Sprague on Oliver's Either Side The Horizon.
I received a request to republish a review on the blog which I'm happy to do.If you're interested in Stephen Oliver's work you can find out more about him and read some of his work at his website. This review was first published in June 2006 issue of Antipodes – A North American Journal of Australian Literature and appears with the author's permission.
Historical Vertigo
Stephen Oliver. Either Side The Horizon. Titus Books,2005. 112 pp. A$19.95 ISBN 0-9582586-3-5.
Reviewed by Nicole Sprague Fairbanks, Alaska
Stephen Oliver’s world is a post-modern poetic circus where the material and the metaphysical hiss, side by side. The book cover captures an industrial plant crouching under a myriad of gray clouds, all barely in focus, while a vertical stop sign states stop or pots, depending upon one’s perspective. Reading Either Side The Horizon engaged my sense of vertigo.
The opening poem, “Letter To An Astronomer,”outlines the predicament: “Make no mistake / there’ll be neither alien ship nor coded message exchanged, /merely (coming in under radar) signs of our passing intime, most fluid of inventions – condemned forever to/rush forward, condemned forever to rush backward”(3). In Oliver’s poems, everything returns, especially the gruesome habits of human beings.
Focusing on the nuances of genocide and cultural imperialism in Oliver’s work may reflect my own morbid sensibilities. But there they are on the page: Rwandan machetes flying, “the bullets that pumped meaning back into our lives,” great ancient statues of Buddha tumbling to the earth, and Mira Markovic missing good coffee after her husband’s arrest.
“Stalin’s Cotton Socks” illustrates Oliver’s poetic roots in history. He writes, “Joe, you drank the Aral Sea dry”(52). Then a few lines later, “The Aral Sea shrunk to a dirty stain miles off; / all to make your cotton socks, Joe, to cover your cloven hoof!”(52). The cultivation of cotton in the Aral basin could beStalin’s greatest ecological disaster. In the poem, Oliver employs a colloquial tone, juxtaposing the brevity of Stalin’s actions, creating irony in the voice of a father explaining to his son that the bottle of whiskey he consumed before driving may have resulted in his crash (oops).
Juxtaposition is what makes Oliver’s poems delightful. These are not the heavy-handed poems of a social critic, nor do they veer off into Eliot’s tradition of the philosophical. Rather, these are the poems of a thoughtful humanist, albeit one who laments the folly of human behavior, without judgement. In“Credo,” with its tight four stanzas, Oliver begins,“When you mix hatred and anger you / get men hiding in mountains and other men / with fresh uniforms who oppose them” (63). Oliver nails it brilliantly.
“Credo” should be required reading for politicians. In closing he writes, “These words held hostage by your every / thought allowed you to swallow the lie whole”(63). Hatred and anger function as particulars,and the date (November 1, 2003) that follows the poem anchors in to the present.
In this regard, Oliver is reminiscent of poets like Wislava Syzmborska: the particulars become merely secondary to the tragedy of all humans, universal and constant. Killing and despair are not rare and specialized events, they are commonplace. In “Munch Museum, Oslo” Oliver retells the recent theft of Munch’s “The Scream.” In a straightforward narrative, utilizing accessible and economical language, Oliver writes that “The Scream” represents “despair, muted panic, the sort of panic one would feel drowning”(77). In the penultimate and ultimate lines that follow, comes the simple question: “Who in their right/ mind would live with such a painting, let / alone steal it; such despair is commonplace” (77).
What threads these poems together is an ongoing historical conversation coupled with Oliver’s playful stylistic diversity. The poems bounce from straight narratives with tidy lyrics, to leapy, linguistically driven poems, and finally to Oliver’s intellectually rich metaphysical excursions. I find Oliver most compelling in his lyrical mode; however, his prose poems are good fun. “The Home as Homicide” begins, “The magnolia flower bruise-purple, cream cupped, under September” (46). Oliver extends the bloody, sensual image throughout the first stanza, returning to a human landscape in the second stanza. “The land insisting upon its climactic heritage beyond the roar of air / conditioning in a million suburban homes…”(46). In Oliver’s dialectic, there is a binary, earth and its inhabitants. But like the book's cover, this binary is fuzzy and grey, straining toward something holistic, which I think the book achieves.
Either Side The Horizon is the realm where dialectics stumble, where vertigo and eternal recurrence are essential, and where, finally, a truth emerges. I might call Oliver’s truth doubt, a nod to Keat’s negative capability. However, really what Oliver describes, from multiple uncanny viewpoints, is wonder. Not wonder in a romantic sense, but the wonder of a little girl appreciating a magenta wildflower blossoming in field of land mines.
There's more information on Either Side The Horizon at Titus Books.
posted by harvey molloy @ 11:40 AM
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