There is Nothing That is Not Touched : A Review of Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley and Divine Fire by David Woo

Every poet is so different—their language and their grammars so uniquely their own—that while there are usually threads connecting them to others, what attracts a reader to a particular poet’s book is a response as sui generis as the poet’s to the world. Comparing poets is something like how simile works: you think you are linking like to like, but the simile welcomes in all that is unlike to the picture you are creating—the different subjects split and multiply themselves. Like wrestling Proteus, as a reader you must hold on while the god in your arms changes shape after shape.

That said, as I read Sandra Beasley’s Made to Explode (W. W. Norton, 2021) and David Woo’s Divine Fire (UGA Press, 2021) alongside each other this spring, it was impossible for me not to note the craft strengths that Beasley and Woo share between their collections. Both poets write generously, narratively, and with a sense of largeness about the world their poems inhabit.  

1. Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley.

W.W. Norton, 2021. 91 pages.  $26.95.

Beasley’s Made to Explode is brilliantly American—from the soundscapes, the landscapes, and the foodscapes it explores. It has a historical fish-eye, and bends time and space in its lucid attention. The poem “Heirloom” opens: “Lo, twelve children born to a woman named Thankful / in Nampa, by the border between Oregon / and Idaho, or as it will be remembered: Ore-Ida.” “Heirloom” delves into the origin of the Tater Tot, the speaker’s family, the entwinement of food production and food memory, the way one person’s capitalist venture shapes the lives of others. “Three decades later,” notes the speaker, “the golden age of my childhood is a foil-lined tray / plattered with Ore-Ida product, maybe salt, maybe / nothing but hot anticipation of my fingertips.” Beasley writes gorgeously of food, I think because of the fish-eyed lens, catching verbs (“plattered”) and taste and heat in its curving scope. The biblical-mythic language of “Lo” adds an additional and vital texture to “Heirloom,” allowing the reader to think about the framing of the past, the kinds of honor we give it in how we relate the past as story: “Lo, my mother is a great cook and Lo, / my grandmother is a terrible one, but on tinfoil plains / they are equal.” Naming the speaker’s father’s aversion to tomatoes (“Put away your Brandywines, / your Cherokee Purples, your Green Zebras.”) as its own product of food insecurity in a family and tomatoes “unleashed from cans / to feed four children on a budget” the speaker utters the most American sentence of all: “We talk little of this.” Beasley delves into subjects not named because their presences are so mammoth and undeniable in American life (as when someone says: “this is almost too obvious to say” and while, yes, it is obvious, there is a need to say it). The poem “Heirloom” concludes: “Lo, what is cooked to mush. / Lo, what is peppered to ash. Lo, the flavor / rendered as morning chore—that this, too, is a form of love.” 

Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley. W.W. Norton, 2021. 91 pages.  $26.95.

Probably because of the title, but also because of the military career of the speaker’s father, the Bass Pro Shops, the series of “Midnight” prose poems taking place at Washington, DC memorials, I think of the couplet from the US National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner: “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, / Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,” by Francis Scott Key. American children learn to sing it as a celebratory song, a song during which to place a hand over the heart, at which to grow misty-eyed. But it is a song about violence, regardless of how it is framed—a song of bombs and rockets. American. “Made to Explode” pokes at the tender heart of America—the volatility of the venture of America. The lines from which Beasley’s book takes its title occur in the poem “Einstein, Midnight,” which consider Einstein’s memorial, its “cumulative” shape, “clay on clay.” “What you see,” explains the speaker, “is his 1953 face combined with an imagined body. Mass is the presence of energy, an object’s resistance to anything other than what it is already doing. Yes, you may sit on Albert’s lap.” The poem moves through notable moments of Einstein’s history (“Did you know he patented a refrigerator with no moving parts?”), the intimate connections of his mind and scientific collaboration to the atomic bomb. The speaker tells the reader: “Later, he’d say that if he’d known Germans would fail, he’d have never urged Americans to succeed.” The poem closes with a bombing, but it’s not what you might think: “Now, an artist works into the dawn hours, looping with her crochet needle until his figure is shrouded in pink, purple, and teal. Yarn-bombing, we call this. Anything, in the right hands, can be made to explode.”

Beasley’s collection has a deep resonance with American culture—its history, its capital, its food (lima beans, pinto beans, Long John Silvers), its poetry. The poem “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” is a Golden Shovel after Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “Gay Chaps at the Bar”—a form invented by the poet Terence Hayes to honor Gwendolyn Brooks, and an homage to her poem “Seven at the Golden Shovel,” the Golden Shovel form trails a line by Brooks’ down the end-words of each line in a poem. It’s an exceptionally tricky form to write well, to sound natural rather than forced as the Golden Shovel writer accommodates Brooks’ lines. Beasley uses variable-lined free verse to do so, juxtaposing Brooks’ “Gay Chaps at the Bar” with non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the service of war. Section III of Beasley’s quartet is a single line from Brook, lineated by word and standing strikingly alone:

But
nothing
ever
taught
us
to
be
islands

The presence of Brooks’ line, re-formed on the page, accentuates the Golden Shovel’s form, and calls more strikingly into contrast the subject of Beasley’s poem with Brooks’ Petrarchan sonnet, with its epigraph provided by a young lieutenant who served in World War II: “…and guys I knew in the States, young officers, return from the front crying and trembling. Gay chaps at the bar in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York.” The enfolding that occurs between Brook’s “Gay Chaps,” soldiers on leave and at leisure, with Beasley’s “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” demonstrates Beasley’s dexterity with layered narrative and form, with handling the explosive subjects of America—whiteness, war, colonial violence against Native Americans in the poem “Self-Portrait with George Catlin” (which contains the lines “Here / is that ‘we,’ cozy / / as an infected blanket”). Another Golden Shovel, “Black Death Spectacle” revisits the story and person of Emmett Till via Brooks’ poem “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.” Elastically reflective on historical and present violence (which can also be silence, which can also be inaction) and suspicious of the spectacle America both makes and demands of its Black citizens, the poem closes:

At the Biennial, the man’s T-shirt challenges those passing through.
Black Death Spectacle. They murmur over the bloom of a
wound, seeing red without seeing red.
Question the shovel, he says, that’d till this prairie. 

I marvel at the enfolding of the word “shovel” in the poem’s closing line as well as the appearance of Emmett Till’s surname (“till”), in the enfolding of Brooks’ line (“chaos in windy grays through a red prairie”), and the moment in stanza four where two lines cinch into one, Beasley’s poem and Brooks’ words overlapping and becoming one: “red / room.” While I reject the language of “master class” as a white critic, Beasley’s poem is a tutorial in how to both honor and engage Brooks’ original poetic text when writing a Golden Shovel.

In closing, I want to add that this collection is ripe with love even while it cautions its reader to “reject any pickaxe disguised as love.” But this symbolic pickaxe is also the context for love poems in America—whether they are directed towards a beloved, a place, or a perfect mouthful of food. You will not find a clearer or brighter voice for speaking to the intricacies of heirlooms and heritage in America than the work of Sandra Beasley and Made to Explode.

2. Divine Fire by David Woo.

UGA Press, 2021. 83 pages. $19.95.

A Vermeer painting—known by several titles, among them The Allegory of Painting—fractures and multiplies across the cover of David Woo’s new collection of poetry, Divine Fire. Such a cover summons a number of presences to a collection of poems: the iconic light of Vermeer, the self-consciousness of ekphrastic art and allegory, the idea of light and holiness. There is something both intimate and abstract about a Vermeer painting—a tension that also shines in Woo’s poetry, particularly in the relationship of titles to bodies of poems.

The titles in Divine Fire are touchstones—in fact they often feel concrete, like a stone you could hold in your hand. But what they are are doors you step through—windows opening into other windows. Woo’s poems are transformative, liminal spaces. Like Divine Fire’s cover suggests: a multiplicity of perspective, a defamiliarizing and fracturing of what the reader might take for granted as whole and “real.” For example, the poem “On Refusing to Click On Images of Natural Disasters” sounds like an occasional poem, the kind of narrative title one encounters frequently while reading a literary journal these days. But Woo’s poem opens:

They arrived in a land where the stone-faced imperatives
of order and authority no longer existed. Stones
replaced them. Stone once removed—stone made from stone,
breccia, sandstone—replaced neighbors and friends,

and spoke the inhuman language of stones, dull of deep
implausible sounds, like continuous, voiced, epiglottal plosives.

Narrative, yes, but defamiliarizing. Gone is the “lyric-I” one might expect—here is a “they” in a mythic-sounding voyage and arrival—the stones feel allegorical, parabolic. The second-person arrives to shift the narrative:

In your little house, you are free and thoughtless as a stone,
your doors unlatched, your windows open.
Today you meant to enjoy the air, freshly scrubbed
by days of rain…

Divine Fire by David Woo. UGA Press, 2021. 83 pages. $19.95.

The poem revolves and becomes a poem about voyeurism—the self implicated and involved in the disasters of others, suddenly a participant: “Above you someone important is circling in a helicopter, / and he waves to you.” Where is the comfort of abstraction now, the allegory of the land of stones? “You wave back jauntily, / then look down and notice that you are clinging / to a roof, a tree, a mound of rubble.” The power of poetry to lift its reader and transport them—as a dream transports—to a dramatic situation, is a power that Divine Fire employs to great effect. The poem closes: “But you can see his face in close-up on a million screens. / He is wiping away an invisible tear, / and his helicopter never rescues you.”

There is a dreaminess to Woo’s poetry—an attention to hypothetical situations and the subjunctive voice—throughout the collection. There is something intrinsically allegorical in the poems, as though they lie lightly over the world, strong as a spider’s web is strong in tensile strength. In “The Decline and the Fall of My Subconscious,” the speaker immediately confesses: 

No, I didn’t know myself.
I was a little honey mushroom
sprouting above the giant fungus
in the Malheur National Forest. 

Like the Malheur National Forest in Oregon becomes the site for the poem’s metaphor, Woo understands how to locate the self in the things of this world: the science, the literature, the music and geographical places. In an interview at Kenyon Review’s Poetry Today with Ruben Quesada, Woo names a number of disparate texts and then notes: “…when it is time to write, I like to take a few deep breaths and disperse these fragments into a fine flutter in my mind.” Woo begins the interview by using the extended metaphor of a silkworm spinning a cocoon to describe the work of a poet:

I often think of something Czeslaw Milosz once said, that you become a kind of silkworm when you write. With each poem, you spin a thread out of yourself, constructing a cocoon that envelops you and hardens into a “crystalline structure,” until you shed it and begin anew. In this way writing poetry becomes a matter of spinning—and emerging from—cocoon after cocoon, dwelling after dwelling, and each poem becomes something exterior, even alien to the self, the little rooms that you’ve left behind. I believe that the life of poetry is continual habitation and transfiguration, continual emergence into a world altered by the singular fabric that you’ve spun from your soul. The question of a poet’s work becomes: how do you find the sustenance to keep fabricating your silk?

How, indeed! The poem “The Decline and the Fall of My Subconscious,” beginning with the speaker as “a little honey mushroom,” wraps itself around to “the parable by Kafka Trismegistus” where a man stands before a mirror “that contained all the world’s wisdom.” “In real life,” Woo’s poem observes, 

…the mirror was nailed to the ceiling
of our room in some red-velvet motel.
All those limbs moving in unison
to a throbbingly vulgar bass beat!
And the only thing we learned from love
was the art of becoming another.
Turn off the subwoofer, Love,
what remains is something wee,
wee and oh-so-sempiternal, the self
unselfing another, world without end.

This blending of the natural world and poetry’s metaphor with the worlds of memory and allegory (as the address of “Love” summons to the page) impresses me as essential to Woo’s poetry, which has an intrinsically unearthly quality about it, a sense of the saintly or holy (“set apart”), even—especially!—in the presence of the motel’s ceiling mirror and the “vulgar bass beat.” I close Divine Fire feeling that Woo has a Midas-like touch for the holy—indeed, the reader often feels surprised by the poems’ holiness. Unlike the impossible-to-hold Proteus, the poet is not trying to wrest themselves away from the reader, but to come closer to them, to share an experience of transformation. A good book of poetry shows us what a strange and holy world we live in. Divine Fire does just this, opening window after window onto other texts and other art: a faded Vermeer, the poetry of Luis Cernuda and Catullus, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Pessoa, and more. And on everything in Divine Fire, as in a Vermeer, the light is falling—there is nothing that is not touched by it.