Book Review: The View of the Body by Renee Ashley

Reviewed by Michael T. Young

The View from the Body
Poems by Renee Ashley
Black Lawrence Press, 2016
$15.95; 75 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1625579553

In his poem, “Prime,” W.H. Auden dissects that moment between sleep and consciousness. Auden parcels it out into a poetic weave of the waking self as it lingers “without a name or history” and hovers “between [the] body and the day.” This space and time is where Renee Ashley’s latest collection, The View from the Body, takes place. This collection is a struggle to define the self against the demands of the body and the culture that defines one by the body, especially in the case of women.

The opening poem, “Came Home, I,” begins, “The body: deluded, distressed, its incontestable world / loose in the other world.” That incontestable world takes many shapes. But regardless of shape, it consistently creates a dual self. In this first poem, it is a place to “view the two-headed girl.” The poem concludes: “So came home, I, divided and dancing / that steel-shoed dance, with instructions: Fall silent.”

Within the book, there is an acceptance that the body and mind are really one thing, for this machine we inhabit is, as we are told in “Salt to Make a Sea,” a “body named / bone, named brain.” That assertion is counter to the typical Cartesian view that divides the self into ghost and machine. While this atypical perspective is explored, there is still the longing for a kind of transcendence. Implied is the problem of defining the self as simultaneously physical and metaphysical, social and private. In the collection’s third poem titled “Not What She Had in Mind,” “She is trying to get out of her body.” To this desire “The yeasty / dead rise and toss out suggestions, but / they’re not what she had in mind.” Dying is one way out of the body. Of course, dying is also one way you can’t have any suggestion “in mind,” since it’s equally a way to be out of mind.

In the book’s second section, the poem “Pain” tells us “unbecoming is what all this is about.” Ashley layers meaning, since “unbecoming” serves both as death and as a way of un-writing what it means to live in a body. This is apparent in “The Beautiful Girl is Disturbed.” The “she” of the poem is defined by a “he” in the obvious terms of men’s desire:

         He wants the skin from her arms, from

her back. He wants the birds that speak from her mouth.
(He is testing the serious thunder between her legs, her
aureole of sunlight, her perpetual hour. He is translating
her body into the world.)

This transforms the titillations of sex into degradation, for it also translates the female self into the simplistic terms of skin, arms, voice and that “serious thunder between her legs.” Against all of that, “she” struggles, even in the very act, “That she has no wings. That she too must fly.” The struggle is of a mind against the terms that would define it solely by its body. That struggle is embodied variously elsewhere as in “Or, I Saw Someone Leaving the World,” which ends “The writing: It’s wonderful, nothing.” The speaker is writing new terms, and that “nothing” is another kind of unbecoming defined in the collection’s final section. It is a nothing that is both cultural and metaphysical, the cultural nothing that denies everything about a speaker who doesn’t fit into that culture’s image.

In “On Being Asked at Work Why My Office Self Hasn’t Confronted My Poem Self on the Page,” we find a self that

   builds a house

of many rooms and doors and the doors are hinge-bound but she
passes through the walls, and one of the rooms, the best room, is

soundless and dark, and in this one room the woman owes nothing,
not to anyone, not for anything. Nothing! A room, by definition,

free of debt, of should, of this-is-the-way-it-is-done, of Newton’s god-
damned apple falling, endlessly defining up and down, a room of no

I told you so, of Fuck you it’s my poem, a room in which even this small
explaining defines its sweet occupancy, fills her lungs with air.

The speaker is free from all laws both social and natural. Here is the island of absolute self-definition against the various forms of imposed definitions we are born into, those that are the given world or what we might call “other.”

Each of the book’s three sections could be read as a self-definition asserted against the various meanings presented as “other.” Perhaps one of the strongest oppositions comes in the form of time. The wisdom that teaches us to live in the now is not, ultimately, possible for a human in the way it is for the dogs that also run through the collection. In “Simple,” a snowfall provides for a disappearance of thresholds. What comes simultaneously is the possibility of “finding ourselves in this.” The speaker watches the brown dogs frolic in the white, “their eyes // as good as sightless except for the joy. For the / loss of that other, a better-known world.).” The dogs’ joy is pure or “simple,” but the speaker can’t follow the dogs there. Similar to Keats’ Nightingale, these dogs too cavort in a world we cannot completely enter. That “better-known world” is both the idea of a better world here and the idea of a better world elsewhere beyond it. Either of those things, which endlessly plague the human psyche, do not impinge on the canine reality.

The dissolving of thresholds continues into the second section, opening the possibility of greater meanings for the self. In the second section of the book, the first section of the poem “The Abduction of Mirrors” concludes, “You’ve reached the limit you’re going to disappear.” The poem is the longest in the book and suggests a problem in human perception rooted in the taking of the forbidden fruit. We learn, “Objectivity not a fruit on this tree,” and “All that does not grow from you reflects.” Because the world is a kind of Rorschach, the fate of the self and the world are coeval as is the self’s destruction in “Important”:

The recognition of a self shot through
with the self. What rises to the top. Look

around you: a perpetual grief called so-
this-is-what-I-am. So that will be my end.

The self lives in time and cannot escape the final identification of each moment dying into the next. This progression is bound with the desire to understand the world around us. “Home” as another identity is understood in terms of movement, as “a place you go or just a way you are,” like in “Things As They Are When They Take You”: “Your heart a rattle of rocks and // the world ends every day. You would like to get closer to / what-it-is.” Ultimately, “you’d like / to understand a few things as they are when they take you.”

But becoming—being taken or going to a place—is also a kind of falling or failing, and these are other threads that run through various poems. For instance, in “Less Than the Plow,” we are told “You must pity what falls and cannot find its wings.” Or, in “I Did Not Know It Had Come to Be so Late,” we find “here I am again, // sack of spirit and shit, suspended in the fact / of failing again.” But the world ending every day necessitates rebirth. The first poem of the third section, “Such Threads of Light as Exist in Deep Pools” declares, “Here is the name: reborn.” The world and identity are bound together, which means also that identity is an act of perpetual definition without a fixed conclusion. It’s a publication outdated as soon as it is published.

The self finds that a part of its meaning is irresistibly rooted in biology. The title alone suffices: “The Poet, Who Has yet to Identify That Third Person, Confuses Her Feminine Pronouns—and Then Discovers It Doesn’t Matter Anyway Because, Despite All That Effort Not to Be, She Is Her Mother After All.” Gradually the echo of that imperative, “fall silent,” from the collection’s first poem, asserts itself as a part of the biological imperative that everything has a limit, everything dies, falls silent and as is said in “There is No Thing Called Memory”: “Only the rope // of the body untwined. Such lineage. / She writes that name in her dust.”

That is the by-line of everyone, even of writers, every poem an elegy in the terrible past tense of “I was here.” The “other,” which the self opposed in order to achieve self-definition, is itself subsumed into that self’s definition in “Thrown to the Away”: “It pulls at //what is left behind. The other. The / dust. All the evidence you ever were.” In “Six Lines in the First Person Addressing the Second,” the self that is a mind addresses the self that is a body, “In the arrogance of the body I know you.” That body, that “second person,” hands the mind its terminal weapon, “I still carry your gun in my hand.” The end of that second person carries with it the fate of the first, because both will go down in the same violence that concludes their existence. The terms of physics previously defied, Newton and his “goddamned apple,” return in the final poem, “There Is,” where “There is /// nothing left to worship,”: “Up there down there. // Foreground. Background. / What you can swing from.”

Context is everything for meaning; there is no definition free of it. We are all in a context inextricably bound up in the definition of who we are. For better or worse, that imposes limits, especially the physical ones, with death being the ultimate defining context. However, the struggle against limits remains heroic and is better than the alternatives of apathy, acquiescence, even the embrace of oppression. The struggle against limits is what creates us and makes our beloved underdogs. We are how we respond to mortality. Renee Ashley’s collection is an intellectually brilliant banner in that battle.

Michael T. Young’s fifth poetry collection, Turpentine, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books. Among his other collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, Transcriptions of Daylight, and Living in the Counterpoint. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including American Book Review, The Ashville Review, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Main Street Rag, Prick of the Spindle, and The Potomac Review.