40-odd years of poet in city and country, alone and in company, at home and on street, it traces an itinerary through what one poem calls perceptual difficulties (38) and what another calls the world and its (75). These poems are stripped of decoration, and although majority consist of short lines, O'Brien has a formal range that maintains a spark in a variety of configurations on page, from pentameter lines to prose poems (the latter bearing none of inertia that form has lately been subject to). The first person pronoun appears in roughly half of these poems, although there's no doubt that someone moves behind those without it, setting them in motion: it would be impossible to conceive of them as less than lived. When lyric I does appear there's usually an element of honesty in voice, an unforced, relaxed reflexiveness, as in following recognition of limits of poetry as equipment for living (to use Burke's memorable phrase): thought poem Was a cotton packed anger in But when morning cracked like a seed Wit was foot stood upon. (54) In these pages there is a Fennelosan tachography afoot that results in compressed lines with connectives between them left out: the best join's unseen one poem prompts ( 111). The intervals between lines sometime link up, and sometimes do not-which is to say that this is a style that jumps and cuts between lines, leaving argument in interstice and forcing reader into poem. O'Brien is more a disjunctive than a discursive poet, and there's a certain pleasure to be taken in speed with which his poems unfold. There are clear links intermittently, but even when join is uncertain, vagueness is held at bay by persistence of particulars that supply a synapse between a lived world and a moving mind: A day without subtitles A line at bank An attention blunted or dispersed An architectural ornament Seen out window twenty times Till it compares to nothing (37) Such poetry runs risk of mere annotation (a lineated diary), but O'Brien is fully cognizant of this: Remarks is not literature, he writes in another poem, Arrest is literature (39). And arrest here comes when that architectural ornament is shifted off shelf of quotidian (Seen out window twenty times) and into unique (Till it compares to nothing). The concern with comparison and with images, windows, eyes, light, and shadows recurs throughout Sills, suggesting that O'Brien is a poet interested in vision and animated by likeness, even while he's cautious with both. This attention to likeness and comparison comes with a strong engagement with Platonism, and a firm recognition of its limits. A quoted voice in Skin asks, Why multiply entities? …