So Much Charm & Destruction

on Laura Kasischke's Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004)

by Jonathan Weinert

     At first blush, slipping "Macaroni & Cheese" between "Creation" and "World Peace"—as Laura Kasischke does toward the end of her sixth collection, Gardening in the Dark—seems the work of a poetic trickster operating under the influence of a satiric impulse. But Kasischke is no Billy Collins, recounting the advantages of spending the summer in suburban Middle America over touring the basilicas and sarcophagi of the Continent. She intends neither to ridicule nor deflate. Indeed, Kasischke's impulses run rather counter to satire. Her extravagant metaphorical inventiveness charges and inflates the commonplace items of the deceptively ordinary world her speakers inhabit, transforming those objects into talismans of portent or menace. Kasischke's macaroni and cheese, that most comforting of comfort foods, quickly goes strange on her, standing before her imagination as a totem of human incomprehension and disintegration in the face of change and death:

Love. Hunger. Other alchemies.

You may be asked, "What

are my eyes made of? Can

Santa's reindeer be burned by fire? In

heaven, does Jesus eat?"

In the oven, something breathing. Rising. Melting. Shifting

shape and sweetening

in the heat. Now

you can see that the bird in the street

is wrestling something bloody

out of a carcass, trying

to expose its heart. You

put the dish down beside the cloth, and say,

"Darling, I don't know."

     The world that Gardening in the Dark enacts is dark indeed — "So // much charm and destruction at once, a violent // funnel of humming and love," like the swarm of ladybugs that brings the universe into being in "Creation." This is a world in which the consciousness that "My love, all of it, a life of it, has been / too little" haunts every perception and every memory, a world in which the imminent obliteration of the self is alternately postponed and engaged. Kasischke examines a host of potential consolations—language, sleep, love, youth, family, religion, nature, technology, the unconscious—then discards them, one by one. Transcendent and transformative energies constantly impinge, but their intent is profoundly ambivalent. The "sacred / flower watching" (not, significantly, "watching over") the speaker at night seems both nursemaid and accuser, both comforting and malevolent. In the end, its "soft / white gaze" can illuminate only the speaker's "insufficient face."

      One of the fascinations of Gardening in the Dark is the way in which it demonstrates the obverse and reverse sides of metaphor, its ability to simultaneously distance and connect. As in the later Sylvia Plath, the central drama in many of these poems is the confrontation between the domestic and a constantly encroaching otherness. Metaphor equally propels and controls this confrontation, pushing the familiar into the realm of the uncanny while anchoring the uncanny in the realm of the known. But unlike Plath, who was unable to maintain the boundaries between herself and the ferocious energies that assailed her, Kasischke uses metaphor to bring self and other into relationship while preserving the difference and distance between them. Her metaphors nail the things of this world to the meanings of the next, but they also prevent those things from flying up into the realm of intolerable significance. Both sides of metaphor are at work in "Happy Meal":

At the bottom of the bag, there is a fact

(a bit of joy, a bit of junk) which my son was issued

from the womb into this world knowing.

      This "little monster, this fact / at the bottom of the bag" may represent the essential mystery of her son's existence—a mystery Kasischke is canny enough not to attempt to articulate—but it's also just "a complimentary toy," "a bit of junk."

      Kasischke's poems continually attempt to break free of painful self-reflection by moving in, or out, or down, or up. But there are no Wonderlands on the other side of Kasischke's poetic rabbit holes. Her roads keep bending back upon themselves, affording neither respite nor escape, repeatedly returning her to the desolation of the self. "What I was after was just / a graceful passage to another place, / and now I know there's no such thing" the speaker says, pulled over to the side of the road in "Speeding Ticket." Rarely, however, is desolation handled with such grace. Kasischke walks the fine edge that separates self-disclosure from self-dramatization. Only occasionally do her sufferings become mannered or operatic. What consistently pulls them back from the brink is the beauty of the language, the brilliance of the metaphors, the audacity of the leaps and figurations. For instance, Kasischke's reports of botched transformations, thwarted by the inaccessibility of true transcendence, possess a queasy horror-movie feel, but Kasischke's language is consistently delicious, her diction cool, her enjambments surprising, and her images sharp and original:

How awful

resurrection

for someone like me will be. The teenage

girls are being dragged

out of the earth by their hair.

Tongues, testicles, plums, and small hearts bloat

sweetly in the trees. And then

a silence like water

poured into honey—

the silence of middle age.

     It will not do, in other words, to focus on the destruction to the exclusion of the charm, or the violent insect humming to the exclusion of the love. Gardening in the Dark is more fun to read than a collection so relentlessly gloomy has any right to be. The surfaces of many of its poems are so dazzling, their figurations so delightful and unexpected, that the depths beneath may be initially obscured. One responds first to the music of these poems, and only later takes in the full measure of their darkness.

     Given Kasischke's considerable achievements with poetic speech, her ambivalence about the redemptive power of language, which surface occasionally throughout the collection, is somewhat surprising, and not entirely convincing:

I reached into myself and pulled

a shadow made of substance

up & over my mind. Like

drowning in a fountain—it was

my watery shroud of language and desire, and I

drank disastrously from it for the rest of my life.

     But these poems, which are made of nothing if not language and desire, are no disaster. The teller of the tale is always a survivor, one way or another. Kasischke's assertions of failure seem to pay lip-service to postmodern doubts about the efficacy of language rather than disclose a genuine skepticism, which Kasischke does not appear to possess. Kasischke is truer to herself, and therefore more convincing, when she confronts silence as an encroachment, or a metaphysical threat. Such confrontation recognizes that the powers of speech are inherently ambivalent, since all language stands more or less precariously on the brink of its own extinction. The ships in "Why," which "[tip] off the edge of the world / into an abyss / made of clarity, and more abyss," represent the inability of language to do more than point in the direction of apprehensions so total and complex that they defy articulation. You "know / in the empty notebook / of your heart that / where thought ends, there's God," Kasischke writes in "Zeus," but this is perilous business, because you don't know whether going to that place will invite realization or erasure.

      The most successful poems in Gardening in the Dark rely on embedded argument rather than direct disclosure, proceeding by means of the unsaid and the half-said, the unsayable and the implied. "Black Dress," like "Accident" and "Speeding Ticket," shifts precipitously from statement to statement, image to image. The poem starts inside the poet's head, moves through contradictions to a series of observations (parks full of people, the wafted sounds of a fancy restaurant, a woman painting a fence) connected only by the sensibility that observes them, then deftly juxtaposes allegory, religion, history, and myth across a sequence of declarations that comment on the powers of representation, the possibility of transformation, and the true locus of psychological distress. This is fine poetic wine, flavored with a tincture of American surrealism, and it soon overflows the Dixie cup of paraphrase. Because of the absence of any narrative, logical, or syntactic clues, it's difficult to get the news from this poem, but the fact that the reader has to work to grasp the connections is the greater part of the poem's delight, and its power.

Kasischke is a fearless and at times brilliant lineator; her startling enjambments can turn meanings inside out, like a weathervane swinging one way and then another:

The self, contrary

to popular opinion, is not

the thing that remains.

     Kasischke also has a keen ear for the counterpoint between line and sentence, for consonance and contrast within the line—what Robert Bly calls an "awareness of the different kinds of fur that words have." There's a fugal quality to the best poems in this volume, an ease and fluidity that can only result from strenuous construction and the painstaking labor required to conceal the joints. Kasischke rarely sacrifices sense for sound; unfortunately, she sometimes sacrifices sound for sense. At such moments a critical valve seems to blow, and the pressure leaks out of the poems. Like underinflated balloons, they no longer rise by virtue of their own inner buoyancy.

     Kasischke's poems go slack when they become too informal, too contemporary, too narrative. Her imagination becomes more literal, and her metaphors more obvious, as in "Fog," where she describes a run-in with her ex-husband in the supermarket:

Over there, two spectres,

unable to hold one another,

try to dance a sad waltz,

while, over there, two shadows ludicrously attempt

to strangle each other against a wall.

     Paradoxically, Kasischke's informality distances rather than embraces. When Kasischke lightens the hieratic, oracular tone in favor of a more colloquial voice (as in "Fortieth Birthday" or "The Sorrows of Carrie M."), the informality effectively intervenes between Kasischke and her intensest feelings and perceptions. In turn, therefore, it intervenes between the reader and the poems. Her bitterness dwindles into sarcasm, her wit into wisecracking, and both speaker and reader are held at arm's length:

I was a tower of fury and glory.

The called me Carrie.

A postman's daughter.

The wallpaper, nautical.

The carpet, shag.

I woke in the middle of a story

about myself

without a beginning or an end.

It was nap-time, they said . . .

     The lesser poems, which seem insufficiently digested and maybe a little hurried, are clustered together in the middle third of the book. The collection, at almost one hundred pages, might have been stronger a few poems shorter. Still, Kasischke does not commit the errors of some contemporary satirists who use misguided notions of post-postmodernism to deny their poems the power to elevate. Kasischke knows well that rapture requires a formal space, as Jeanette Winterson has pointed out, "a discipline of emotion and language that heightens both to a point of painful beauty." In Gardening in the Dark, the poems most formal in tone and diction prove to be the most intimate, the most painful, and the most beautiful. At its best, the collection succeeds in joining a fiercely personal self-reckoning to a searching intelligence within a heightened and authentic suburban idiom. Kasischke gives us a taste for the unmedicated nerve, for the undiluted darkness, and she shows us how to find them here, in America.