The Naked Emperor: A Review of Frederick Seidel and Rachel Hadas: Frederick Seidel, Selected Poems; Rachel Hadas, Love and Dread

Re-Size Text: A A A A Comment

RSS blog print

book review

Brooke Clark

The Naked Emperor:

A Review of Frederick Seidel and Rachel Hadas

Frederick Seidel, Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (December 7, 2021)
ISBN 978-0374603250, 288 pp., USA $18.00, paperback

Rachel Hadas, Love and Dread
Measure Press Inc. (July 5, 2021)
ISBN 978-1939574329, 70 pp., USA $25.00, hardcover

Rachel Hadas, Piece by Piece
Paul Dry Books (June 15, 2021)
ISBN 978-1589881556, 221 pp., USA $18.99, paperback

 

«««

When it comes to the poetry of Frederick Seidel, less truly is more. In this sense alone, his new Selected Poems marks a significant advance over Poems 1959–2009—the more-or-less collected he published a little over a decade ago—and may do more to burnish his reputation than that doorstop volume simply by containing less of his work.
  A selected volume is an opportunity for an author to shape their reputation, and some rethinking has gone into Seidel’s Selected since he published Poems. The most obvious is the complete disappearance of Final Solutions (1963), Seidel’s first book, which is not represented here at all. This is an interesting, and perhaps understandable, choice. Final Solutions was very heavily, and very obviously, influenced by Robert Lowell—sometimes to the point of sounding like pastiche. It wasn’t until his second book, Sunrise (1980), that Seidel truly began to sound like himself, and so it’s fitting that his Selected kicks off (if you’ll pardon the proleptic pun) with “1968,” which begins:

        A football spirals through the oyster glow
        Of dawn dope and fog in L.A.’s
        Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot
        That punted it is absolutely stoned.
  The third stanza fills in the scene and places it historically:
        Fifty or so of the original
        Four hundred
        At the fundraiser,
        Robert Kennedy for President, the remnants, lie
        Exposed as snails around the swimming pool, stretched
        Out on the paths, and in the gardens, and the drive.
        Many dreams their famous bodies have filled.
        And a bit further on:
            Backlit
        And diffuse, the murdered
        Voityeck Frokowski, Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate
        Sit together without faces.

        This is the future.
        Their future is the future.
  The people named in those lines are, of course, the victims of the notorious “Manson family” murders (“Voytek Frykowski” seems to be the usual spelling of the first name). The poem’s drift from lassitude into Grand Guignol horror is characteristic of Seidel. The assassination of Robert Kennedy, whom Seidel calls “the only politician I have loved” (35), hangs over the poem, and all the early poems included here. Seidel puts his finger on the moment the dream of the sixties turns into a nightmare of decadence and brutality. For the rest of his career, he remains stuck on the nightmare.
  After Sunrise, the Selected marches through his collections in the expected chronological order (Poems 1959–2009 was, for reasons I still can’t fathom, organized in reverse chronological order). Once you get a feel for his style, though, nothing much changes; this Selected Poems shows not development, but stasis.

 

«

 

Talking about the self is the starting point for almost all contemporary poetry, but it remains traditional to make a distinction between the author and the “speaker” or “persona” of the poems. I can’t say with certainty how closely the details of Seidel’s poems mirror those of his life, but my feeling from reading his work is that there isn’t much difference. (I admit I reached this conclusion partly out of a sense that Seidel would revolt at the effort required to make things up.) If we take Seidel’s work as a guide to his life, then he is an inheritor of great wealth—originally from St. Louis, now living in New York, but making frequent jaunts to London, Paris, Milan, Bologna, and elsewhere. Seidel himself seems to take pains to dispel any notion that the person speaking in his poems is not himself; one poem is titled “Frederick Seidel,” and begins, “I live a life of laziness and luxury.” This sort of opening is standard for Seidel; “Widening Income Inequality” (great title) begins:

        I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right,
        I live a life of privilege in New York,
        Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. (223)
        Seidel admires this self-portrait so much that he restates it, with some elaboration, about fifty lines later in the same poem:
        One lives a life of appetite and, yes,
        Lives a life of privilege in New York.
        So many wretched refuse with their hands out.
        Help me please get something to eat.
        I’m a pope in a pulpit of air-conditioned humility
        And widening income inequality, eating mostly pussy. (225)
  This is the keynote of Seidel’s work: adopting a pose of supercilious arrogance, he unapologetically details his sybaritic lifestyle while mocking the human “refuse” who beg him for spare change. Luxurious dining? Of course:
        I ate shavings
        Of tuna roe on buttered toast
        Despite the heat,
        Brown waxy slices of fishy salt
        As strong as ammonia. . . . (163)
  Expensive tailoring? Naturally:
        Three unrelated establishments named Caraceni in Milan
        On streets not far apart make custom suits for men.
        They are the best. (82)
  Sex with much younger women? Where to begin:
        The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.
        But this woman is young. We kiss.
        It’s almost incest when it gets to this.
        This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger. (142)
  The poem goes on for a while and then concludes like this:
        Give me Everest or give me death.
        Give me an altitude with an attitude.
        But I am naked and nude.
        I am constantly out of breath.

        A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,
        But right now one is coming through the door
        With a mop, to mop up the cow flops on the floor.
        She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair. (143)
  Parts of this poem show what Seidel does best. A line like “The young keep getting younger” is a cliché, but the extension of it into “the old keep getting younger” adds another layer, suggesting that as one ages, there are more and more people younger than you who are nevertheless still old. “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” is perhaps the classic Seidel line, but his poetry is better when he becomes the object of his own unforgiving scrutiny. The “train wreck” suggests Seidel himself, the “tent” perhaps an oxygen tent for the man who is “constantly out of breath.” The image is one of external forces extending a life so tenuous it could flicker out at any moment; the “cow flops on the floor” emphasize the disgusting nature of old age, as control over the body slips. Seidel has no comforting illusions on the subject of aging: “Old age is not for sissies but death is just disgusting” begins one poem (193). The same idea comes across in “The Ritz, Paris”:
        A slight thinness of the ankles;
        The changed shape of the calf;
        A place the thigh curves in
        Where it didn’t used to; and when he turns
        A mirror catches him by surprise
        With an old man’s buttocks.
  That’s the entire poem; brief, by Seidel’s standards, but containing far more than many of his longer efforts. It’s noteworthy that this quintessential poet of the first person here shifts abruptly into the third person voice, as if wishing to put the horror of his own decrepitude at a distance. Still, the reader has no doubt that the man in the mirror is an image of the poet himself. Similar moments of jaundiced self-reflection spike suddenly out of other poems, as in these lines from “Evening Man”:
        You have to practice looking like thin air
        When you become the way you do not want to be,
        An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
        That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.
  Here the shift is to the second person, but again we see the poet’s need to distance himself from descriptions of his own aging. The shock of that image, of the old man recognizing his face as that of a wrinkled monkey, works. But these moments are too few and far between to make up for the sterile litanies of luxury that surround them. Seidel addresses his preference for lighter subject matter in this section from “The Lovely Redhead”:
        I’d rather talk about the weather.
        I’d rather talk about which airlines I prefer.
        I’d rather talk about my periodontist and my Macbook Air.
        Don’t try to talk to me about Guillaume Apollinaire.
        Laugh at me if you like, but actually it’s sad.
        You people who know, know love is brief and being old is bad.
        Know tribal wars devour the world, and little children are starving.
        Five million orphans in Ethiopia aren’t riding
        Beautiful Italian racing motorcycles to outrun their problem.
        Chemotherapy is as brutal as the cancer it doesn’t cure.
        Starving children get that look.
        I’d rather talk about my London tailor.
        I’d rather talk about who makes the lightest luggage with wheels.
        The best luggage these days glides along on grease. (211)
  This is as close as Seidel comes to a statement of his ars poetica. The careless lurching in and out of rhyme is representative of his approach to formalism—but more on that later. The overall point seems to be that many elements of the world we live in are pretty grim—“being old is bad,” to borrow Seidel’s flat phrasing—but there doesn’t seem to be much to be done about it, and so Seidel will talk about the quotidian elements of his life. There isn’t any real reasoning to this passage, and we don’t feel we’ve come to understand his approach or agree that it’s the right one; we’ve simply been made aware that Seidel also recognizes what has been obvious to us for some time.
  Which brings us to the last two, slant-rhymed lines of the passage, with their rather obvious invocation of Lowell’s great lines at the end of “For the Union Dead,” “A savage servility / slides by on grease”. (Earlier in the same poem Seidel apparently parodies Whitman with the lines “I sing of noise. / I sing in praise.”) It’s significant that at the end of this statement of his poetic method, Seidel chooses to invoke Lowell, the master he has tried to banish by cutting all his early, Lowell-imitating poetry from the Selected. (One might see a Bloomian “agon” here.) The message seems to be that we should not expect the serious engagement of Lowell’s work from Seidel—he’s not interested in that. Or perhaps we should say he’s given up on it, as some engagement with the world can be seen in a poem like “1968.” But the last line also has an almost ugly, parodic quality, as though Seidel is mocking Lowell by replacing the high abstraction of his “savage servility” with the bathetic “the best luggage,” turning poetry into ad copy. Whatever Seidel’s intention, the inevitable comparison these lines raise in the reader’s mind does him no favors.
  The most striking aspect of the self Seidel presents in his poetry is its lack of interiority. Most lyric poets write reflectively and create a sense of “a mind speaking to itself,” as Graham Greene said of the narrative voice of Great Expectations. There is very little of this in Seidel: his is an exterior, social self that doesn’t spend much time thinking or feeling, but rather is always going and doing—racing motorcycles, eating out, spanking much younger women. The emotional and intellectual life of the poet, so central to most contemporary lyric, is completely absent here. Instead we get a poetry of status markers, littered with the names of London tailors and Paris hotels. This gives the poetry a weirdly emaciated quality—it is like an expensive suit worn by a cheap plastic mannequin. I’ve often found myself complaining that too many contemporary poets write what sound like diary entries with line breaks; Seidel’s poetry sounds like a collection of shopping receipts and restaurant checks.

 

«

 

The overall impression of reading through the Selected Poems is one of the author’s dwindling interest matched by his dwindling effort. Seidel becomes an exemplar of the kind of lifestyle poetry quoted above—the way he lives is almost the entire content of his work. At times even he sounds unsure of why he is writing. This is the fifth stanza of “Poem Does,” from the longer poem “Going Fast”:

        Stanza no. 5. We want to be alive.
        Line 26. We pray for peace.
        Line 27. The warrior and peacemaker Rabin is in heaven.
        28. We don’t accept his fate. (104)
  Here Seidel’s boredom with his own poem becomes both form and content. In pointing out exactly how long the poem is, and then reusing the childish rhymes for numbers (“5” and “alive,” “seven” and “heaven”), he makes it obvious that he is padding out the poem. But if Seidel cares so little, why should the reader care at all? The poem contains no insight into anything, no ideas of any value; it is just a collection of words strung together to fill out a page.
  Signs of Seidel’s utter contempt, not only for his reader but for his own work, abound in the Selected Poems: terrible puns like “Another sunny Sunni day in the UAE!” (167); bizarre pleonasms like “Italy, your women are Italian!” or “Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene / Were likely to become alcoholics” (198); infantile diction like “Ready not to get deady” (103). The poem “Evening Man” ends, “It ends like this” (169), as though Seidel were simply giving up with a shrug after going nowhere for six stanzas.
  Another marker of Seidel’s lack of interest in his own work is his tendency to repeat himself. I quoted the line “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” from “Climbing Everest” above; the poem immediately after that one is “Broadway Melody,” which begins—can you guess?—like this:
        A naked woman my age is a total nightmare.
        A woman my age naked is a nightmare.
  Clearly, Seidel likes that line so much he can’t stop repeating it, admittedly with a slight variation each time. There are numerous examples of this sort of thing: in “The Blue-eyed Doe,” the “mica sidewalk sparkles in the dark,” (49), and in “Going Fast,” the “sidewalks sizzle with mica” (99); in “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,” the “fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness,” (171), and in “Downtown,” the “July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly” (180); also in “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,” Seidel writes, “I kept my nose outside the window like a dog,” (170), and in “Barbara Epstein” he keeps “the driver’s-side window open / To loll my head out to sniff the oncoming breeze like a dog” (254). I could go on reciting examples like this for quite a while—I haven’t even cataloged the countless references to the Ducati “racer being made for me” (134), which is one of Seidel’s favorite themes—but I will spare you. How many times do we need to be told that he is having a Ducati racing bike made specially for him? Several times per book, apparently (and the Selected downplays how repetitive his work is). Perhaps more telling is a larger, slightly different instance of repetition; this is the end of “Fucking” (a poem that, sadly, does not live up to its title):
        There was a man named Pericles Belleville,
        There is a man named Pericles Belleville,
        Half American.
        At a very formal dinner party,
        At which I met the woman I have loved the most
        In my life, Belleville
        Pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver
        And waved it around, pointing it at people, who smiled.
        One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.

        That is the poem. (31)
  And this is the conclusion of “Arnold Toynbee, Mac Bundy, Hercules Belleville”:
            I put Hercky

        In a poem of mine called “Fucking” thirty-one years ago, only
        I called him Pericles in my poem.
        At the end of “Fucking,” as he had in life,
        Hercules pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver
        At a dinner party in London,
        And pointed it at people, who smiled.
        I had fallen in love at first sight
        With a woman I was about to meet.
        One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.
        That was the poem. (188)
  The first instance is a tiresome society anecdote (not an uncommon genre in Seidel’s work), which again concludes with his shrugging “That is the poem,” as if he has worn himself out and can’t be bothered to go on any longer (though it’s not clear why he went on as long as he did). The self-referentiality of the second poem, however, demonstrates the narrowness of Seidel’s concerns and the arid stasis of his work—he can think of nothing to do other than rewrite his own poem, the second time using the real name rather than a lightly disguised pseudonym. What purpose could possibly be served by this repetition? Nothing beyond filling out a volume, I suppose. The overall effect is one of monotonous, droning sameness. Even Seidel seems to be getting bored with himself in “Fog”:
        I climb on a motorcycle.
        I climb on a cloud and rain.
        I climb on a woman I love.
        I repeat my themes.

        Here I am in Bologna again.
        Here I go again. (125)
  The clumsy anaphora and treatment of each line as a single sentence accentuate the monotony of Seidel’s writing even as he writes about repetition. Certainly a writer can profitably revisit themes throughout their career. But when done well this is accompanied by a shift in perspective that brings about a deepening understanding or a fresh insight. Seidel’s repetitions create nothing beyond a sense of reverberant hollowness.
  If repetition is one of the marks of the laziness of Seidel’s approach to writing, then the sheer badness of much of the poetry contained in this volume is another. His subject matter is decadence, but his artistic approach is carelessness. Given that this is a selected poems, you would think the author or editor might have been a little more . . . selective, let’s say, than to include some of what I quoted above. And yet it’s all here, and many other examples as bad or worse. The most noticeable aspect of Seidel’s verse is its dashed off, unfinished quality; if he ever revises, there’s no sign of it. The impression the reader gets is not of the apparent effortlessness of great poetry, but rather of a complete lack of effort. It’s hard to imagine a writer not wanting to take another shot at lines like these, from “Spin”:
        A dog named Spinach died today.
        In her arms he died away.
        Injected with what killed him.
  Or a poem like “Nice Weather”:
        This is what it’s like at the end of the day.
        But soon the day will go away.
        Sunlight preoccupies the cross street.
        It and night soon will meet.
        Meanwhile, there is Central Park.
        Now the park is getting dark.
  The use of periods at the end of each line only emphasizes the thumping obviousness of rhymes like “day” and “away” (essentially repeated from “Spin” above, you’ll notice), and the way the diction of the fourth line has been contorted to fit the rhyme scheme is amateurish, and having the stressed “night” and “soon” together in the centre of the line points up this awkwardness. And to say the poem sputters out in its final line seems rather too kind; you might dishonestly praise this if it were by your eight-year-old nephew. To have written it is bad enough; to include it in a selected volume suggests a complete ignorance of the qualities that make poetry good.
  “Nice Weather” also points us toward a strange development in Seidel’s career: his increasing fondness for formalism. Seidel’s free verse is dull and flaccid, little more than prosy jottings broken into lines, but at least it doesn’t tax his technical abilities. As his career and the book go on, though, he turns more and more toward rhyme—or attempts to turn, perhaps I should say: in one poem he exclaims, “I can’t stop rhyming! I can’t! It’s my domain!” though the poem itself, built entirely of rhymes on the “-ain” sound, demonstrates it isn’t his forte.
  As is the case throughout this book, there are moments that work. In “Remembering Elaine’s,” he starts off handling his five-line AABBB stanza rather well:
        We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
        Night after night, and most of us survived
        To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
        And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
        The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.
  In terms of content the poem has Seidel’s typical digressive, anecdotal quality, but the use of “avenue” in rhyme position is rather good by his standards, and the enjambment of lines 2 and 3 is a pleasant relief from his tendency to treat every line as a sentence. A bit later he rhymes “Gitanes” with “Don,” which has a ring to it. The mention of Wordsworth is about as poetic as Seidel gets, despite referring to himself, in another poem, as “the most poetic of poets” (201)—an assessment with which few readers, I suspect, will agree. The dropping of Wordsworth’s name in the vague phrase “a kind of Wordsworth wonderment” is meant to convey to us that Seidel felt a wonder at the beauty of nature of the sort we associate with Wordsworth’s poetry. But he doesn’t try to describe this feeling of wonder himself, or to get the reader to share in it (there’s no “My heart leaps up” here); Wordsworth’s name is a placeholder for the kind of writing Seidel can’t be bothered to do. It’s as if he’s saying Wordsworth has already described the wonders of nature, and so it would be pointless for him to reiterate them. Again, we feel the author shrugging over his own work.
  A bit past the midway point of the poem, we run aground on this:
        Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene
        Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean
        That way, because others who drank as much or more didn’t
        Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn’t
        Do cocaine, and didn’t get fucked up, and just didn’t!
  “Life is mean” is a flat, colorless phrase to force a rhyme, and then the triple rhyme of “didn’t” with itself shows that Seidel’s characteristic laziness has taken over. Many of the poems slip in and out of rhyme, for no apparent reason other than authorial convenience. This is the beginning of “Man in Slicker” (not among the worst poems in the book, actually):
        A man is talking to himself again.
        He strolls down Broadway in the rain.
        He’s hidden in a slicker, so he’s yellow, obvious.
        A rainy day on Broadway looks like Auschwitz, more or less.
        He has a fancy accent so he isn’t Jewish, is he?
  The rhyme of “obvious” with “more or less” has a nice musicality to it, but “is he” is just left hanging without a rhyme. The casual references to Auschwitz and being Jewish are characteristic of Seidel’s handling of larger issues in his later collections, on the rare occasions when he does allow them to impinge on his poetry: he mentions them in passing, but never follows these references up or takes them anywhere. They are empty gestures toward larger ideas that he won’t engage with. He prefers to talk about his clothes and his motorcycles—as this poem demonstrates within a couple of stanzas:
        I’ll look good in my black chalk-stripe suit,
        Savile Row astride a red Ducati racer
        For a fashion magazine, a fancy joke
        Done morbidly, my tongue sticking out like I’m dead.
        What if they remove my tongue from my head?

        Talking, talking, talking, at my desk, in silence.
        Putting my head in the open mouth of my Macbook Air.
        Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare.
        The poem eats anything, doesn’t care.
        I sing of Obama’s graying second-term hair.
  It’s as if he’s forgotten that he started the poem in rhyme; we get three unrhymed lines, and then the obvious “dead / head” jingle, where the nonsensical fifth line seems tacked on just to create the rhyme. That seems to remind Seidel that he intended to write the poem in rhyme, though, because in the next stanza we get four of five lines rhyming on the “air” sound. All four use obvious monosyllabic words, and the repetition has a compulsive quality, as if Seidel’s brain has got stuck in a rut and can’t get out. This creates an impression of juvenility, as if a child were just throwing out random words that rhyme with one another with no larger feeling for what they mean or whether they make sense. If a rhyme occurs to him as he goes along he’ll use it, but he certainly won’t go looking for one, and he won’t worry about following a pattern of rhyme from stanza to stanza.
  “Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare” is exactly the impression we get from reading his verse: he just types whatever details of his life occur to him straight into his Macbook, and they are “raw or rare” in the sense that no, or very little, artistic effort has been expended to shape or alter them. The line “The poem eats anything, doesn’t care” is his excuse for this carefree approach, and the non sequitur about Obama’s hair is an obvious joke on that idea. But behind Seidel’s vision of the poem eating anything seems to lie his attitude to his readers—he clearly thinks his audience is so lacking in discernment that he can serve them anything and they will take it for poetry. His contempt for his work is surpassed only by his contempt for his audience.
  The strangest thing about Seidel’s poetry is that it exists at all. Has any poet ever written so much while evincing so little apparent interest in writing well? No doubt there are other demands on his time: As he is constantly reminding us, he has tailors to visit, Ducatis to ride, and pussy to eat. One could almost imagine that Seidel’s whole career is a joke at the expense of the poetry world, and like an emperor freezing in the cold as he waits for someone to tell him he’s naked, Seidel turns out increasingly infantile doggerel in the hope of finally prodding someone into telling him it’s bad. No doubt some will say this is “the point”—that Seidel is writing a form of anti-poetry, or parodying poetry itself. That is the most charitable interpretation: that Seidel’s work expresses an “end of history” ennui, where everyone is aware that everything meaningful has already been said, and everything worthwhile has already been done. Contemporary life, on this view, is empty and purposeless, and Seidel’s poetry reflects this state back at us. But if that is his intention, I don’t see what useful purpose is served by it.
  The Selected’s main virtue is that its brevity de-emphasizes how dull his work is, but reading it right through remains an enervating experience. As he himself writes, “I have nothing to say.” It’s true—but for some reason he can’t stop saying it.

 

«««

 

In a brief “Foreword,” the poet, translator, and critic A.E. Stallings suggests that Rachel Hadas’s new book, Love and Dread, can be understood in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hard to know for certain how many of these poems were actually written during the pandemic or in response to its conditions, but this does seem like a profitable way to approach the collection, which has resonances with a world in lockdown, and it’s tempting to read the book as a sort of poetic “journal of the plague year.” One poem even mentions “the empty streets subdued and strange.” (52)
  One of the main themes that runs through the poems is a concern with the domestic as opposed to the external, social world. For all of us who have been spending so much more time in our homes lately, the connections to pandemic life will be obvious. The opening of “Rose-Scented Lotion” is a good example:

        The level of rose-scented lotion daily
        lower in its bottle. And because

        we are not attempting to fill it,
        time slows to a standstill.

        The room brims with silence.
        Afternoon nap? Not yet afternoon.

        Sun neither out nor in.
        March takes a breath.
  The poem captures the uncertainty we have all been living with for a while now, in which we seem to be in a perpetual entr’acte, unsure what to do, uncertain even of what day it is; we feel almost as if time itself has been put on pause. Within that environment the poem enacts a particular kind of attention, in which a mundane domestic object—in this case, a bottle of lotion—becomes imbued with a new significance. When we never leave the house, the lotion bottle that we see every day can unexpectedly become a new chronological marker: we may not know what day it is, but we have a sense that time has passed by the lowering level of the bottle. A domestic object that we would barely even notice in the rush of “normal” life suddenly becomes transformed into a powerful object full of meaning.
  This focus on the domestic is reinforced by what must be the most common image in the collection, that of a couple in bed: “I wake / each morning to the blessing of your presence” (“The Dance”); “You stir in your light sleep / and reach toward me” (“Hotel Bella Venezia”); “Fast in the hold of sleep, my love, you lay. / I turned to you and clutched you anyway” (“Horns”). The bed is the centre of the home, the place where the couple (and many of these poems seem to speak of or to the state of coupledom) lie down together each night and awake each morning. It is a place of safety and refuge, as is the home that the bed symbolizes:
        Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
        They have to take you in,
        wrote Frost. Presumably a place where strangers
        cannot penetrate to do you harm. (37)
  Again in the poem “Here,” the home is presented as a refuge from the dangers and stresses of the external world. These are the concluding lines of the poem:
        When you cannot take it anymore,
          shut the world’s door.

        Out of the noise, the chaos, and the heat,
          this retreat.

        Out of the windswept plain of loneliness,
          a sheltered place.

        When it becomes too much to understand,
          take my hand.

        When it hurts too much to live in time,
          come home.
  The couplet structure and rhyme scheme reinforce the idea of the poem, with each longer line stating a problem or danger, and each shorter line responding with an offer of safety closed by the rhyme, until the whole poem culminates in the word “home.” The poem presents what we want to believe, and perhaps what the poet wants to convince herself—or someone else?—of. But we can’t help but notice that the poem ends on a slant rather than a pure rhyme, and that small divergence slightly unbalances the poem’s message.
  This uncertainty plays out through the book as a whole. Love and Dread is a carefully structured collection, where different poems are in conversation with one another, sometimes reinforcing, but more often questioning or even undermining the ideas of other poems. The image of home as an unequivocal place of safety and comfort is not allowed to stand unquestioned; the first two stanzas of “Marble Cake” present one of the book’s clearest challenges to it:
        Swirled with a flickeringly thin old knife
        into golden batter,
        the streaks and whorls curlicue
        to a submerged design.

        Fear: less the other side of bliss’s coin
        than thin lines hidden deep within the sweet
        mixture, a secret pattern
        coded in dark and light.
  In this poem, the simple domestic task of making a marble cake is shown to be fraught with menace. Just the “flickeringly thin old knife” is remarkably portentous, suggesting an almost invisible, ancient menace in the world than can never be escaped. That first line sets the tone, and the rest of the poem develops the idea of darkness in light, and the inescapableness of the darkness, until the cake itself—something we would expect to be associated with the comforts of home—has instead become a symbol of the inescapableness of evil in the world.
  It can hardly be a coincidence that the poem on the next page, “Fire Pit,” reinforces the idea. In this poem a typical group activity, roasting marshmallows around a fire, is suddenly transformed. These are the concluding lines of the poem:
        Then in a flash it was no longer
        about confection or nourishment.
        An ember leapt the circle
        and caught, and hillsides, grass, and trees caught fire.
        The circle opened out and came apart.
        We all were running.
        But where was there to run to?
  This poem is remarkably in tune with our moment, evocative of both the wildfires that have become a commonplace and, on a symbolic level, of the way an airborne virus can spread in group settings. The leap of the ember is the unexpected threat that arises from what seemed like a safe, innocent gathering; the circle coming apart is the collapse of a societal order everyone believed was solid; within a few lines, it seems the entire world has been consumed. The apparent safety of domestic activity has been turned into the source of the threat. The question of the final line implies that the obvious answer, “home,” is no longer available, that the home itself has been consumed in the growing conflagration. The way the question is left hanging suggests that there is nowhere to run to, no safety remaining in the world.
  And even the bed, which at first appears like the ultimate symbol of sanctuary, becomes complicated, as the collection goes on, by the idea of dreams. Again, it’s hard to know how much of this was planned and how much is just coincidence, but the idea of spending more time in bed, and of therefore remembering and paying more attention to dreams, is particularly resonant with the lockdown conditions imposed in many places in response to the pandemic. The poem “Sleeping Late” begins:
        You left the bedroom without waking me.
        Alone in bed
        I’m drifting uncommitted, out of time.
        No one is waiting for me to wake up,
        so I burrow deeper into neutral light.
        Volleyball on the beach in Tel Aviv.
        Solemn symposiasts. Contractors from the city
        make their presentation. They would like to bury
        a rusty Cadillac nose down
        under the hill among our maple trees.
        I say no no no. . . .
  The loss of the everyday external world and its demands has led to a sense of purposelessness—no one is waiting for anyone else, everybody has a lot of empty time to fill. It’s natural, then, that so many poems in this collection have a reflective, homebound quality, as of a person sitting with nothing much to do, looking around her domestic setting and thinking about what she sees.
  “Sleeping Late,” as can be seen in the quote above, moves into a description of a dream, one of those mysterious, slightly unnerving dreams in which we’re trying to stop people from doing something but can’t make them listen; the other figures in such dreams always have a mysterious power that we can’t find a way to counteract. Given the overall mood of anxiety, it’s fitting that the reader turns the page and finds the next poem is titled “In the Anxiety Hotel”:
        In the Hotel Anxiety
        I lost you and you lost me.

        Ignorant where our pathways crossed,
        we wandered both alone and lost.

        Where was my luggage? You were sleeping
        and wouldn’t wake. I shook you, weeping.

        I had a question, I had more
        that needed answers—two, three, four.

        I asked someone who should have known.
        He slammed the door. You were alone,

        roaming red halls that curved. You knocked
        at random doors, but all were locked.

        I’d gone to bed, but in which room?
        The hotel was a catacomb.
  The poem concludes:
        At the Anxiety Hotel
        our story lines run parallel.

        Sweet dreams you wish me every night.
        We kiss and then put out the light.

        But many nights we wander from
        lobby to corridor, room to room,

        and I lose you and you lose me
        in the Hotel Anxiety.
  Obviously the “Anxiety Hotel” is the dream world. The disjunctions, sudden shifts in place and time, the unsuccessful attempts to communicate described in the poem are all characteristic of what are commonly called “anxiety dreams.” The final lines state the conundrum of the bed, its double-edged symbolism: we lie down in it as a place of safety, but as soon as we fall asleep we are seized by our anxieties, and spend the night held captive by them.
  In these poems, the usual division of life into the private domestic sphere and the public social sphere has been destroyed—perhaps by the pandemic if we want to interpret the poems in that way, or by some other, unexplained phenomenon that is left unstated. Either way, the external world barely appears in these poems. Instead, the division becomes that between the domestic world of waking reality, and the dream world of sleep. The world of dreams becomes the only exit from life within the home, but just as home life is impregnated with a sense of menace (as in “Marble Cake”), so the dream world is not really an escape; instead, it is a world where the anxieties and stresses we associate with the social world of work take us prisoner and act out on us. In dreams, quotidian worries take on an omnipotent, phantasmagoric form.
  So what is the solution? As the poems in this book make clear, in a world divided between the domestic and the dream, there is no certain refuge to be found in either the home or the bed. The title poem, placed near the centre of the book, seems to suggest there is no pat answer. Here it is in full:
        A desiccated daffodil.
        A pigeon cooing on the sill.
        The old cat lives on love and water.
        Your mother’s balanced by your daughter:
        one faces death, one will give birth.
        The fulcrum is our life on earth,
        beginning, ending in a bed.
        We have to marry love and dread.
        Dark clouds are roiling in the sky.
        The daily drumbeat of the lie,
        steady—no, crescendoing.
        This premature deceptive spring
        forsythia’s in bloom already.
        The challenge: balance. Keep it steady,
        now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,
        now googling a rare sarcoma.
        The ghost cat’s weightless on my lap.
        My mother’s ghost floats through my nap,
        as, dearest heart, we lie in bed.
        Oh, we must marry love and dread;
        must shield our senses from the glare
        and clamor of chaos everywhere.
        Life bestows gifts past expectation.
        It’s time to plan a celebration:
        dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
        certain that summer follows spring,
        that new life blossoms from the past.
        The baby is the youngest guest.
        But just how long can we depend
        on a recurrence without end?
        Everything changes, even change.
        The tapestry of seasons strange-
        ly stirs in an uneasy wind
        that teases dreamlike through the mind.
        I reach for you across the bed.
        Oh, how to marry love and dread?
  This poem is the keynote to the collection, and the perfect expression of the book’s quest to find balance between the threats and joys of life. The image of the bed is picked up here as the place life both begins and ends, and thus becomes symbolic of the duality of existence the poem expresses, the place where we “marry love and dread.” The couplets give formal expression to the theme of setting the darkness and the light against one another, accepting both, and striving to find a balance between them that we can live with.
  The book concludes with “A Poultice,” a poem about a traditional cure for injury, which sums up many of the collection’s ideas of finding ways to accept and live with things as they are. The final lines reinforce the idea that there is only, at best, a temporary forgetting of the external threats that menace us:
        Turmeric, rosemary and rum:
        my love and I are rocked in time.
        The motion lulls us, we forget
        the bruise, the wound, the doom, the threat.

«

It’s always interesting to read prose written by a poet. It can illuminate concerns that are also central to the poetry, showing similar ideas or themes from a different angle, as it were. This is the case with Piece by Piece, a new collection of essays by Rachel Hadas.
  The book is written in conversational yet elegant prose, everything expressed with a limpid clarity. It covers a range of subject matter, but many of the pieces are either directly autobiographical or contain memoiristic elements. There is an assured fluidity to Hadas’s prose style, as she weaves different elements together into a smooth whole.
  Of particular interest to readers of her poetry might be “Remembering the Future,” an interview of Hadas by Jessica Greenbaum. The title comes from a slightly mystical remark Hadas makes, that poems can “remember the future” (103), by which she means that a poet can sometimes come to understand their own work better long after they have written it. (She is referring to a particular poem of her own that she feels she understands much better ten years after writing it.) This attitude reveals how Hadas sees poetry as being a way to illuminate the self. For her, the impulse to poetry is purely lyric. In the same interview she talks about poetry anthologies she had as a child, and how the poems she wanted to imitate were the lyrics, not the narrative ones, and she states directly, “poems come out of my life.” (102)
  Family is another dominant theme. In essays like “Mater Sagax,” in “Classics,” in “Talking to my Father,” Hadas’s parents are a recurring presence throughout this book. Her father was the classical scholar and translator of Euripides, Moses Hadas, and her mother, whom Hadas describes as “primarily a reader of books, not a writer” (8), translated the classic children’s book The Story of Ferdinand into Latin. Hadas’s reminiscences make it clear that she was born into a bookish household, and that literature was an integral part of the world around her from a very early age. That she became not just a writer, but a writer whose work is so deeply engaged with other literature (through translation, allusion, and even her interest in the cento form) is hardly surprising. The essay “Through the Smoke of This One” is, in fact, a sort of miniature study of the art of allusion, beginning with a question of the origin of a particular proverb, and then broadening out into a consideration of how writers use one another’s words, and where those words really originate.
  In a similar example of how she traces the vagaries of thought, the essay “The Trembling Web and the Storage Facility” begins with the arrival of a contributor’s copy of the journal Raritan, in which Hadas has two new poems published. Unlike many authors, I suspect, Hadas actually reads the work of the other writers published with her, and the essay unfolds into a discussion of the contents of one particular issue of a literary journal. We follow the journey of her mind as she pages through the issue, sharing personal reminiscences of the authors, pursuing the references she finds—to Coleridge, Shakespeare, Plato, Shelley—and teasing out the connections between them until she has created an interlocking pattern in which this single issue of Raritan comes to appear like a complete, coherent work of its own. And then she moves, at the end, to her own two poems, and situates them in the interlocking matrix of literature that makes up the issue.
  The piece is, in a way, a guide to the whole book, as the main impression one gets from it is the sense that everything is connected, if you look hard enough and, more importantly perhaps, if you have the knowledge to see the connections. Recurring figures and concerns cement this sense as we read: her parents, as already mentioned, Greece and Greek poetry, her friendship with the poet James Merrill, and other elements all recur in different essays in the book but each time, never seen in quite the same way as before. It’s as if she were taking out certain objects she carries with her, holding them up to the light, and drawing our attention to different facets of the same thing, making us see them anew each time. The book’s title seems at first to draw our attention to the parts, but “piece by piece” is of course a description of how things are built. The feeling of this book is precisely that: disparate essays nevertheless arranged into a satisfying whole.