Reviewed by: So Forth by Rosanna Warren Richie Hofmann (bio) So Forth, by Rosanna Warren (W. W. Norton, 2020), 83 pp., $25.95 Rosanna Warren is a poet who savors the extremes of the sacred and the profane. So Forth, her latest collection, is a reliquary: for artifacts of hunger and violence, desire and memory. Throughout the book, these objects are infused with meaning, with narrative potential, with secret knowledge. The world in So Forth seems always to be tremblingly alive: its trees, its statues, its seas. Even dead things are awakened, animated by the poet’s surprising diction and skittish figurations: a snake’s discarded skin becomes, in Warren’s imagination, “fairy lingerie on a stone wall.” Disciplined by her erudition and by the hard truths of experience, Warren reminds us that what is eternal is experienced first through the body and through the “so forths” and “et ceteras” it leaves behind. In one poem, she explores the “cardboard mausoleum” of an ancestor’s belongings. In another, even scraps of poems are “letters / drained of sense, in phantom script.” In the thrilling denouement of “As If,” the speaker, disoriented by desire, identifies herself with a half-butchered fish’s beating heart on a marble slab: the heart blurping and shuddering in its own obstinate rhythm. As if, it seemed to say,as if, you idiot, you ever could be free. Her images—dynamic, violent, pulsing—record an inventory of relics, each waiting to be touched, described, venerated, remembered. What can these objects hold? the poems in So Forth ask; what knowledge can they keep? The world that arises in the poems is a rarified one; Rosanna Warren is moved by the history of art, by European travel, by literary forbearers. Most often, she is drawn to the dark underside of that refinement, to exposing the depravity that many of the relics of Civilization seek to elide. Two herons have “legs as long as stilts, / silver high heels and miniskirts warped at the crotch.” In a sort of ode to Montpellier, the poet addresses the city: “you are the Queen of Summer, patroness / of gold neck chains, cut-crystal perfume vials, and exotic tea.” The dizzying environment seduces, but the ancient megalographic stories—of kings and saints— make room for the quotidian realities of working-class France: “Necklines plunge in your honor, motor scooters chortle and bleat.” In “Sans Domicile Fixe,” while Europe “contracts into dark burgundy upholstery,” outside, “the new homeless twist dreadlocks // and pace their mastiffs.” Warren’s poems often derive their energy from these tensions, as well as those between Baroque excess of imagery and astringency of feeling. In the book’s impressive central sequence, “Legende of Good Women,” which imagines, sometimes in their voices, the lives of certain women artists, she [End Page 475] meditates on the singer Marianne Faithfull, who “shredded her voice but still she offered each song, / she said, like an Appalachian artifact.” Each of the historical women Warren imagines—whether Coco Chanel or one of Rodin’s models—must make her art out of the roughness of life. As she asks of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: Translate us too, rough line by line, into your crystallinesevere design. Though some poems in So Forth perform a more traditional music, most find their expression in a free verse with a deckle edge, untrimmed and utterly seductive. Her poem, “Darklight,” is astonishing in its unfolding: The moon dragged her string-net bag of shadows through the boughsas we felt our way alongthe night road, gravel cracklingunder our feet: the streamin the gully gnashed dark thoughts about the rocksand we steeredby treetops, tall spruces with their necromancers’ sleeves,white pines raising arms insupplication, celebration, who could tell:from the meadow, we’d seenCassiopeia’s maternal zigzag: hard to losea daughter to sea monster, then to bridegroom, but allthat family sorrow nowtwinkles quietly in the enormous sky . . . So many of the poems in So Forth move with the directness and control of Rosanna Warren’s sumptuous and perfect Anne Verveine poems—imaginary translations published in her collections, Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red...
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Feb 28, 2021
Liana Mikhailovna Akhmetzyanova + 1
