Book Review: Manual of Woody Plants by Phil Cordelli

Manual of Woody Plants
Poems by Phil Cordelli
Ugly Duckling Presse, October 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1937027216
$17; 184pp.
Reviewed by Anne Shaw

“Show me someplace we haven’t been,” Phil Cordelli’s writes in Manual of Woody Plants, and proceeds to unfold the profound strangeness of the ordinary (“Acer negundo (Box-elder)”). Following the structure and titling of a horticultural guide, this expansive collection uses plants as a jumping-off point to examine the nature of memory and perception. Cordelli systematically channels the essence of each plant, exploring the ways they touch and commingle with the human. In doing so, he presents plants as unacknowledged others, strange presences with which we coexist but which we continually overlook.

The poems range from haiku-like fragments to examinations of personal experience, language, and sociological history. Cordelli commands a wide range of tonal registers as well, from the plain-spoken to the lyric and experimental, often combining them in a single poem: in “Quercus alba (White oak),” he conjures “roots / visible in the one-foot-square hole / a glorious phosphorescent death”; in “Rubus (Bramble)” he delves into playful evocations of language: “iamb gon amble / …. / hunger knuckles and etching / nascent thorns not yet stiff;” in “Forthergillia ‘Mr. Airy,'” slashes illustrate his lyric meditation on history:

to
\\

/
speak of home, intermitting the voice
//
these were for hills, the tenement, the farmer
\\\
the old, unrequited tunings

Cordelli’s own language is periodically interrupted—by diagrams, sketches, a Greek excerpt from the New Testament, or the detritus of found language—as though calling attention to the futility of attempts to taxonomize. Like the plants whose names they bear, each poem operates on its own terms. So, too, Cordelli suggests, with human experience.

The collection’s strength—its embrace of the dispersive, disruptive, and exploratory—is also its greatest potential weakness, and the book at times runs the risk of seeming more loosely-defined compilation than manual or guide. Frustratingly, it offers only a cursory explanation of the scope and structure of the project that propels it. The author’s explanation, concealed in the tiny type of the endnotes, describes a range of generative processes: the reclamation of old poems, the juxtaposition of lines of text (the author’s and others’), and twenty-minute mediations in the presence of each plant. Yet the full details of the process are never revealed. The implications are different if Cordelli grafted in sources related to the particular plant in question or used randomly encountered materials. Similarly, the practice of seeking out each plant from an existing manual, including the most hard-to-find and exotic, has different resonances than focusing on those indigenous to a particular location. The book’s formal choices and metatextual gestures can be equally mystifying; for instance, some plants are listed with their common names and others not. Such self-conscious gestures run the risk of seeming like an apparatus superimposed to make otherwise disparate poems cohere.

Cordelli’s true intent, though, seems to be to invite the active participation of his audience. To that end, the poems offer different experiences to different readers. Familiarity with each plant opens layers of meaning like seed pods; for readers not inclined to look up botanical names, the lines offer striking, filmic impressions. Their strength lies in the language itself, as Cordelli uses his supple lines to bend and connect ideas. For instance, in “Redbud (Circes),” he moves the reader effortlessly through a series of perceptions that are both alien and poignant:

one last tooth tethered to evening
angelic, interrupted in tracing
something forgotten in code
all bodies immersed in each other

Such singular acuities, guided by Cordelli’s sensitive ear, are the real driving force of the collection. At its strongest, Manual for Woody Plants constitutes a rediscovery and remaking of our relationship to the pastoral—one focused on precise observation, individual experience, and the enigmas concealed in what we think we know. These poems, like the plants they invoke, reward close examination as they explore the roots and branches of human perception.

Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and Dido in Winter (Persea Books, December 2013). Her poems have appeared in journals including Harvard Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and New American Writing. Also a visual artist, she is currently a graduate student of writing and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found online at www.anneshaw.org.