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Reviewed by:
  • The Uncertainty Principle by Mark Kraushaar
  • Rosanna Oh (bio)
Mark Kraushaar, The Uncertainty Principle (Baltimore: The Waywiser Press, 2012), 83 pp.

If “one of the functions of poetry,” according to Allen Grossman, is “to bring people together, to pitch them toward one another with news about the poems which they have both read,” then Mark Kraushaar’s second book of poems, The Uncertainty Principle, winner of the 2010 Anthony Hecht Prize, would offer a never-ending dialogue about contemporary poetry, which has become increasingly factionalized over the degree to which poetic language should imitate the linearity and plainness of everyday speech. One challenge Kraushaar addresses is to write mostly dramatic monologues with as little drama as possible, by which I mean that most of the poems in this collection operate as speech acts, and sometimes, even as activity logs written in the third-person. Kraushaar’s best poems strive to articulate with urgency, rather than just say, a particular insight and in doing so, reveal a humbling discovery: that the impetus for writing about the most moving human experiences is usually the unsayable. [End Page 281]

Kraushaar’s poems use conversational markers that welcome the reader to disarmingly quiet meditations on why things are the way they are, a theme explored masterfully in a multitude of settings, ranging from the domestic (a father-son relationship) to the communal (the 9/11 attacks) to, ultimately, the universe. From time to time, he may abuse techniques that colloquialism tends toward (consider “Icarus,” which starts with a gim-micky confession: “At first I felt bad because / I didn’t feel worse. / But then I felt bad”), but his language accretes psychological power in “Visit Wyoming,” a personal favorite of mine:

My father drove because he always drove. My sister sat up front and so did my mother, and behind them in the back seat, I read Boy’s Life . . .

This use of repetition is a rhetorical tic Kraushaar indulges in other poems: he writes in “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This,” “He sits there. / He sits there a little more”; and again in “You Have One New Message,” “Then he listens. / Then he listens again”; and in “Poetry Noir,” “someone . . . leaning over / and looking up, and leaning over again.” In “Visit Wyoming,” the language is as plainspoken as ever and yet deceptively so, for its matter-of-fact tone suits the subject: the fixed dynamics of a haunting family portrait. This instance of repetition, along with the others mentioned, argues for the permanence of life’s small redundancies. The first line later metamorphoses into a refrain of anguish, amplified because, ironically, the language is muted: “My father though. / My father drove because he always drove.”

So humble, so sincere is the voice behind the best poems that their central conflict of committing an action or not (to say or not to say is one important action) assumes life-threatening significance. The endings to several poems operate as a sort of yes-or-no: “What the Dead Know” ends with “You would” and “The Uncertainty Principle” ends with “and then wishing I weren’t, and so don’t, / so do.” To just do or don’t, to just say as the speaker in “Meeting Darlene” puts it—such endings seem too know-it-all and consequently simplistic, maybe a bit false. I prefer an unresolved poem like “Baffled,” in which the speaker’s struggle to articulate makes saying or not-saying more poignant, more meaningful:

Behind her somewhere rooted near the fridge or by the radio, my father, slowly with a certain emphasis, I don’t know what you want, he’d say.

So I guess she didn’t feel like telling him, or if she did, she wouldn’t because he should have known. It’s not so strange. [End Page 282]

But I could be his father now, And of an early summer, in a back yard just like this, I could tell him, sad, baffled, silent man, I could say exactly what was wrong and what to do. I could. I almost could.

To consider the causes for a miscommunication or a failed relationship is a coping mechanism...

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