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MOVING & ST RAGE by Kathy Fagan. The University of North Texas Press, 1999.

Reviewed by H. L. Hix

The title of Kathy Fagan’s second book, MOVING & ST RAGE, well represents the whole, by capturing the characteristic that animates most of the poems: an ability, displayed often enough to qualify as reliable, to punch the pinhole that makes the poem a camera obscura, turning the world upside down and projecting it onto the page. The evaluative word in that sentence, "reliable," may sound like faint praise, but I mean it otherwise. Indeed, for reliability as an artistic virtue, or as a characteristic of any artistic skill, I hold a toned-down version of Russell’s reverence: "It is an awful curse to have the creative impulse unless you have a talent that can always be relied on, like Shakespeare's or Mozart's."

Fagan attributes the title to a "billboard on Ohio State Route 36," but from the sign’s absent O Fagan constructs a fictional saint, and explains "why Rage came to travel, and walks / the foreign seacoast of an ancient city now, / anonymous among the crowds...." The same "hugely missed and missing O" that creates and sanctifies St. Rage through its absence exerts (like God) a presence also, drawing circles and spheres and whirlings into the poem: "the whirl of birds and white / umbrellas in the sun of the platia," and

a wheel of common failures

that is hope turning up

and regret coming down, and that makes a sound like

                                                See Me See Me,

spewing grit and salt and stars, grinding

on its dark axis.

Fagan demonstrates the same ability to open a pinhole for focused light repeatedly. In the book’s first poem, she describes a girl with her "feet spread // Apart and planted for the camera, / Sleeveless skin peeling / Like eucalyptus bark // In light the color of eucalyptus." In others, religious icons call up "spit / in a hanky to clean the kisses from their cheeks" and grief becomes "a schoolyard of children / lining up by their size."

Fagan’s first book, The Raft, displayed the same skill — not quite as reliably, but frequently enough to augur this second book. Early on, describing a small girl watching geese from her room at night, Fagan makes that Miranda a Prospero by showing us "her small hand, / palm up against the pane, the fingers / loosely arched as if she / had released those great white birds / and ordered their going herself." Later in The Raft, Fagan watches as a "train lows forward // like the slow-moving beasts in a field beyond."

Still, out of The Raft and the first two sections of MOVING & ST RAGE, only The Raft’s early "A Summer Song Cycle" in any way presages MOVING & ST RAGE’s third section. For the first half of the book, Fagan seems undecided about what a poetic line is or can be, but in the third section, a sequence of twelve poems alternating between poems entitled "Revisionary Instruments" and poems whose titles tell what "she" did, Fagan finds her line. For most of the sequence, that line is a sentence.

A poet’s voice must be unique, inimitable, but a poet’s line is never hers alone. The incantatory line in the "Revisionary Instruments" section of Fagan’s book descends from such antecedents as Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman, and has cousins in the first section of Robert Hass’s Human Wishes and in C. D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining.

The sentence/line gives Fagan a way to expand her concise observations — her worlds in a grain of sand — in the direction of fiction, and condense character and narrative in the direction of lyric, as in the beginning of "Revisionary Instruments III."

The beagle out back barks with a hound’s voice, barks with a seal’s

voice, that hoarse and fish-hungry.

 

Her owners let rooms in a shingled house, leave rarely, are never idle.

 

Even their boys, jostling each other on the seat of a mower, manage,

anyhow, to look purposeful.

 

They travel the lengths of the sidewalks and alleys they’ve been ordered

to stay on, and do; shouting above the engine sounds, scattering squirrels       to the borders.

 

How cleanly Paradise contains them this way. How well they guard it on

their noisy rounds.

 

If "Revisionary Instruments VI" stands as the book’s ars poetica, it is an accurate one. It announces an ambition that surely all poets share: "I wanted to write a poem so true our hearts would ring and tilt into the dip of it." It also recognizes the impossibility of achieving the ambition: "Let us forget that now." But if poetry cannot remove the dissonance between desire and actuality, it can, and Fagan’s best poems do, reduce the distance between memory and hope.