Moraine

A Collection or a Book?

I have on my shelf half a row of poetry books whose pages are tagged with yellow stickies. These are the pages that make each worth keeping, the poems I return to. One volume has survived numerous library-donation trips on the strength of a single poem: "The snake's/ tongue, the first seducer/ black and forked . . ."

Yet surely the poet intended the entire book to be worth keeping, and tinkered endlessly to ascertain each page's place and weight within the whole. This question of "wholeness" has been much on my mind lately. The very fact that we publish our poems not just individually but in books implies relatedness, a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts quality that demands the poems be read together. Why, then, will one volume read as a distinct entity, confident and sure, while another reads like a grab bag of bits and pieces? What makes a book a book?

Joanna Fuhrman's Moraine addresses this question up front. A moraine, says the epigraph, is a "ground covering of unsorted debris, deposited by the melting away of a glacier." We stand warned that what we have is a miscellany. By claiming "unsorted debris" from the get-go, Fuhrman cues us to expect a certain random, all-inclusive energy. This applies both to Moraine's overall makeup and to the makeup of each poem. What's more, each of the poems is called a "moraine," as if it were a form like a sonnet: "Swing Set Moraine," "Moraine for Bob." As a unifying device, it works surprisingly well.

Just as the title promises, Fuhrman deals in excess. "What's behind that particular gaggle of hipster noise?" the speaker asks in the second poem of Moraine, a line that pretty well sums up the book. Unrelentingly intimate, like a TV turned on 24/7 regardless of programming, Fuhrman lets fly the brain-chatter most of us edit out. Along the poetry continuum, her work is "experimental" in the sense that language play trumps narrative or correlation. "Post-Suburban Moraine" opens: "All along I knew the razzmatazz beauty was said to conjure/ was just a weary catalogue, a thermometer designed to make us/ sick, a pox dividing a house already split and licked," and then hurtles along for three pages, giving just enough linkage (post-suburban = a house divided by illness) to intimate a meaning we never quite reach.

Undeniably, the images are energized: "His pain became a glorious relief,/ an opalescent halo" ("Spinal Moraine") or "the memory/ of a faucet's/ splattered/kiss" ("Pinched Kitchen Partial-Moraine, A Lullaby"). Moraine has a headlong energy that keeps the eye flying down the page, and I like that. Several poems make me think of that definition of experimental work as a joke that writers play on the reader's imperative to construct meaning. True, the nimbleness required to string so many words together and not inadvertently create meaning is considerable. At points, I just stood back and said, "Wow." The technique breaks down, however, in places where the trick takes over, language so punch-drunk that even the suggestion of coherence is lost.

Take two more examples from "Post-Suburban." Lines like "I try to understand the latent compassion in all dull knives. Peach pits sob in private" seize the imagination because they hint at a mysterious relationship between nouns. Compassionate knives dull themselves -- they wish to do no harm. Meanwhile, peach pits sob either for having been scored by dull knives or out of longing for knives that refuse to score them. Eerie and unusual. Compare this to "the tax returns fight back: brave, groovy and strong against the strident/ ukulele, against the hot and blistered moped," where zaniness tries a little too hard, to less effect.

Interestingly, Fuhrman herself comments on this fine line of difference. An ars poetica appears in the midst of "Cento Moraine #2": "Bards freezing, naked, up to the neck in water/ . . . reforming a definition backward and outward so close/ to nonsense that the mind shuttles beneath shade." Here I found both of us, writer and reader, perfectly described. While my mind shuttles back and forth trying to understand, the writer is "naked, up to the neck" in her effort to achieve technical virtuosity without breakdown ("nonsense"). Generally I dislike poems talking about poetry, but this worked for me; I recognized the anxiety and humility of that naked bard, about to go under.

In fact, looking over my notes, I see many of the lines I highlighted are comments of one sort or another on writing. Thus the poems become a performance as the poet watches herself try to reach an impossibly high bar. "Something weirdly architectural between one thought/ and the next is what they wanted," she says of her readers, which made me stop and ask myself: Is it? If "weird architecture" is what gives a poem enough structural integrity not to devolve into gibberish, then yes, that's what I want.

The book works best in individual passages. Because Fuhrman's MO is to pull in everything but the kitchen sink, many poems falter under the weight of their references, yet all of the poems have passages -- or at least lines -- that jar, surprise, electrify. One of the most striking stanzas is the opening of "Nighttime Moraine," which reads like a dream sequence:

To fall into the here of it -- as if the workers sleeping
in the skyscraper don't mind the rain banging against
the windows and I am not the car being driven under
the river. A voice in my ear whispers: bend your head
down and close your eyes, pretend your hands are
slipping to the bottom of the horse's mane.

Lovely any way you look at it, and grounded in a human experience of loss/death that, for me, makes it worth the reading. When "Nighttime" veers off in another direction ("Shirley Temple's voice falls from the trees like a net" means, uh, what?), there's a sensation of being forcibly ejected. Then again, since ejection is what these poems are after . . . it's working.

I once knew a writer who objected on principle to "young-sounding" poems, poems without any awareness of a universe outside the writer's self. In Moraine there is a preoccupation with self that shouts out "youth," but I wonder if that is a bad thing. If Fuhrman's goal -- and I'm intuiting here -- is to travel the universe of the self and no farther, it may be as valid a goal as any other. Certainly, she keeps it interesting. However, what does occasionally grate: the assumption that the minutiae of one's daily life, unfiltered, are fair game for poetry. Play-by-plays such as "All afternoon I feel faint, gulp diet ginger ale,/ sweep the living room, hide the condom wrappers/ under the yellow pillow instead of walking to the trash" ("Mellow Pad Moraine") are essentially a way of killing time until the poem starts. Such reports may strike the writer as intimate (you're right here with me), but to the reader they sound falsely familiar. And, yes, young.

False notes aside, Moraine reads as a book and not merely a conglomeration. There is a jazziness and frenetic pace to all of these poems; there is indeed "razzmatazz." Barreling through Moraine, we never doubt this is the same voice speaking.

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