Unions,
Alfred Corn’s eleventh book of poetry, is his most accessible collection. The poems are still diverse and
demanding in their references and allusions, as well as in their variety of
forms, but those aspects don’t call attention to themselves, instead taking a
relaxed approach and inviting the reader to follow suit. It might also be because I’m currently
twice the age I was when I first read Corn’s poetry as an undergraduate
twenty years ago that the density of references ceases to distract me; now, I
recognize and understand the majority of them. I can better appreciate, too, Corn’s deft sleights of hand in
slipping them discreetly into his poems.
This
is an elegantly structured and sequenced volume, and its title motif is
intentionally woven through the book.
Among the collection’s myriad kinds of unions are transatlantic journeys to places that figure into roughly a fourth of the poems. The epic “Eleven Londons” recalls in close detail a series
of extended stays in the city over a period of four decades, carefully documenting
the sociocultural changes that took place in the author’s life, from the days
of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison to debates over same-sex marriage and
post-9/11 wariness.
“A
city is a person,” writes Corn midway through the poem, and its segments,
constructed like free-flowing journal entries, are built around that notion;
the city changes as much as the poem’s author and the culture that surrounds
them both, just as his perspective on all of it changes simultaneously. A steady, informal rhythmic
underpinning that’s reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s lines keeps the sum of the
parts intact. Having visited
London annually each spring myself for the past two decades, I matched much of
my own catalog of memories with Corn’s:
Charing Cross, the National Portrait Gallery, Camden Lock, Regent’s
Park, Little Venice, Covent Garden, the bounty of West End theatrical productions. We’ve even seen some of the same shows.
Among
the book’s other United Kingdom-based poems, I particularly like “Bloody,” an
incisive etymology of that curious English adverb and its lack of (polite)
American counterparts. In a jaunt
across the Irish Sea, “Dublin Night” is also indelibly memorable and haunting,
with its lone shadow of a figure drifting through the bustling center of the
town in darkness, wondering if it might be best to disappear into the black
water running under a bridge.
Despite
such solitary glimpses, there are also, certainly, interpersonal unions
represented at points throughout the volume — friendships (“Bob”), rivalries
(“Doppelgänger”), romances (“In Half-Light”), sexual relationships (“Möbius
Strip”). But among the interpersonal
poems, the most impressive and intriguing one for me is “Common Dwelling,” a
poem about near-strangers, one’s neighbors residing in the hive of a communal
building. We live in a world in
which fewer and fewer people can afford to purchase a house, so it’s a scenario
that almost all of us can relate to:
“the enviable neighbor couple / who shift and stir less than an arm’s
length / behind the headboard, their murmurs / sifting into consciousness / as
though no sheetrock intervened.” No other poem that I know of conveys that
uneasy form of sonic intimacy so effectively. Or this:
“Heavy
boots not muted by rugs clunk
about
on the floor above. Months
of
obstinate slogging guarantee
their
pace would instantly anywhere
be
recognized, if not the pacer.
Odd
moments in the day he launches
his
campaign with a ruckus that feels
coercive,
sure, but on behalf of what?”
The
same image could be applied to the American and global political landscapes as
Corn aptly describes them. From
allegorically political poems like “The Wall” to more direct and pointed indictments
like “Cascade of Faces,” Corn navigates back and forth between a citizen’s
commentary and active resistance.
Yet he always seems to emphasize human beings’ ongoing responsibility to
each other, ultimately, even if our contemporary cybernetic world makes those
connections ironically more difficult to forge. Today, our potential unions often throw our loneliness and
solitude into stark relief within “the musicosmic comedy of time.”
That
solitude takes center stage in “Hunting Season,” probably my favorite poem from
the collection. Several
alternating strands of imagery — an approaching thunderstorm, a man out walking
his dog, another listening to a classical composition on the radio while watching
from a window — escalate to a powerful crescendo that suggests imagination, even
imagination into some distant residual memory of a past life in ancient times,
may be the only real remedy and redemption. Just like in the rest of Corn’s work itself, music is the vehicle,
of course, that gets this poem’s speaker there: “Sing, goddess. / Lightheaded, I’m ready to be torn apart.”
The
poem also suggests that our increasingly technological existence will only ever
carry us back to nature, which is where the book begins, with a gorgeous ode to
the wind titled “All It Is.” “Any
terrain you find arises from all / that came before,” Corn surmises, after
tracing a breeze that makes its way through treetops and over wetlands. The same could be said of how this book
itself came to be, arising from all of Corn’s books, poems, and experiences
that came before. One more union,
then, or rather, many unions across the vast divisions of time and space. As Corn closes one poem early in the
collection, “Since what divides things joins them, too, united.”