Spinoza Doesn’t Come Here Anymore (review)

Colette Inez writes poignantly direct and intelligible poems, worlds removed from current trends toward ambient circumlocution. A freethinker with a long-smoldering yen for the numinous, she pursues her quarry in the most prosaic of liminal locales: in screened porches, hospital corridors, on public transport, in doorways, stairwells, and the rooms of a dislocated childhood.

There is an unassuming, bittersweet, if not entirely appeased yearning after origins at the heart of this collection. Like the elusive philosopher of the title poem, Inez seeks out the intangible among the chafing mundanities that surround us, finding grace without the grace note of religiosity. “I want to put an extra ‘O’ between G O and D, I’ll pray / to that: love, friends, music, books, reason and beauty,” she writes in “The Skeptic.” “I believe he preferred the beauty of women / to the virtue of sermons. I believe he preferred their beauty to giving /absolution,” she comments in “My Priest Father,” who she has seen in photographs.

Along the way, we meet the friends of her youth and some of the strangers of her city; we see ee cummings, Perry Como (paired incongruously, but successfully, with General MacArthur), Fernand Lé Glenn Ford at the postwar zenith of the American Century. The settings can be thinly sketched but are mostly convincing, the diction various and rich, the stanza structure appropriate to the occasion.

And we are offered sundry forms: a sequence of quatrains largely written in Spanglish, “Adiosito, Mother Snow”; an elegy for a hellion turned to dewy prom queen in “Mabel, Merrick, L.I.”; and a lament for a Peruvian backpacker sidekick trekking through Europe of the Fifties in “Saying Goodbye to Carmen.” A ghazal is dedicated to the poet’s fragile mother, and a double tanka is addressed to Chairman Mao’s widow, the reviled Chiang Ching. Philosophical differences between William Blake and Sir Isaac Newton are briefly recalled in a series of unrhymed triads.

Above all, the memories are moving and the numerous disclosures unleavened. They are often humorous, even girlishly lighthearted:

Silly billies, we poked each other’s arms with balled fists, held hands and howled at crabby ladies in funny hats, dusty feathers fake fruit.

(“Back When All Was Continuous Chuckles”)

Elsewhere we hear an ersatz, storefront Gypsy intone: “Wait, I see your poem on tv/ you got a hit show / gods gotta make it right / gimme a little more . . .” (“Reading Da Leaves”), and squabbling girlfriends are reconciled in “Movie Star Lies” when a fictive Rita Hayworth “in a silver limousine / legs in black net slithering out the door” is given the finger and waved away.

Like the D. H. Lawrence of “Look: We Have Come Through,” Belgian-born Inez (she arrived in the Unites States just before the outbreak of World War II) has been a stranger in a new world, in the New World; she sees its varied surfaces for what they are, while registering the pain (and not a little of the pleasure) that they conceal.