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Reviewed by:
  • The Visible by Bruce Bond
  • Jake Oliver (bio)
The Visible, by Bruce Bond Louisiana State University Press, 2012

I am not here to be dogmatic about poetry. Neither, it would seem, is Bruce Bond, despite his formalist background. The veteran of seven previous collections of poetry continues to delight in the details of our existence in The Visible, focusing on the tiny mechanisms that power our post-industrial, twenty-first-century landscape. While absolutists often seek to confine poetry within a rigid set of parameters, declaring that poetry must, Bond instead cuts through the noise to find the quiet awe underneath the gilding. That he makes it all seem so effortless is a significant testament to a man clearly at the height of his craft. Instead of writing one-dimensional manifestos, Bond paradoxically lets his firm control of the lines loosen the straight-jacketing of both modern existence and poetic dogma. He attains transcendence without ever seeming to have had overt designs on it in the first place.

Take, for example, his sonnet “Oracle.” Though typically abstract, and consequently somewhat hard to pin down, the poem sets us on a metaphorical journey as tired travelers (“to lay the burden of the path we travel / over earth”) searching for meaning in our lives and our surroundings (“each of us bewildered, led, / dawn to dawn, to part the living veil”). The living veil is our reality and behind it lie the mysteries and the great truths we all seek. There is an overarching sense of the mystical at work in this poem, a weary yet hopeful search for truths of the [End Page 168] road. By using the universal “we,” Bond makes us companions on this journey and invests us in the search for what lies behind the veil. That this veil lives could mean that the mysteries lie in nature, in humanity, or perhaps in the ideas and traditions of poetry, which are living and constantly being engaged with, revised, refuted, and cherished.

The written word has a transformative power for Bond, charged with an almost supernatural force, a “star of ink” (“Elegy for the Lost Book”). This force can move us through the process of grief (“My Mother’s Closet”), dreams (“Lamp”), or remembrance (“Hunger”). Bond is the steward of poetry as something more, perhaps akin to a religious experience. The poetry of The Visible is cosmic and intimate; it is measured and precise; it interrogates the essence of being and dares to confront pure non-existence, an infinite nothingness; it rattles the senses into higher consciousness—“Always your singular / body startled out of the dark like dice” (“The Strangeness of Knowing Well”).

Bond wisely anchors his abstractions in the body, and through this, the senses. Even if the proceedings seem to move away from us in meaning, we are never far from a tether to help move us through the poems. The denseness of some poems reflects the subject matter more than anything, and whether we are attempting to place ourselves in the grand scheme of things or cope with personal pain and loss, there is no one answer. “People” provides us with an example of the senses, in this case sound, as both bridge and tether:

The common birds sing their December music. They sprinkle the sound like water from the hand of a priest, in fear, in joy, or both at once—who are you to know, they say, and no one answers, who are you, they sing and will not stop.

“Privacy,” the collection’s darkest poem, addresses the sexual abuse of a young boy and his attempts as an older man to process this event as “silence wakes / the sleeping man inside his sleep.” The incident seems incredibly traumatic to the speaker; he “could not speak” of the incident “until now”: [End Page 169]

I recall the thick white smell, the musk, the mold, the salt. I taste it still, longing for the words to take its place. And yet I did not feel the full privacy of shame until he held me to my silence, which is to say I caught a glimpse of his, how he suffered what obsession has that...

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