The Spiny Lyric I: Irredenta and Pastoral Lyricism

Irredenta by Oscar Oswald. Nightboat Books, 2021. 88 pages. $16.95.

“[O]f interrogations lost / on me American / enveloper by nature,” says the speaker of the poem “First Verse” in Oscar Oswald’s debut Irredenta, and the questioning of what and who gets to define “nature” is part of the poetic ethos of this book. Merriam-Webster defines the term irredenta as “a territory historically or ethnically related to one political unit but under the political control of another.” In Irredenta, Oswald interrogates the meaning of the titular concept by exploring the pastoral lyric poem as site of—and site of opposition to—toxic state language and white colonialism in America. Oswald makes strange the language of ecology and American discourse through poems in which these various dictions ghost through one another syntactically, where the speaker walks “to wood fairweather citizen / stand upstream headwater absentee – / stem of my name capital, and juniper my lifeblood period” (“Exeter”) and where the speaker states “I song with those who are not made their destinies” (“The Young Herdsman”). The diction of capital, citizenry, weaponry, colonization, settlement, and Manifest Destiny fill, disrupt, trouble the spiritual pastoral imagery of the poems in Irredenta, in turn interrogating the pastoral image of white settler colonialism. 

Much of this work happens through the juxtapositions created through the line-level syntax throughout Irredenta. In “The Travel Poem,” for instance, Oswald uses collisions of language to work through the notion of the travel poem as a genre in which a speaker’s naming (and renaming) of things is a form of harm:

sunray spiny daisy mind

my barren mind Democracy—

my deadly hand all things I touch rename

my o and o writ into aspen

same I share with atom and the nature back away

The hand that writes and renames—suggestive of colonization and “barren mind Democracy”—is “deadly,” and the pastoral lyric “o” of a lone speaker crying out in a wilderness becomes “writ” into the tree, a kind of scarring and marring, an overwriting with the speaker’s self. The speaker’s “daisy mind” runs up syntactically against “sunray spiny” in the same line, which is sonically pleasing at one level but suggests something more troubled and prickly (or pricking) with “spiny” lurking beneath the daisy. Verbs like “touch” and “rename” stack against each other syntactically with no connecting words, and “the nature back away” makes syntactic sense strange, disorienting our sense of grounding in the sentence’s linearity. Such disorientation troubles the American pastoral tradition and notion of citizenry in a larger sense. The speaker who claims to “share with atom” also depicts a nature “back away” (tucked away? backing away? erased?), the lyric “I” in fact harming and damaging through the very act of claiming to share and be one with all things in nature.

Indeed, the notion of a cohesive and coherent lyric “I” in Irredenta is troubled and questioned. In some instances, the “I” almost becomes an object through its syntactic position in the sentence, such as a line in “The Young Herdsman” that reads “what though I open question I exits companion” where the “I exits.” In “The New Poem,” by contrast, the speaker declares “I am the brag this early hour,” as though the “I” becomes synonymous with the brag and declaration that is suspect through its associations with “deadly” harm in other poems throughout the collection. The “I” of these poems floats through images of lyric beauty such as “yucca thousand times in bloom” (“The Travel Poem”) or “I moth a star I crow a crosswalk” (“Saunterer”) as well as images of artillery, helicopter, ambush. When the speaker makes the following lyric declaration in “The Young Herdsman,” is the “I” a voice of resistance or complicity?

That is true north where I receive it.

I will conclude after the outline I

my fruitless labor –

goodbye crossfire language draws to bow

Is the “I” one of finding a true north, of a fruitless labor of somehow saying goodbye to “crossfire language,” or is it a lyric I that is deeply enmeshed and a product of the weaponry of American diction? These questions feel like a productive tension and ambiguity created by the poems throughout Irredenta. At all turns, we see that cactus, cliff, light are hovered over by helicopter. When the speaker of “Inscription (Or Epitaph)” says “I pick people off the ground I citizened” one hears the incessant, individual I, I, I, of the American notion of private citizen and all harm therein. The speaker may claim “Rosemary my atlas” (“The Young Herdsman”), but who draws the atlas and the maps, and who gets to claim that their atlas is “just” nature? Oswald deftly interrogates these questions through the use of language and syntax throughout Irredenta.

If “each person-making image of these states / is empire,” (“Two Idylls”) then these poems may in fact be questioning the way lyric may be a “person-making image” and the way the pastoral tradition has been a tool of empire. Part of the work of Irredenta, then, may be read as the speaker studying the ecology of a landscape in which empire is syntactically enmeshed with the language of environmental writing, of the lyric “I” crying out from the wilderness. Much like Kirsten Jorgensen’s Sediment and Veil uses fragmented syntax to juxtapose pastoral imagery with the violence of atomic testing, Oswald’s Irredenta grapples with the language of the state and its violence in the mythologized Western landscape. The speaker of “Gallup, NM, I-25” wrestles with being irrevocably part of this landscape:

I weigh myself as citizen or spirit

I am the substance of both

a river’s floating light I float to bottom

newborn leaf pale red and weightless branch…

if I only have water

finishing with every leaf is laid upon the dusty ground

rescue nothing I have written of a song—

The speaker feels both of the spirit and of the state, both observing the beauty of a “newborn leaf” and the futility of rescue, interrogating how the self is part of the harm and the landscape. In this way, the speaker of these poems both deeply questions the tradition of the spiritual pastoral (evident in the titles of many of the poems such as “Thyrsis” and “Lycidas,” as well as the language of the poems and references to Thoreau) and tries to find a place within contemporary ecopoetics to resist these harms. The work is as deft as it is lyrically beautiful.

Oscar Oswald’s exciting debut Irredenta both pushes back against and claims new space within the pastoral tradition in American writing. Fragmenting the syntax and language of citizen and landscape, Oswald explores the so-called wilderness and the myths around it through opposition and beauty, through an “I” that shifts and troubles and questions. Irredenta is an astute and astonishing new entry into contemporary ecopoetics.