A Poetic Blind Tasting

UW poet delves into history

The Seconds

By Linda Bierds

G. P. Putnam's Sons

2001, 88 pages

Paperback, $15

Reviewed by Kent Chadwick

Are Linda Bierds' poems zircon or diamond, costume jewelry or true pearls? That was the doubt I'd had since first hearing and reading Bierds' poems nearly a decade ago. That was a doubt fostered by dozens of bad poems by other poets who namedrop historical figures into their titles in order to add meaning to their lyrics. How much of the attraction of Bierds' poems was intrinsic and how much due to their historical settings?

Bierds, a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient, regularly identifies historical subjects and settings in her titles. "From the Orchard: Marie Curie, 1930" is a typical example. So the day that I bought my copy of Bierds' new book, The Seconds, I covered its table of contents without reading it and masked the title line of each poem with a scrap of paper and scotch tape. Then I was ready to read each poem without a historical preconception and perform the poetic equivalent of a blind tasting.

My first taste, the first poem, was one of the longest in the collection, running five pages. Written in the first person, the speaker is royalty struggling with both madness and insomnia in a time of quills, caravels, and castratos. With exacting attention to detail and the wanderings of consciousness, Bierds builds a sequence of six rich scenes connected by lightly handled symbols:

"Time tossed and retrieved her shadow, again and again, out over Polaris and a distant Mars...."

When read without knowing the title, it is a very good poem, interesting and satisfying in its own right. Then I uncovered the poem's title: "Dementia Translucida: Philip V of Spain, 1740." The title serves to anchor the poem into history, naming the speaker and his condition, yet the poem isn't dependent on the title. The worth of the poem is earned, not borrowed from a historical setting. But I think that Bierds obliges us too much by specifying the exact date in this title. She expects no background or work from the reader. I knew nothing of Philip V, would only have been able to place him within a range of three hundred years, yet I didn't need to know the exact year of its setting in order to enjoy the poem. Bierds gives us history. But I think a more powerful approach is to drive readers to history, as Ezra Pound did in his Cantos, which almost requires the reader to become a student of history in order to understand its poems.

In my "blind tasting" of The Seconds, I found that nearly two-thirds of Bierds' poems are similarly strong, interesting in image and language, with their historical references serving to anchor them in time and multiply their dimensions. A prime example from this group is "The Highland: Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939," a beautiful meditation on language, illness, and consciousness as Zelda writes to her "Dear One," F. Scott I expect, from an elegant mental hospital. Bierds effectively describes Zelda's experience of her mental illness, how her visual perception occasionally fractures, making the things around her shift from objects into masses of color and free-floating lines. "Into what shape will our shapelessness flow?" Zelda asks, in doubt of her immediate stability and her future. This is not an everywoman abandoned into mental illness; it's Zelda Fitzgerald. Knowing the historical circumstances adds poignancy and gives us a slot in which to file the images and the narrative, yet reduces the range of the reader's possible engagement with the poem. It is a known story, not a fiction, an imaginative drilling into the historically real, not an open-ended invention.

However, some of Bierds' poems in The Seconds do need their historical setting to rise above the average. For example, I didn't find "The Ponds: Franz Kafka, June 1924" interesting until I uncovered the title. The actual lines of the poem don't effectively create a portrait of the speaker, nor do they lead us to care much about his fate. The poem first describes the speaker's childhood swims with his father, then jumps to a story about his grandfather's winter baths in an ice-covered river, then precipitously to the fact that the speaker's larynx is now diseased and he's traveling to find a cure. The only thing holding the pieces of this poem together and attracting our attention is the fact given in the title- that the speaker is Franz Kafka.

Taken as a whole, The Seconds is more effective than it's individual parts. The individual poems are well-crafted and intriguing, but not often great. A difficult poem may need a number of readings for one to fully grasp its allusions and indirections, and only a few in the collection promise individually to draw me back again in the future. But together they form a very satisfying and very smart meditation on illness and the experience of time. Here in her sixth volume of poetry, Bierds has perfected the building of a book. Her lyric voice unifies a wide range of biographies and carefully weaves images and oddities into a major theme--how illness often draws us into a penetrating awareness of the things around us, how that awareness slows our experience of time and ushers us into the presence of death:

"the sun is pale, the heavens troubled ... I tremble before my own heart." That's knowledge I'll return to.