Staff Shelf: Breytenbach, Goodman, Searls, Phillips

Mouroir, by Breyten Breytenbach (Archipelago, March 2009, 279 pgs, $15)

When it was already late I got up to go and smoke a cigar outside under the naked heavens. It was an old habit of mine to do so, even under otherwise normal circumstances: to slowly contemplate the fantastic pageant of the galaxy, all those beasts and formations and images and petrified ice fields remote fluttering fires and to see how they rock by, to see how blanched they are; I know of no better solution for oppressive thoughts: the I is liquidated.

Oppression, memory, poetic language -- all have a place in Breytenbach's strange and often striking book. Written during the artist and anti-apartheid activist's seven-year prison sentence (1975-1982), Mouroir is made up of 39 fragments, some just a few pages, others 15, some concentrated narratives, others entirely free from the rules of story. (In her celebratory review of the novel, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer offered this gem: "Narrative is an old railway line on which service has been discontinued.") It's a difficult, often bewildering book, but I'm finding pleasure in Breytenbach's language, which is a poet's in its originality and use of imagery: "I use the stirrup-word 'reality'," he writes -- and I have to stop, in admiration of the phrase. But other passages, like this one, pull me forward, and lift my head:  "The night was tight and still except for the quick quivering of wind in the branches and coppices. Like pilot-lights on high masts were the stars in the blown-clear spaces of heaven, like the mirroring in a dark surface of the rain-eye on leaves." 

*

Cat Power: A Good Woman, by Elizabeth Goodman (Three Rivers, May 2009, 288 pgs, $13.95) 

Goodman, former editor-at-large at Blender, starts off this bio with an introduction titled, "Chan Marshall does not want you to read this book." It's a triple downer: we're given a sour page-one shove off, an overly inflated sense of the book's importance, and an admission that we won't be hearing from Marshall herself. We do hear from Marshall's ex-boyfriend's mother. And Marshall's step-dad, who offers these details of meeting her one-time beau Bill Callahan: "[W]e had a light lunch, sandwiches and stuff." For the Cat Power fan (and I'm a big one), there's at least some new information here, the most interesting centered around the who's and how's of the record-making. But Goodman's project -- as a full-length book -- in the end feels misguided and wanting.  

*

What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, by Damion Searls (Dalkey Archive Press, May 2009, 102 pgs, $12.95)

This slight collection never grabbed me, though I'll long remember this very fine description of modern office life, from the story "The Cubicles" (and coming a few pages before my favorite phrase in the book: "extracubbicular activities"):

Even the physical space of the cubicles was a sort of allegory of the isolated compartments in which your hours find themselves there, like cabinets in a tea shop, hundreds of square drawers taking up the whole wall, each one with barely enough room on the front for a knob and a number or a Chinese character, each one smothering a wonderful scent in its conformity. One of those cubical drawers holds what you want, the new sensation you desperately need to awaken you from your present stagnation, but which?

*

Speak Low: Poems, by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 68 pgs, $23)

One of St. Louis' best poets -- and one of the country's -- has just published his 10th collection, and once again we're facing bodies: of water, of land, of men. Phillips has his own striking rhythm -- words in short bursts, then a pause, then a few more -- that gives these poems a strong sense of penetration, of drilling down ("now a tinderbox / in flames, now the flames themselves," he writes in "Rubicon"). With imagination and superb craftsmanship, Phillips writes of desire, fear, regret, forgiveness; he alludes to Greek tragedies and sketches vivid present-tense moments of consequence, often messing with our ideas of either/ors and oppositions, as in this line from "Distortion" -- "Let me show you what it looks like / when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side." -- or in this remarkable close to "Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices":

Frankly, it's the inevitability part  

that I most adore, still, in the inevitable. It makes of blame

an irrelevance. We'll take up once more the two positions that--

favoring depth over range--we've mastered, finally: this time it's

your turn to be the bonfire; I'll be distance through which 

the bonfire, unspecifiable, could at first be any small point

of restlessness--lit, contained--in a blackening field. 

-- Stephen Schenkenberg