Book Review: Said Not Said by Fred Marchant

Reviewed by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Said Not Said
Poems by Fred Marchant
Graywolf Press, May 2017
$16.00; 96 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1555977733

Marchant’s generosity is expressed in an extraordinary balance of the immediacy of fresh description and the shapeliness of perspective. Vivid scraps of memory, patterned by Marchant, cohere and weave through this elegant collection. Wound together are Marchant’s childhood as witness to his sister’s illness, his education in Catholic schools, his period as a marine, his subsequent status as a Conscientious Objector, his post-graduate education, his friendships with and translations of Vietnamese poets, his years as a poetry professor, his deep friendships with poets and others, and, finally, the profound comfort and redemption he finds with his wife.

Many poems in the collection proceed by juxtaposition, as in “Trip Wire Dream.”

the night fell like snow that had been falling all day

unlike

a peach pit as wet and red as the cancer they’ve removed

like

the tyrant untethered from his broken clean-shaven neck

Even this short excerpt moves from universal, to personal, to political, (the reference, I presume, is to the capture of Bin Laden), all of which are juxtaposed in Marchant’s work. His is a poetry of presence and incorporation: what happens in the world and what happens in the body are one.

Several of the poems in this collection explicitly reference works of art. “Twin Tulips,” concerning the poet touching his sister’s drawing of tulips, is placed on the page in two long stems of language. It is followed by a stunning ekphrastic poem about Titian’s Europa (“The Rape of Europa”), which describes the depicted and imagined terror of being forcibly swept past reason into another realm. In a series of seemingly inevitable moves, Marchant slides from a consideration of the elements in the painting, including the careful side-stepping language of the docent, to the imagined sensations of Lucretia and his sister. The poem concludes in the speaker’s sister’s mental ward with the ubiquitous, over-cheery attempt at orientation in such places:

a nurse with a thick magic marker to fill in the blank
             Today Is

In the realm of things said that don’t matter, and things not said that do communicate, this unfinished sign reverberates. We expect the chalked-in day of the week, and in its absence, realize that today just is, simply, starkly.

While others might have raged at the injustice, feared contagion, gone in search of a cure, or intentionally distanced the self from the mystery, limitations, and levitations of mental illness in the family, a quotation from Becket states the poet’s hard won insight: “Use your head can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” So instead readers receive a beautifully animated tangle of fabrics and textures. The language is attenuated, almost articulated, as Marchant engages with untranslatable, almost tangible elements of existence. One of the multiple accomplishments of this book is that it delicately tracks the poet’s early dawning awareness of his sister’s situation, with the disinterested objectivity of a child who must deal with that, as in “The Unacceptable.”

How?

How do you write about a cough?

How to hint at the sound of it?

A cough that was odd, not from a cold or something else you catch.

Not only does this series of questions indicate the persistence of the unanswerable and incomprehensible, even well past his initial childhood discomfort, but it also points toward the mature poet’s engagement with rendering, into words, his insights about what is unsayable. He proceeds by a musical intertwining of repetitions, holds, and variations. The pauses between the lines act as breaths between separate questions the poet contemplates, as if they’ve arrived, one at a time, clarified out of the memory of his confusion.

After two speculations about that strange cough beginning “I think now…” then “I first heard it when…” comes a final beat of his understandable childhood conclusion:

I was seven and thought she should just quit it stop bothering me and        everyone.

A few poems later, we learn that the name of the institution in which his sister was placed was Howard (The William A. Howard Farm). So the How’s, which start the lines of the poem above, morph musically, in the following poem, into and because of Howard.

This collection possesses an energetic variety of visual and auditory experiences. The layout on each page mimics drawing. Space, cluster, collage and counterpoint devices make each poem sui-generous and part of a revolving whole, spinning many elements of concern. Likewise, there is a shifting of address: the on-going threads of conversation to and about God, the priests of childhood, the critical voice that calls one up short, and the voice that demands integrity are interwoven in the book. All of these are in service to the human dilemma, which again cannot quite be known or articulated. Marchant acknowledges guilt, desires redemption, and doesn’t know why, as in “In the Rapids:”

             . . . I was proud I could
hold steady enough for anyone who might
need me.  At the same time I felt an almost
overwhelming desire to apologize, although
to whom and for what I just could not say.

There are moments that might appear only private but then become wider, deepen. The personal, political, historical, and etymological are not separate. This is generosity, the lavish generative understanding of connection. What’s said—and what is not—co-exist vibrantly in this book.  

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is the author of Opinel (Bauhan Publishing, 2015), and two chapbooks, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, The Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland, and the 2008 Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, 2011. Her poems have appeared in Agni, Field, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, Salamander, Slate, The Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, and The Tupelo Quarterly, and have been featured in VerseDaily among others.  Her poems are included in two anthologies, Cadence of Hooves and Thirty Days, The Best of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project’s First Year. Rebecca lives in Marlborough, NH and teaches poetry at Tufts University.