Auden wrote that a "poem should be a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true…and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly." In his debut collection, By Reason of Breakings, Andrew Zawacki more than amply demonstrates a verbal paradise of play and he contrasts our immediate historical situation by continually returning to aspects of prayer, a move made obvious in his titling many poems with religious terms, such as "Doxologia," "Agrapha," "Sanctus," "Covenant," "Ephphatha" and "From the Book of Divine Consolation." However, the poetry is not devotional in any strict religious sense of the word. In fact, many of the poems are marked by a specific regard for the language of science. This is the result of a discerning and rigorous mind bent on teasing out the smallest details of our immediate surroundings–"the painful, the disorderly, the ugly"–with the hopes of arriving at a quality of truthfulness.
           The opening poem "Vespers", prefaces the book’s three main sections and deserves sustained attention because it presages the conundrum of prayer that runs throughout the collection. It begins with a series of negative definitions:

Architecture it’s not, not even in winter,
Nor is it a draft of a river…

***

                                    Nor

is it the finished thing
even if it has the look of a finished thing. In winter
but it is not winter, it’s almost a year ago…

The poem accrues its power and grace by sliding forward on the force of an associative logic, one that Mr. Zawacki creates line to line, image to image, by repeating key words like "winter", "polished", and "river", etc.

         It’s a year
ago, our bodies are four-fifths water, Your 
body is polished up to have the look of moving water.
Clouds are four-fifths of winter, but whatever
is almost crowblue or moving cannot be called architecture.

Formally, the logic of the poem’s imagistic turns are held together by end rhyming words that share the suffix /-er/ or that slantingly reproduce that sound, like "architecture," "your," and "for." A dizzying, dreamlike beauty wells up in the language play, and as a whole the poem has the haunting incantatory quality of a mangled sestina or villanelle. Yet, this beautifying and gamesome quality pushes beyond itself toward a rising pathos by the poem’s end when suddenly the speaking /I/ emerges to qualify not what he has said, but what he didn’t say: "I did not say fever / or finished, or after; I did not call winter need. I never / said I had been nailed to a river…"
           One can sense the pressure at having to say just what one means and never being able to do so. If it isn’t the finished thing, what is it? The answer, perhaps, lies with the poem’s only two unrhymed end words: "thing" and "left." A small detail perhaps, but it leads to the heart of this and many of Mr. Zawacki’s poems: it is what is left at the end of any attempt to pronounce the unnamed, unnamable thing–in a word, language. This is, of course, the old saw of what good poetry always tries to do; nevertheless, at his best this poet breathes new life into it.
           At other moments, unfortunately, all breath is sucked out of the poems as Mr. Zawacki subordinates meaning to the sound and measure of his lines, and to a quasi- philosophical diction and syntax redolent of post-modern literary criticism. Even when one can vaguely trace the skeleton of implication on which the poem’s flesh rests, it is difficult to understand why or how one should care about it. It’s as if the most important aspect of communication is the act of it, not the substance of its outcome. Consider, for example, these lines from the uneven "Argument for an Elemental Aesthetic,"

–not derrick
but diesel & disarray,
runaway ramp
when brakes refuse braking

are limits assumed
as instance of incompletion
not its cause:

Another example from "Slipknot 6" (there are six "Slipknot" poems and they appear at somewhat regular intervals in the book’s first and third sections):

Nor would it stop at the edge
Dissever in three shades of arouse
Wrest us not asunder or aft
Do not deliver us unto
A cataleptic census

The language is arresting; the poem has a kind of pleasing prayer-play to it as it upends "deliver us from evil" from the "Lord’s Prayer"; and there is enough connection between the lines to prevent the poem from running willy-nilly into nonsense. Yet one cannot help but wonder, finally, what it all adds up to. What is a "cataleptic census" anyway? Poems such as these are freighted with an unnecessary and studied ambiguity. Nowhere is this more evident than in "Autopsy", a poem composed entirely of an eclectic array of quotes culled from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
           The strongest poems in the book are generally characterized by a solid connection between the tactile and the intangible, where the poem’s elevated language and abstract musings are predicated on the material world. For example, in "Astrelegy," Mr Zawacki writes

Light in the shipyards is so long in coming
the stars it once belonged to aren’t there anymore.

Zodiac bends in formaldehyde, where the turnpike
crosses two rivers shimmying north: Gemini…

* * *

Death is not for the dying:
stars above the boathouse are playing

Cyrano to light…

Starlight free of its source, filtered through the uncounted light-years, descends with its constellated brightness to illuminate twin rivers channeling north. The description is lovely; the lines are well wrought. Most importantly, the powerful images both ground the reader in a landscape as well as provide a correlative for the grand gesture of "Death is not for the dying." Who is it for? It is for the living, of course, just as Gemini’s light is not for the stars, but for the landscape in which it comes to rest. The poem is melancholic as it severs the mundane relationship between source and emanation.
           This strategy occurs most potently in the sixteen-part prose poem of the collection’s middle section, the appropriately titled Mise en Scène. Here, Mr. Zawacki turns an eye toward the nexus of the natural and industrial worlds. The first section "i. Corona" sets forth the tone and thematic concerns of the whole section:

The sky moves one way and the ground goes the other. Between aurora boeralis and the methane-bleached clump of grass at the gulch’s rim, there has always been this window, knotted with ligaments scoring the forest to crosshatch.

If the window is a kind of metaphoric equivalent of the poet’s mediating vision, it represents one that can never fully contain everything before it and points less toward order than disarray. We see time and again the great spillage of industrial America and the way it refashions the landscape, as in "iii. Cantus": The / hillside is piled in a scaffold of tires, iconography of an orange and indigo / lapse." While we sense a menacing quality to the metaphoric scaffold, the speaker of the poem reminds us (or him/herself) that we are obliged to continue in the role of witness:

          Don’t bother counting what changes more slowly than you do. Pick up what’s dropped, index the rate of collapse. Oil rig, gasworks, glass plant, paper mill: listed, and turned away from…

Fortunately, the world of Mise en Scène is not all peril and pestilence. In "xii. Ephphatha", for example, Mr. Zawacki exhibits a tender, mournful spirit as he draws nature and the human-made together:

          The sepals are stenciled with saltwater froth,concrete blocks a grille for lichen and cinders. Listening knows how the negative aperture works, and what it reveals in the nets. The northeastern galesare soughing their plea through the lighthouse…

The concrete is an obstacle for "lichen and cinders" alike, but any violence in the image is tempered by the naturally frothed sepals preceding it. By connecting the two images as he has, Mr. Zawacki creates an oddly appropriate relationship between the concrete and the lichen. Most moving is his gorgeous turn of phrase where the "lighthouse" becomes the echo chamber of the gales’ longing and in an almost symbiotic way, the "plea" is the lighthouse’s signal.
           Mr. Zawacki writes with great verve and intelligence, even in those moments where the language games overwhelm the poem, and the reader will no doubt find delight despite the book’s beguiling divigations. What the reader will find very little of, however, is the felt presence of other humans. By Reason of Breakings is oddly devoid of people. Occasionally we encounter a few ambiguous figures flitting around the poetry’s margins, as in "Parallax," where

…someone you’ve overheard but never met

is already asking, as if she’d forgiven herself,
and taking your hand to find traces or reasons…

But these cameo-actors are noirish in their shadowy evasions of any clearly lit frame of reference, and they remind one of the vague ‘Someones’ Mark Strand ingeniously employed in his poetry years ago now. Having said that, the book’s evocative central section does generate a graspable impression of a human speaker, and in so doing, illuminates the poems that surround it.