Book Review: Incorrect Merciful Impulses by Camille Rankine

Reviewed by Robert Manaster

Incorrect Merciful Impulses
Poetry by Camille Rankine
Copper Canyon Press, December 2015
77 pp., $16.00
ISBN-13: 978-1-55659-490-8

Camille Rankine’s compelling debut collection, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, enacts the struggles of one trying to connect broadly with society and more intimately with both another person and one’s self. The threat of disconnection is everywhere. In the opening poem, “Tender,” the speaker begins:

Dear patriot

Dear catastrophe

        None of this means what we thought it did

Dear bone fragments

Dear displacement

Dear broken skin

        I am in over my head              

The voice takes on a tone of tender weariness. The spacious lines, lack of punctuation, and the endearing, repetitive address “dear” opens up space for the uncertain and overwhelmed speaker struggling with present and past threats.

These struggles inhabit a twilight of sense, as in “The Current Isolationism”:

In the half-light, I am most
at home, my shadow
as company.

[…] I mean this stain on my mind
I can’t get out. How human
I seem.

Vagueness is both a strength and challenge. While these and other lines resonate emotional nuances of being connected and disconnected, they slip by grounded certainty in narrative.

Eight “Symptoms of […]” poems throughout this collection frame these struggles. The symptoms, heightened threats from the norm, are akin to Rankine’s vagueness. The reader cannot tell exactly where it hurts or from where the pain is coming. As one moves through this book, one’s feelings are catching up with this sense, dropping the rational urge to explain and figure out. Rather one learns to live with these symptoms. Near the end, though, in “Syzygy” the speaker understands “it helps / to think collectively / however unlikely.” In the final poem, “We,” the collective “we”

have been destroyed
have been beginning

have been discovery, a new fruit
…….growing ripe within our skins

The speaker transforms the creation story into a renewal story of partners as one — including both woman and man, dark- and light-skinned. This transformation involves knowledge: from a morality-based what-should-be (initiated through eating the Garden of Eden apple) to a discovery-based what-is (indicated as a “new fruit”). The former seems more rigid and prone to people separating — while one person or group is “good,” another is “evil.” The latter, though, seems more fluid and open to people connecting — through discovery one continually learns actual similarities and differences. There’s no period ending the poem (and book), no ending to this growing (and learning) within.

Within this overall struggle to connect, the collection has an adept, varied pacing. In “Always Bring Flowers,” Rankine’s poetry is compact:

Draw my next step in chalk.

Every atom of me says faster,
giddy up up up, skull-fractured

my skinny hope on the popcorn ceiling,
eyes full of snow.

This language with its implied threats is barely contained as a poetry of fragments. Other times, as in “Wake,” sentences traverse their way down unwinding their hold yet tightening their pull:

I can stop this anytime
or I can’t, I can’t

decide, do I
cup my hands to receive

some element of grace, or
brace my frame against the harsh
that I create.

There’s powerful enjambment and illusion of enjambment in “harsh.” Given relentless poetic tension amid such dialectics (e.g. cup/brace, receive/create, grace/harsh), here and throughout this collection’s varied pacing and form, Rankine continually shifts and resists certainty.

Rankine’s work is a poetry about the possibility/impossibility of connecting. In “The Current Isolationism”:

When there’s no one here, I halve

the distance between
our bodies infinitesimally.

With longing for close connection and the awkward length of “infinitesimally,” the speaker inches closer, always halving, yet is never able to touch the other. If one always halves distance toward a given endpoint, how can one ever touch that endpoint? There must be a leap of faith, a skewer in logic, to overcome distance. There’s also poetic play with the pun on “halve” (“have”) and with the stanza break — this white-space distance after “halve” when the speaker is closing in on distance. This play brings out even more the possible/impossible connection the speaker desires.   

While there’s much poetic play and tension in Rankine’s language, her poetry also walks along the edge of overreaching, which is an admirable risk. At times, the poetry works too hard to steer the reader, as in “History,” “[…] with the memory: / lost teeth, regret. Our ghosts / walk the shoulders of the road at night.” These moments, though, are infrequent.

At her most sublime, Rankine’s speakers critique a suspect language. In “Vespertine,” the speaker subverts the usual metaphors of light (white and source of life and truth) and dark (black and source of evil, destruction, and death). The night’s active and alive; it has emotional valence and power. “Dear night: It was so warm / under you that I offered.” However, “In daylight, I’m an acre of empty / desert, anyway. A spent white flower. A pale / honey scent wilted away.” In “Instructions for Modern Graffiti,” the protagonist goes underground into the dark where “You won’t be spared / these visions. Rats scatter. Trash fire. // Heartspray, stain the halls.” In this dark at night, the “you” is heartily alive. In the morning, “Your eyes stung // by the natural light. /[…] alive without permission, rusting away in the sun.” The “you” is still alive despite natural light and its traditional associations. By undermining these metaphors, Rankine’s poetry critiques the white (and implicitly male) world of this language (of “light”). In this sense, Rankine’s poetry participates in poetic discourse about race and gender. While she mostly eludes giving direct critiques of them and usually eludes revealing the race and gender of her poems’ personas, her poetry tends to transcend these categorizations.

As her poetry confronts a continually uncertain, disheartening society, she joins the ranks of those critiquing American culture, its isolating forces and disconnected toil of its individuals — all amid the grace and beauty her speakers find, as in these typically gorgeous lines of poetic tension and vagueness in “Contact”: “This precious ache I cradle, my treasure, / my dread. What barren, what beauty it makes in me.” Her tone and critique seem more evasive and tender than other poetic approaches by poets in these ranks, such as June Jordan’s and other’s (most notably the slam poets) in-your-face style; Terese Svoboda’s hyper-associations with frenetic, fragmentary energy; Juliana Spahr’s more ethereal associations with connective energy; Ladan Osman’s dynamic, bold movement; or Mark Nowak’s more pragmatic impulse in documentary poetics.

At her best, Rankine’s word choice is precise and resonant. “I can’t keep my fool mouth shut,” the last line from “The Problem of Death within Life,” deftly uses the less formal and more emotional word “fool” rather than the expected “foolish.” The consecutive heavy beats imply an anger more at the speaker’s self. There’s also play with “full” (vs. “fool”) and the mouth being overflowing with food. In this case poetry overflows, bursting out of the speaker’s hunger in a disconnecting world. This fool/full sense dampens the anger, even making it self-deprecating humor in its ill-mannered fullness. It’s as if the speaker reluctantly participates in this world’s framework of self-assuring authority and labeling of the self — perhaps “incorrect” impulses — yet continually strips it down when opening up space for both humility and empathetic voice — “merciful” impulses — which inhabit this well-wrought collection.

Robert Manaster has published reviews in such publications as Rattle, Jacket2, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. His poetry and co-translations have appeared in numerous journals including Rosebud, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Image, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Spillway. His co-translation of Ronny Someck’s The Milk Underground (White Pine Press, 2015) was awarded the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.