The themes are familiar: erotic desire’s power to shape and unshape us, the anxieties of family, individual isolation and alienation, and how consciousness–artistic, philosophical, or otherwise–is born out of these influences. But the manner by which Sam Witt arrives at the development of these themes in his startlingly strong debut collection, Everlasting Quail, is powerfully fresh, deeply felt, and always unfamiliar. Therefore, to place Witt’s work within a single tradition would neglect the vast and various influences that inform the poems. One need only glance at the book’s extensive notes to get a sense of the range of literary and philosophical culture brought to bear upon these poems. Witt’s notes provide glosses for lines that make reference to, or borrow directly from, Benjamin’s essays, Calvin’s Horribile Decretum, Sidney’s Arcadia, Voltaire, Goethe, Euripides, and The Captivity Narrative of Robert Eastburn, to name only a few. So, I will forgo ascribing to Witt’s collection any rigidly defined Bloomian agon and instead propose that readers approach these poems as one would a surrealist painting, for they rest–to borrow from Breton’s 1924 Manifesto–"on the belief in the higher reality of certain neglected forms of association, in the omnipotence of dream."
      Witt transfigures confessional, lyric poetry into a surreal landscape where the boundary between internal thought and external stimuli is continually blurred, even destroyed. At the epicenter of these chiasmata stand the poems themselves. "The Mortality Tree", the proem that begins the book, signals this collapse of inner and outer life and inaugurates the persistent theme of a familial inheritance/influence that is alternately damaging and enlightening for the speaker.

Whispering in the ghosts of nerves–
mulberry, blood-orange, apple–my people
spreads its loving fingers

like a shady disease. Long, petrified roots
like my loving fingers touch the dead.

      Similarly, in "Americana II", we witness the interpenetration of Self and Other: in this case, it is in the speaker’s imaginary colloquy with his mother:

I embrace the nail boiling in your happiness,
she puts my finger in her mouth, she puts my voice
in her mouth, each of her surfaces suckles the touch
out of my fingertips, linoleum and tile.
"There’s more," she whispers.

     Witt establishes a fluidity between the Self and the Other that is highly reminiscent of Whitman. At the same time, this fluidity, despite the smoothness the word connotes, permits the poetry to sustain a jarring inventiveness of language. It allows Witt to get away with wild and sometimes disturbing metaphors, as in "Americana I", where the poem’s speaker mourns for the looming figure of a "Sister," a mysterious female who appears in a number of the poems and who is by turns celebrated, elegized, and eroticized:

I am the miracle fabric, that flash
when you flipped your hair in the sunshine ages ago,

(Onely you know it’s a wig) & fade fast, (it’s my life,) shorne away,
stroked by tired fingers now on my knees…

     The opening trope here is anagogic. The speaker does not claim to be like the fabric and flash of light caught together in the familiar gesture of sweeping hair from face, but that he is that fabric, that sudden light. Such identification with the mourned for person produces a state of melancholy in which the speaker becomes dangerously attached to the "Sister." Through the course of the poem, "Sister" is transformed into "Lethe-sister", a figure for the speaker’s own death that tempts him to drink from her waters–a temptation the speaker struggles to resist: "Lethe-sister, / I have my life to drink." But the dialectical contest between pure autonomy and total submergence in the mourned-for-object finds it’s synthesis in a middle ground where both the speaker and the longed for sister merge within the poem’s space. Ultimately, the speaking "I" can neither claim an autonomous position in the world, nor rest within the safe embrace of his remembered life: "I do not belong here, I belong everywhere, a tiny speechless / pinwheel of sparks."
       Witt continually uses such anagogic tropes to explore the lapsed or porous boundary between self and outside world throughout his collection, even going so far as to inhabit a young girl’s consciousness and voice in poems like "Waterfowl Descending" and "Song of the Daughter." An excellent example of how Witt amplifies this strategy through a widening enterprise of associations occurs in the book’s second section with "At the Greyhound Terminal Requiem". The poem, again addressed to a sister, superimposes the speaker’s lonely peregrinations via Greyhound bus against a similar wandering over the shifting terra infirma of memory:

Negative of wind, slow trace of what your hair was: a soft voice, a trace
Of many faces, all of them yours, all of them passing through me,

All of them mine as I follow it into the waiting room,
The ghost trace of my form bending away in the mirror
           That faces another mirror, when I say you–

I mean this large man who lumbers towards me saying
"I’m afraid," saying "I’m unacceptable, & cold."

In the space of just a few lines the face of the addressed "you" becomes all the faces passing by the speaker, and as they pass by they pass through him and then become him. So that when we reach the large lumbering man who says "I’m unacceptable, & cold", we hear not only the timbre of three distinct personalities (the social outcast, the distant/lost "you", and the frightened "I" in whose voice the whole poem is contained), but also the despair of one general, human lament. The effect is subtle, powerful and indicative of the poet’s strength throughout the collection.
      Of the book’s many achievements, one of the most pronounced is the distance Witt maintains between the confessional speaker and his own authorial identity. Too often, first books become receptacles overstuffed with thinly veiled confessions of childhood tribulations that then lead into the traumas of adult love. Even in poems like "The Nap" and "Beverly", where Witt’s elegiac stance revolves around real people (real members of his family, as the book’s notes tell us), the speakers of the poems are almost more allegorical than real to the reader. Thus, whatever the lived particulars of the poems may be, the reader never feels distracted by autobiography. The truth of the historical ‘event’–as in all good poetry–is subordinated to that of the mind moving through it in language, through its re-collection. Anything less would potentially fall into that unfortunate category of poem Randall Jarrell once described as resembling someone’s ripped-off arm with the words "this is a poem" scribbled across it.
      A point that may strike some readers as odd is Witt’s taste for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century English spellings and diction. I have already remarked on the intersections between the perceiving self and the perceived world (Witt has a strong streak of the Romantic in him), between the porosity of the living self and the recalled past that abound in this collection. If we can accept this as a provisional structure by which to understand the author’s deployment of personae and his use of metaphor, we can also extend it to describe the nexus of poetic languages layered over one another. Nowhere does this appear more obvious than in the very difficult "From the Book of the Dead."
       Composed of multiple "chapters" that give the fiction of having been excerpted from another, larger collection, "From the Book of the Dead" is a pastiche of the poet’s own voice and passages taken from an eclectic selection of Eighteenth Century sources, including Candide, Tom Jones, and "An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences", by Increase Mather. If there is a narrative thread that connects each chapter, it is the trajectory of the speaker’s life, in the fashion of the Künstlerroman, from a "birth" through various spiritual, psychological, sexual, social, and artistic awakenings to the "present" life of a writer. Because of the persistent use of antiquated language, the speaker seems almost to backslide into the future. Like Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s "Angel Novus" (the notes tell us this was the inspiration for the poem’s opening image) Witt conceptualizes the speaker as being stormily propelled into a future toward which his back is turned while, to quote Benjamin, "the pile of debris before him grows skyward." On a literal level, the debris is immediately physical and social, but there is a figural pointing toward language and culture as well:

….When I face myself in the buckled window panes–
paper mills, blind smokestacks, moon over the penitentiary,
Buried rivers that murmured the lower voltages,

When my government ships its waste to poorer countries
at night…

The speaker of this poem would be more accurate in stating "when the government ships my waste to poorer countries", or at least "our waste." This failure to recognize the self’s culpability is unfortunate, but doesn’t entirely destroy the sentiment of the moment. Clearly, we are meant to join the speaker in contemplating our own reflection in a landscape savaged both by industry and our own demands for energy, safety, and whatnot. But the ecologically minded Witt extends his gaze beyond our collective backyard litter to recycle an historical English no longer spoken, and this partly explains the pastiche nature of the work. The result can be mildly bathetic, as in

            My Father & Mother, that I had never
feen before, were waiting, & ordered me into Houfe, to fit down
filent, My Mother began to cry for fome time, then dried up her
tearf, & received me for her fon.

However, the effect can also be unintentionally comical, as in

I must have hat that ‘caught in the machinery’
Way of crying,
                                 & put a belt of Wampum round my Neck,
inftead of the Rome which I had worn 400 milef.

     One might argue that in the more comic moments Witt is being self-effacing or at least self-ironizing. While this may be true, the effect is inconsistent. He takes the piss out of himself much more dramatically in poems like "Why I Hate the King." More importantly, at other points in the book, the anachronistic spellings and phrasings do produce a chilling tone within the line. Witt achieves this precisely in his economical use of them. Consider for instance the difference between the above lines and this brief passage from "Waterfowl Descending", which appears in the book’s third and final section:

orphan-bird, (a cylinder) of many
colorful sounds I could not decipher, its slick feathers

as of spunne glass to a red throate…

Brief, originally imagistic, and superbly controlled, "as of spunne glass to a red throate" conveys a tremendously menacing emotional and psychological weight. By contrast, the large excerpts in "From the Book of the Dead" feel forced; they appear as overburdened pack animals on the Silk Road of aesthetic theory.
      Between the antique pastiche of "From the Book of the Dead" and the lengthy notes that, in some cases, serve as a kind of instruction manual on how to read the poems (a weakness, to a degree, since the poem itself should do this), undoubtedly some readers will view Witt’s book as occasionally overblown, off-putting, and at time pretentious. Or perhaps some will argue that the notes reflect a basic insecurity that accompanies a young poet’s entrance into the larger literary world, that they exist as a proof that the poet has done his homework, received a meaningful tutelage at the hands of western high culture. There might be grains of truth in any one of these accusations; however, Witt’s notes are more sincere than otherwise.
       Because he builds many poems directly on lifted lines, not acknowledging the original sources would court a species of disingenuousness. More importantly, though, the reader should approach the notes as if they were an extension of the poems, for this is truly what they are. They draw us further into the writer’s imagination because they speak to the shaping of poetic thought itself. With poems and notes together, Sam Witt has created a fine body of work that hears and senses what Wallace Stevens called our "keener sounds" and "ghostlier demarcations" with an emphasis on our, for with no small accomplishment, the poems speak far beyond the self: they are pales past which many are invited to trespass.