It's Sad When We Dislike a Book We Want to Like...

A book I read recently which I disliked was Secret of Breath, by Isabelle Baladine Howald, translated from the French by Elena Rivera.

I have liked translator Rivera's poetry in the past, and I've liked some things I've read by Howald in the past (through Burning Deck's translation series and O.blek mag, I believe).

This book deals with death and loss, and I fear the writer is so devastated by the loss and the loss is so new, that the writing being done in response remains in the realm of catharsis.

It is painful to read, because it's the same stones that we've all had on our hearts and tongues before, and we know they'll be there again sooner or later.

Here are some excerpts...

"I must leave you. I must not die with you."

That is page 51 in its entirety. It's a book of spare lines and short paragraphs, a lost speaker wandering through a realm of newly-deposited death.

Many other pages bear single lines like that. It's difficult to return to (or imagine if you've been lucky this far) this place, but the horrible truth is all that the speaker has to seize are truisms, the same ones doctors give to the survivors in hospitals.

Or darker thoughts.

"To write alone for nothing and no-one, here is what's left."

I don't know how to respond to the work without sounding cavalier.

I mean it's authorial fallacy to even assume this is an actual death being processed by an actual person and not "poetic theater"; but even if it's not true for the author, it's true for so many tonight.

It's just that the author is trying to say the unsayable; speaking the truisms of the waiting room--where the rest of us wait to hear the finality of one--doesn't really add anything to the experience. The writing isn't able to reach art because there is too much damage sustained. As I said, it's difficult to look at it.

It's neither revelatory nor consolatory. Because poetry usually fails at that bourne anyway, unless it's going to mimic the poetry of past times and promise the usual forms of continuance: either an afterlife or the "energy translated" form of poem apres Whitman and many others who work along those lines.

Those are the two responses you can go with, basically.

And they both often seem woefully inadequate, unless you are dealing with a subscribed true believer of some sort.

Later, there is memory and reliving, joy in moments which escaped time, but at the bourne itself don't even bother. Somebody's going to get hurt if you start talking like that. You might even get brained with something heavy. And we might not even blame the griever. You will have brought it upon yourself.

People need magic and transformation at that vanishing point. Even to survive it takes transformation and magic.

And there is always the tertium quid. The impossible elegy. That all is lost but there is yet joy. Some poets have gotten away with it. How do they do it? Oh, I can't answer that! I think it's often a variation on the credo quia absurdum.

How human. How doomed and lovely.

Sometimes, I think it's a form of metamorphosis where the grieving human is just husked, shucked, removed from existence in an experience of depersonalization.

They step right outside of their body because they simply must.

It is a picture of our rare animal privilege. We have a strange marriage to time. We can say "no."

How did Stevens manage to say what he did so succinctly and nobly in his one small poem, the one about the fallen pilot?

That one still gets me: nihilistically moral.

There are some other poems by others.

Barbara Guest's "Rejoice in ancient nothingness."

But I'm sorry to say this book is more of the horrible weight of what we must carry.

Fardels of death. Arrayed as fardels.