Review: Emblems of the Passing World by Adam Kirsch

Reviewed by Maggie Trapp

Emblems of the Passing World
Poems by Adam Kirsch
Other Press, October 2015
$13.99, 144 pp.
ISBN: 978-1590517345

Captured in time, faces in photographs are endlessly fascinating. As we meet the gaze of a photograph’s subject, we wonder what lies behind the eyes of this fleetingly and yet forever stilled person. The very act of looking at portrait photographs invites story making. As we contemplate the faces looking back at us, we begin to create narrative—what prompted the photo? What happened just after the photo was taken? What is the person in the photo thinking? This is in part the draw of photographs: taking them in catalyzes story in the viewer’s mind. And it is just this urge to create story that acts as the genesis for Adam Kirsch’s recent collection of poems, Emblems of the Passing World: Poems after Photographs by August Sander.

Each of the ekphrastic poems gathered in Kirsch’s collection is yoked with a portrait photograph taken by August Sander in Weimar Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Sander’s photos are arresting images of ordinary people living in what would soon be extremely fraught times. The subjects in Sander’s photos are everyday people offering glimpses of their unadorned lives. These small, captured moments reveal layers of meaning and emotion.

Kirsch has taken these startling yet spare photos and spun lyric moments and narrative events from them. He homes in on an ambiguous glance, an incongruously placed hand, a telling leaning in or pulling away. These small moments in the photographs inspire poems that then seek to interpret or open up the photo in provocative ways.

Each of Kirsch’s poems is titled didactically with just an unembellished moniker that describes the content of the photo. In fact, each poem’s title is simply a retread of Sander’s photo titles. We expect that the poems will simply retell the photos. But Kirsch instead reexamines and reinterprets the photos. The poems that he pairs with the photos imagine what the photos might tell us if they could.

Each poem sits on the opposite page from the photo it reimagines. First we experience the photo and its bare title. Then our eyes move to Kirsch’s poem, which, as we read it, draws our eyes back to the photo as we see the image anew in light of Kirsch’s lines.

One particularly striking photo in the book is titled “Middle-class Child, 1926”:

On the page opposite this photo we read Kirsch’s iambic pentameter sonnet:

Middle-class Child

The rain of gifts in which the child has grown
Can be deduced from her small bright medallion,
Her brand-new shoes, her black dress gay with braid,
But most from the instinctive way she’d laid
Her hands contentedly across her lap,
Confident she won’t need to hit or grab
To get the good things life has promised her.
How could she know it’s dangerous to wear
A smile so merry and self-satisfied,
When all her life has been arranged to hide
The possibility of nemesis
And put off the discovery of loss?
Who could rebuke her when she acts as if
She thought she were herself the greatest gift?

Sander’s photo of the child is mesmerizing. One could stare at this image for a long while and still not plumb its depths. Kirsch’s lines take this rich image and extrapolate from it a mood, an era, and an entire ethos. Kirsch’s poem grants us insight and a sense of immediacy and intimacy that we might not otherwise have considered. His sonnet gives us a backstory for this child. We can imagine an entire narrative surrounding her.

Portrait photographs on some level call to mind memento mori. Whether posed or candid, photographic images of people tend to be a reminder of mortality, and this sort of reminder spurs monumentality. We are reminded that nothing lasts, which often compels memorializing and storytelling. Kirsch’s poems render Sander’s photos doubly memorable. His lines complicate the sense of memorial and mortality that all portraits engender.

Throughout this collection, Kirsch allows us to view Sander’s photos in new and complex ways. Kirsch’s project taken as a whole invites us to rethink how we experience image as well as how we understand and memorialize story.

Maggie Trapp teaches writing and literature classes for UC Berkeley Extension.