Julie Suk, The Dark Takes Aim, Autumn House, 2003
With her new book of poetry, Julie Suk proves to be an afficionado of the quiet mode. Starting with a hesitant epigram from Czeslaw Milosz relating memory and pain, this is a document long on subtlety with a deeply pondered anguish for the brute quotidian of life. The book is ordered into three parts. In the opening tri-section, Demolition, the tension between ruins long-abandoned and the tragedies of modern history (personal or national) circumscribes the pain, the remembering, which seems so common in the world. The sorrowing is not permitted to take over, there remain small joys, satisfaction, and a faint measure of happiness, but the realities of genocide, terrrorism, failures and disappointments intrude, and can never be sufficiently distanced. The narrator of these poems would clearly like to declare an occasional victory and tries to, but the opportunities are few and fragile.
The poem she draws on for the title of her book (Rounds) references the fear that the mental illness that plagues the narrator's son will also visit her daughter's children. The naïve device of singing rounds, first with the boy before his troubles start, and now with the grandchild in her lap, stitches together the unexpected and the unspeakable. Modern medicine will have some idea of whether there is a genetic component to the son's condition, and she invokes DNA, suggesting there is: "this time, we hope/ the helix of notes/ descending in tune." Surely a brave hope. But then the narrator thinks of Aeschylus's insistence on sorrow; the mind gulps a bit and the heart stumbles, as this threnody concludes:
How lovely the eveningHere is the thematic structure of her pain, the demolition, and though she shares light moments and the occasional optimism when she can, nonetheless the anguish of the past reminds us to expect no better from the present or the future. All of human civilization can be marshaled to this point (though in Rounds it is an intensely personal demonstration of the recent past), and there exist almost no counter examples. Sometimes the beauty of Suk's lines is all that is offered to go between the reader and despair: "the strobe lights of memory/ playing out impressions of a tower/ you know is not there" (The Architecture Of Ruin); "Echos beat themselves senseless.// Our small lamps barely light/ the labyrinth" (In And Out Of Range); "miles of wheat swooning on all sides" (From Ruins). Frequently, this is all she can find to cling to herself.
with a child on my lap,
a circle of us singing
heedless of the dark taking aim.
She works with a modest palette: not many surprises emerge from the word hoard. Instead Suk provides layer upon layer of carefully observed, apt, telling details which particularize location or architecture or personality, while envisioning an interplay of elements. The world fares well in this presentation -- locales are interesting, scenes attractive, people achingly human in their desire to contact one another -- but all along, someone, just over the horizon, or just a while ago, is slaughtering someone else -- literally, metaphorically, intentionally, casually, always senselessly. Ms Suk's next tri-section (Drawn Into Arms) relents a little. What draws attention to the dark side, the choice of which side of the coin, the reason the cup is half empty, lies in a series of disappointments in the narrator's personal circumstances that seem to validate the gloomy vision of the world exhibited in the poems.
It is argued that love and loving offers a temporary reprieve, albeit illusory: "Desire kneels close/ praying I won't let go" (Bound As I Am). With love it is possible to forget for a while, to experience pleasure though fading, to make contact with others despite the compromise of living:
the illusion of something tangible --It is to her credit that the things that truly please her are invariably human, things that come through human interaction, other people -- all the rest are props. What darkens her vision is the clear sense of having fallen short of the mark all too often in the past:a hand caressing a hip,
a moon-washed quilt
slipping to the floor,
a voice calling out.
(Cezanne's Apples)
It's not forgiveness I want,It should be observed that it is in not having fulfilled the expectations of others that her sadness is rooted. One imagines that the trade-off was in following out her expectations for herself -- her art. It is to her credit that she never once launches this excuse.
It's the chance to revise
the rolls I failed,
the never ending chance
to play the story myself.
(Taking Back The Given)
It is a testimony to Suk's skill and outlook that the treatment of this succession of woes is never depressing nor condemnatory. Instead, a kind of pale beauty glows through, bitter-sweet, at a distance, though as much a part of the way things are as the other. We find great architecture, standing and tumbled-down, alongside the engines of demolition; noble deeds and intentions co-exist with immense barbarity; and on the personal side, memories of love and happiness, as well as current reaching-out, contrast with the physical and mental betrayal of time and aging. In fact, the personal poems in the third, the Haunted By Ruins tri-section are probably more affirmative than she set out to make them. Though there is plenty pulling in the dark direction-- mental illness of a child, divorce, death of a lover, unwanted parting, old strife -- it is intimacy and physical love that allow the waging of a holding action, "I'm Held To The World/ by its gravity, bloody and green/ in the savageness of change."
It is here Suk writes at length about love, and we surmise, about physical love refreshingly on the far side of fifty. In I'm Held To The World, amid shockingly generic violence, the narrator looks at her lover and observes "I'm afraid of time so sweet." We are shown a love secured at cost, an equivocal gain, where (Haunted By Ruin) "our weapons buried/ where we long since agreed not to go," love is possible, "yet we were at out best/ before exposure brought us down." Intimacy has been achieved through concessions of compromise. Even in the afterglow of a successful coming-together (Dust From Dying Stars) they are "falling into dreams the other won't admit." Suk's narrator argues that love is lived through people's experience (Leaving The World We've Loved Speechless), "the mouth puckers as soon as we're born,/ starved no matter how often and deep/ we push into someone else," and that, late in life, its compensation has also become an alienating factor (Reaching Into Night), "a threshold we linger on/ before we're whirled out/ beyond control, beyond caring."
