Watching the Great Gears Turn: Tall, Majumudar, Shewmaker, Bonner, Kennedy

Abstract

Watching the Great Gears Turn:Tall, Majumudar, Shewmaker, Bonner, Kennedy Stephen Kampa (bio) A posthumous collection presents the same sorts of problems that collections of elegies do: a reader must bring the critical faculties to bear on something presented as art, yet the reader, like the writer, is human. How can one read such human documents as these without seeming inhuman through a criticism of diction or gripes about tropes? I have been glad to avoid writing about such books—Donald Hall's Without, Mary Jo Bang's Elegy, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions—but I have before me Deborah Tall's last book, Afterings, and I find myself in the unfortunate position of writing about a posthumous collection: a book that—by its nature, humanly speaking—sounds like a series of elegies for the self. This is not to say that the book itself is loaded with self-referential laments, but rather that all of these words will strike the knowing reader as last words, and last words tend to assume disproportionate importance. ("We owe a cock to Asclepius.") That being said, there are poems here that strike the elegiac note, and the word "aftermath" crops up more than once in this brief book. Given all that finality, I wish the book were better. I do admire certain aspects of Tall's work. She has, at times, a terrific ear—"From the ankles up / mis-angled," for example, or "each eyed / ephemeron, each / graphic bite mark / and decrypted inch of ground"—and I was struck on occasion by the aptness of her philosophical speculations: "What part solitude / is shame?" Her feel for the resonance of a word, for words' puns and puzzles, can be superb, as when she writes of "the rot that lurks in approximation" (we [End Page 291] note that r-o-t, in order, appear in "approximation"). Her gifts come together in "The Odd End of Days," a poem bearing this epigraph: "Today, 11/19/99, is the last day of your life that all of the digits of the date will be odd." It's all on display: her ear (a subtle rhyme of "body part" with "passport"), her metaphysical speculation, and her lexical depth. The final stanza reads, "From here on / we pay our respects / to aftermath," and that last word—loaded with the knowledge that, in some sense, all of our days are the aftermath of prior, significant days; that there must be something that transcends the merely mathematical, that comes after math; and that this is a poem in a posthumous collection—reverberates until it finds a mate in the final stanza of the final poem of the book ("Echo Factor"): "Before Echo / there was no love / of aftermaths." That is Tall at her best. Elsewhere, the collection is less inspiring. She has an irritating habit of using line breaks instead of commas in some places but not others, muddying her syntax, and she favors a phrasal free verse with regular sharp enjambments to distract from the general prosodic monotony. More than once, the best lines in a poem are borrowed: It would be finehere if it werefine here he wrote, everyonedead or dyingor just walking around. Those italicized bits, taken from letters by one Alfred Dove, rather steal the show. Occasionally, a poem doesn't live up to its promise: "Daughters," about the death of a woman's mother, includes the lines: No one is barring death's doorwith her own body. Nowshe is sole guardianpushing back her own daughters. [End Page 292] The lines are marvelous in that it is the daughters who need pushing back, as though they were eager to step through that door. The rest of the poem is a letdown. Perhaps hardest to put one's finger on is why or how so many other poems fail to leave any impression at all. I am not up to the task of such apophatic criticism. Reading a posthumous collection is a humbling experience. One recognizes the high stakes and long odds of a life lived for art. Perhaps it is just that combination that invites us to admire that so...