In the world of contingency, the world of space and time, everything wears out. Nothing can keep its original form. The process of mutation can be seen operating across long periods, viewed in one way–as in the evolution of a species, or the gradual weakening of metals used to construct a castle in the Middle Ages. Viewed in another way, the Heraclitean way, decay is instantaneous: nothing is really what it was a moment ago; and this is particularly, flagrantly true for all expressions of spirit, because every expression of spirit is a projection into temporal reality of an energy from a different kind of reality, and the spiritual energy–though it persists with astonishing tenacity–cannot remain pure in the new earthly medium. At the instant of crossover it becomes distorted. This is one reason, perhaps the reason why our poems (and paintings, films, dances, songs, symphonies) are never quite right, or never right enough to satisfy in the same way forever. Hence we perpetually have to cook up new expressions. And the universe itself seems to share our hunger and frustration, constantly concocting new forms which contain or carry some spirit-energy and which immediately become imperfect, inadequate conveyances for that spirit-energy.
         Big thoughts! What has prompted me to set forth these big thoughts? It is not Spinoza or Schopenhauer or Plato; philosophers can interest me but they don’t kindle me, they don’t make me want to work out ideas about Time, Change, Matter and Spirit. Poetry can make me want that. In this case, it is the poetry of Claire Bateman.
          One of the ways you can realize that a poet you’ve encountered is a truly powerful poet is that you feel a frowning urgency about the problem of understanding the poems. This is different from a weary slogging through fashionable obscurities, and different from the bemused tolerance inspired by many moderately good poets. It’s like the feeling you have reading Emily Dickinson–the sense of an important discovery awaiting you if you will ponder the poem; you may be puzzled, but you won’t be merely entertained or teased.
          Claire Bateman seems to me an amazingly original poet and a poet with depth of vision. I mean to say that her vision goes deep, to the essences of experience, and that her vision seems uniquely her own–with affinities to Blake, Shelley, Dickinson, Hart Crane, and no doubt several philosophers I haven’t read, but with no aura of the cobbled-up or borrowed; and that her vision drives her, seeming not like a colorful set of attitudes amusing to promote but rather like a great polymorphous intuition to which she feels obligations.
          It’s certainly not my vision. I don’t walk through the world feeling the constant presence of a transcendental reality–call it spirit–fluttering in everything, flickering forth from between molecules of matter or between words of a remark, infinitely more important than the tangible forms of earthly life. I don’t, on a normal day, share the sensation of the instantaneous corruption of all spirit-expressions in the air of finitude. But a powerful poet can jolt your thinking in new directions.
The poem that bumped me into the Big Thoughts of my first paragraph above was Claire Bateman’s "Brief Tour of the World’s Back Kitchen." This poem is the last in a set of twelve poems, the Fatigue poems, which comprise one of the four sections in Bateman’s new collection Clumsy. Reading the Fatigue poems we develop a flexible–but not emptily amorphous–sense of "fatigue" as the result when any flow of spirit, or imagination, pushes forth into the wear and tear of temporal contingency.

Brief Tour of the World’s Back Kitchen

By ladle,
by teaspoon,
by batter-encrusted thumb,
the chefs of creation
are sampling each other’s
fatigue.

Ah, murmurs one.
Though this is exquisite,
I find it a trifle overwrought.
Might I suggest adding
a hint of poignance,
perhaps a few notes
from the promotional theme tune
of the Lost & Missing Channel?

Hmmm . . . muses another
at the next vat over.
This possesses a suitable base,
but the undertones seem somewhat
abstract–I’d correct the balance
by stirring in some plunging
humidity and a low, throbbing sensation
at the left temple.

This, declares a third,
is nothing less than
a tonal masterpiece!
I detect a trace of purely
adrenaline-induced exhilaration
just this side of hysteria,
the beginnings of a Starbucks
tremor, & the savory mixture
of intellectual fortitude &
willpower stripped quite raw.

Such finesse,
such a sense of tradition!
And before you exit,
be sure to inspect
the shining bottles where they’ve preserved
the extinct fatigues of history, including
fatigue induced in the archeopteryx by preliminary genetic adaptions,
the fatigue of metals in medieval Saxon drawbridges,
& so on. 

          "Brief Tour of the World’s Back Kitchen" satirizes the fickleness of some literary criticism, while more importantly reaching toward its implication that all imaginative concoctions (like poems) must fall prey to the devastating critique of time itself.
          As always, an abstracted statement of the poem’s theme can seem (or indeed be) trite, while the poem lives and breathes as a unique embodiment of that theme. The great power of Claire Bateman’s poetry is (of course) not in its ideas as such but in the personality-charged strangeness of the lines and of the speakers–often giddy, occasionally desperate (like any sensitive person strained toward exhaustion)–implied by (and between) the lines. That’s why Bateman is a poet rather than a preacher or mystic or guru. Her poems, though their concerns are intensely philosophical, come at you like someone in a scarlet dress, someone whose eyes you can’t glance away from.
          And I would argue, ultimately, that this embodied humanness of the poems constitutes the crucial critique–inherent, a critique from within–of the transcendental yearning that Bateman’s poems so often dramatize. The issue of whether we should think of our love–when we say we love someone–as dedicated to some "higher" magical force which moves through the person, or to the colorful flawed mixture that is the person as a whole–this issue is beautifully caught in the poem "A Passing Stranger Who Falls Briefly in Love With Your Fatigue." The poem consists of one tour-de-force sentence beginning with the title.

A Passing Stranger Who Falls Briefly in Love with Your Fatigue

hopes it’s not too wrong to love the translucence
exhaustion brings to your face, behind which
each of your thoughts floats, weightless
as the sustained note resolving a recitative,
a high A so pure the listener could almost
forget it’s the work of a particular
breath that has been waiting
in line forever behind countless others
like an almost pathologically
patient child who never fidgets, but instead
exudes some secret luminosity,
as if one night at the beach
she’d managed to dogpaddle
a little distance from everyone else,
then worked herself around to face
neither the wired-up stuttering shoreline
nor her grandmother’s glowing
pink-lillied swimcap & billowing magenta bathing suit,
but the open sea in the presence of whose
steadfast darkness she ducked her head to swallow
one star bobbing on a wavelet,
one amethyst from Cassiopeia’s crown
gulped down on a briny wash just before she was
spotted, dragged out, smacked, & toweled down
for the long car ride home.

          The child who tries to swallow a star in the ocean is a seeker of the sublime, and her romanticism is naïve enough to lead to drowning; but it doesn’t, and she is brusquely pulled back into the realm of contingency by pragmatic adults. In the back seat of the car going home, though, you know she has a starry gleam in her eyes. It’s a look that someone–a romantic, or someone wanting to find the romantic in life–could one day fall in love with.
But wait–how did that girl get into the poem? She arrived by way of simile, her story being offered to make vivid the "secret luminosity" of the child in the preceding lines; and that patient child is herself a simile (or vehicle of a simile, if you prefer), offered to characterize the "particular / breath" which is the physical force creating a high pure musical note; and that note is itself a simile, offered to characterize the thoughts which float behind "your" face, thoughts imagined as marvelously "weightless" and "high" and "pure", thoughts which the passing stranger can–at least momentarily–discern, or intuit, through the "translucence" imparted to your face by your fatigue. Apparently fatigue–the stress of being spiritual in a physical world–has partly undone the opacity of your surface, of (let’s say) your socialized conventional manner, enough so that the passing stranger can sense an elusive and unworldly beauty in your depths.
          The passing stranger’s love thus involves a discovery of something within "you" that is transcendental, ineffable–doesn’t it? The way the poem’s three similes blossom from one another suggests the inadequacy of any image from reality to epitomize the inner value. Yes, and yet the poem doesn’t seem to want to go on forever with further similes springing from one another in endless confessed inadequacy; the poem ends quite decisively, with its wonderfully full image of the girl who went to the beach. At the end of the poem I feel a great sense of it having found (in Stevens’ phrase) what will suffice. Besides, we need to recall that what the passing stranger falls in love with is not "one amethyst from Cassiopeia’s crown" nor "a high A so pure" but rather your fatigue, and the "translucence" caused by that fatigue–translucence which is (I want to insist) a quality of the loved face–of the loved person.
          We like tales of sudden romance–boy meets girl, and life is transformed! But we notice that the poem promises no lasting connection: the lover is a passing stranger and falls in love only "briefly". That seems pessimistic (unless we think Bateman would have us consider that we are all strangers passing briefly through this life; well, that would be pessimistic too, in a more global way). And indeed Bateman’s poetry mostly does not anticipate happy outcomes. To be a human container of spiritual mystery and a conduit for infinite yearning is an unrestful, frazzling existence. One speaker (in a sequence of poems addressed to "Dear Postmaster") says

Once you’ve been chased
by a fiery swooping cloud
singing your name with
a thousand voices,
you never stop running,
whether you’re running
or not.

However, the tone of Bateman’s poems is never a tone of hand-wringing lamentation or complaint. Her speakers understand their sheerly tantalized condition to be inevitable, and thus they are stoical about it, if a person vibrating with ineffable desire can be called stoical. The feeling can be bleak–notably in "Dosage" and "But Not Like This"–but more often Bateman’s speakers not only accept their hunger as necessary but embrace it as their destiny. A poem called "Harp Song" produces yet another of Bateman’s rapidly metamorphosing figurations of how spiritual creations cannot remain intact in the terrestrial realm, and ends thus:

But none of this is devastation,
cataclysm, catastrophe.
It scarcely even counts
as an event.
It’s just how your flesh
sings the Lord’s song
in a strange land.

        That reference to the Lord brings up the point that there are a few indications in Clumsy that Bateman is some sort of Christian. If so, though, it is not a faith that imposes any flavor of dogma on the poetry, thank heaven.
        Clumsy is full of poems I can imagine wanting to write about at great length. This is not true of many new books of poems, including some good ones. But I want to keep this piece short enough to be offered as a review, hoping to prompt readers to buy the book. A few years ago when I was reading Claire Bateman’s Friction (Eighth Mountain Press, 1998), a sensation began to come over me: Wait a second, this book is not just "partly good" like so many others–this book is weird original deep. Her book At the Funeral of the Ether (Ninety-Six Press, 1998) confirmed the sensation; I felt alarmed, because Bateman’s work didn’t seem like the poetry (ironic, satiric, real-worldy) I tend to like. I wrote an essay about those two books (Chicago Review, V. 45 No. 3 & 4), and am proud to have written a short Introduction to Clumsy. (Reader, Claire Bateman is not someone I know well. We were colleagues at a 3-day conference at the University of Tennessee—Chat-tanooga in 1995 and I haven’t seen her since, nor do we have any close friend in common.)
       Bateman frequently writes in short lines. Usually I am very dubious about short-line poetry, very inclined to see it as pretentious. But when Bateman’s lines are short, I trust them: there’s a feeling that the words are so electric with meaning for their speaker that they need to be presented in small doses lest the line overheat and burn out.
        I’ll discuss one more poem from Clumsy–not one of the strangest or hardest in the book, but one I find touching and clear. "Monograph" proposes itself as a sociological summary of a period of history–say, the last phase of the twentieth century–during which living was profoundly puzzling for anyone who was really alive.

Monograph
It would later be said of our era
that even the boring parts were interesting,
& vice versa.

Without the least trace of irony,
officials christened space shuttles
after doomed & sunken
cities of yore.

Nearly all of us
constructed dashboard altars
upon which we lavished
particular & minute devotions
as we cruised past scenes
that seemed to represent disaster’s aftermath
but almost always resolved
into simple sequences of yard sales—
derelict undergarments & mattresses
exposed on sullenly tilting lawns—
each just another item on the ever-growing
list of events not to be taken
personally.

For their arcane significance,
we pondered signs such as these:
 
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME RIGHT NOW!

&

GOD SEES EVERYTHING, EVEN YOU READING THIS SIGN!

Though the varieties of available lip-gloss shades
& the total number of famous people in history
were exponentially increasing
so that it became ever more difficult
to distinguish plum from maroon
or the living from the dead,
it still took approximately
the same six years
for a single exhaled breath
to become evenly mixed with the atmosphere.

For none of us was it ever clear
whether that rumbling sound we kept hearing
was static or heartfelt applause.

Everyone was professionally lonely,
yet we ceased not our shining.

Many aspired to but did not actually achieve
the office of Notary Public.

This was not considered a tragedy.

          In Bateman’s eyes, each of us is Oedipa Maas, Pynchon’s brave and possibly paranoid truthseeking protagonist, moving through a world in which everything threatens to reveal itself as a clue to an overwhelming secret truth. In such a world you can never be sure that anything is boring–maybe its dullness or routineness is only a cover for its transcendent meaning, which may lurk beneath the mundane surface or at the edge of your peripheral vision. You try to create homemade versions of meaning–"dashboard altars"–but the world keeps distracting you with signs that might offer revelation if only you could read "their arcane significance." You have moments when you feel you could be the crucial registrar of unveiled truth; but most of us fall short of such service. We persist, like Oedipa, in our puzzled search, seeking a kind of reality not at home in the terrain of our search; the fact that we all share this plight makes it seem non-tragic; but maybe it is tragic.
          There is a possible moral objection to the sensibility expressed in "Monograph" and throughout Clumsy: that a person who lives constantly in such yearning, so radically aware of spiritual incompletion in this world, taking everything (in that sense) so personally, is liable to be useless to other people. A sensibility is not only inherited, but cultivated, and a person who "lavished / particular & minute devotions" upon the private symbol of a dashboard altar might be too busy to ever help or connect with someone else. This is a significant worry called to mind by Bateman’s poetry, and I can’t dissolve it. However, I think she registers a sad consciousness of the issue when she says "Everyone was professionally lonely"–and she suggests that a compulsive nursing of one’s inner sense of essential lack is by no means a vocation only of poets. And I think the democratic inclusiveness of the first-person plural in "Monograph" is convincing: Bateman really feels she is characterizing the radical bafflement and frustration of "Nearly all of us"–and honoring the radiance of our persistent aspiration.
          A review of a book of poems very often remains on the level of sorting–felicities admired and infelicities deplored. Once in a long while you encounter a poet so original, with a style so deeply rooted in unusual sensibility, that the sorting of felicities–though it is a respectable activity, one I frequently engage in–becomes an unsatisfying minor response. You feel the poetry plunges past your scorecard to a more exciting place. There are poems in Clumsy I especially like–the poignant prose poem "Reprieve," the comical prize announcement "Distinction," the "Passing Stranger" poem discussed above–but Clumsy undoes my "A minus or B plus?" mentality: not turning it off exactly, but quieting it down for the sake of absorption in the book’s accumulating vision. Claire Bateman’s poetry, published by small presses, is a test of America’s poetry culture: if Bateman doesn’t win through to extensive national readership and recognition, this will be a dramatic proof that our poetry culture is too cacophonous for merit–I almost said spirit–to get its due.