Reviews

 

 

In Times of Danger
by Paul Oppenheimer

Spuyten Duyvil, 2010; 97 pages; $15.00
ISBN 978-1-933132-79-2, paper
http//www.spuytenduyvil.net

Reviewed by Sarah White

Paul Oppenheimer's book opens with a sonnet about bats flitting through the darkness. It closes with an 8-line lyric (one of the few non-sonnets) on the pleasure of freshwater fishing in sunlight. Do these pastoral scenarios belie the menace of his title, In Times of Danger? Far from it. The poet has knowingly enclosed his collection in a fragile outer framework which he proceeds to explode, reminding us of the deadly violence that exploded into the cloudless morning of September 11, 2001. Oppenheimer's cycle of some 90 sonnets explores the world as it was altered by that event, and tries to process the extreme urban distress in which we have lived since then.

Some poets have responded to modern angst by plunging into linguistic discontinuities, abandoning conventional coherence, shedding any trace of old forms, rhymes, or meters. (We suspect that these poets never liked the forms in the first place, or don't know how to use them). Oppenheimer has taken the opposite tack, embracing formal constraints (I suspect he DID like them, and he DOES know how to use them.) In "A Matter of Form" he sets out reasons for his aesthetic choices:

I need a form that I did not invent—
this shrewd eight-hundred-year-old slippery one…

These lines are written by a proven historian of the sonnet. He has surveyed its development in a brilliantly annotated anthology of sonnets from 8 centuries and 4 languages (The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Oxford, 1989). He knows as well as anyone the sonnet's "slippery" ways and the expansive resources it offers. His unapologetic apologia continues:

its loose, firm music that seems half heaven-sent—
amid my fear that what may soon be done

with fixing peace to make it more like war
and fixing war to make it surgical—
these up-to-date ideas—requires more
as talk of war turns more liturgical,

than undemanding rhythms that conceal
deep seismic rhymes; like some good argument,
this form is worn with rubbing bright as steel,

and tuned by ancient anguish to impart
the strain of modern doubt: an instrument
just right, just now, on which to test my heart.

As I read Oppenheimer, he considers that free verse with its "undemanding rhythms" may conceal under-currents of post-9/11 skullduggery, bigotry and blundering. Instead, he chooses the sonnet as a time-honored tool with which to explore feelings and ideas with precision. He takes advantage of creative tensions, walking the line between disorder and order, anarchy and discipline. Rather than striving for originality he welcomes the continuities that link us with "ancient anguish."

Oppenheimer's approach to our perplexities is open to valid objections, ones which he himself has no doubt heard from critics and fellow poets. We catch echoes of such disputes in "The Little Picture," another testimony in favor of his formal strategies:

Some say that sonnets cannot hold great battles
and that this closet cannot contain the screams
of thousands wounded…

…and more ask why
shocked poets may dig out their hand-me-downs

such as these old-fashioned close-knit lines
as desert lights go hissing out in blood.

Although I myself feel boundless confidence in the usefulness of the sonnet, I do think the form can work its magic without espousing meters as strict as Oppenheimer's. He is a poet to whose ear and pen iambic lines spring almost reflexively, and in all sorts of contexts:

From outer space the world looks all at peace…

The full red blast comes later. First the bud
and not the blast… [This isn't a bomb, but
a February rose blooming indoors]

You take me to the movies. I escape…

However, In Times of Danger does not lack restorative variety and wit. I particularly enjoy "A Diagnostic Moment."

This fever, which I understand as love,
seems long on lickety if short on split,
adept enough at pell if not at mell…

…its higgledy will not make do
with any sort of piggeldy at all
while all its funny dally lacks all dilly

as if before bonjour you said adieu…

Oppenheimer's rhymes and his divisions within sonnets are refreshingly flexible. He is no slave to the octave and sestet or to the clinching couplet. The look of his pages is enlivened by stanzas containing 5, 5, and 4 lines; 6, 6, and 2; 8, 3 and 3; 5, 5, 3 and 3; even, in one case, 7 couplets—a grisly shopping list:

Grapes, broccoli, some juicy Boston lettuce,
red onions, plus two whites, and sweet green beans—

and then we spot a black leg on the floor
just one aisle over; such sights do upset us…

Overall, the collection is notable for its expertise, discipline, and conviction. To tame modern demons by sheer force of argument and scansion may be an impossible project, but it is a worthwhile, even moving, one.

Finally, I return to the two framing poems. First, the bat sonnet. Its language is highly energized. Repetition and an identical rhyme brave possible criticism from purists (not from this one!):

So in that batty twilight flitting past us,
so close, we heard their webbed, tick-tocking wings,
watching their drunken dives, their crazy scoops
and silly struts, their impotent soft flings
agains the squibs of darkness tippling past us,

and parsed their batty intersecting hoops
that creaked and blipped as if amid their tilts
they knew old secret tunnels through the light
into the dark and flew them to their treasure,
some creeping batty type kept out of sight

by day, but grappled from dark sonar stilts
by night, some succulent live pleasure—

and grinned and swore eternity would not last us,
nor any darkness ever take our measure.

Humans here are not only acquainted with the night but comfortable in it. They "parse" the bats' wild swoops, while bats parse darkness itself and follow it to succulent life. The apparent chaos of their movements differs profoundly from the man-made chaos Oppenheimer explores at length before closing on another scene of human ease in nature.

In "Angling," we appreciate a "knowing bass" and "silver perch" set within a flow of water, light and shadow. We are pleasantly surprised to encounter an argument between the poet and, of all people, Plato. I had no idea what that philosopher had to say about fishing, so I Googled and found his "Sophist," a dialogue that raises the issue of whether the angler's art is skilled or unskilled. Plato's answer is somewhat muddy, and one day, I'd like to ask Paul Oppenheimer just why he chose to make this charming piece his final word to the reader. Perhaps it was in order to demonstrate that disagreements do not have to be bigoted or murderous. They can instead be civilized, pleasurable, and balanced ("Plato had it wrong and right"). As a poet (and maybe as an angler as well) Oppenheimer possesses undeniable art and skill. His keen literary mind is one for which all readers should be grateful.

 

Sarah White's latest publication is Alice Ages and Ages (Blaze Vox, 2010), a book of variations. She lives, writes, and paints on the Upper West Side.