Famous Last Words, and: Cartographies, Uncollected Poems: 1980–2000, and: The Opposite of Clairvoyance (review)

Catherine Pierce’s first collection, selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2007 Saturnalia Books Prize, is cinematic in its love of the close-up, the cutaway, and the seemingly innocuous detail that later proves fatal. Many of the poems are written in the second person, although the objects of address, such as the abstractions that are the focus of the book’s first section, highlight the dangers of intimacy as much as its rewards. In “Love Poem to the Phrase Let’s Get Coffee,” Pierce exhibits an infallible ear for precise language and ironic juxtapositions as the speaker confesses her love for “your elegant manners, / one hand on the car door, / the other on the ass.” In each of these poems, the relationship between the speaker and the abstraction is filled with knowing and uncertainty, bravado and fear; Pierce reminds us that the exhilaration of love is also a kind of terror.

Although many of Pierce’s poems consider adolescence, her speakers are aware of, though not wholly impervious to, the pitfalls of nostalgia. For example, “This Is Not an Elegy” begins, “At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant,” and the poem’s first stanza provides a litany of dangers—car wrecks, lust, and hysteria—that could easily have devolved into melodrama. Instead, the stanza ends with these lines: “But slowly the cops / stopped coming around. The heat lifted / its palms. The radio lost some teeth.” The speaker admits that when she looks back at her adolescent self, she confuses herself with film stars playing dangerous roles—in other words, she realizes she must be careful not to believe her own myth. The interplay of archetype and reality is one of Pierce’s specialties, and her gift is the ability to expose both without shortchanging the appeal of either. “In Which I Imagine Myself into a Western,” one of several poems in the book’s middle section in which the speaker imagines herself into a film of a particular genre, is only eight lines long, but those lines manage to evoke the cowboy genre with a knowingness at once playful and desperate. “Yonder / the sun sets, molten, unhinged,” invites the speaker. “With me you put down / the gun, undo my petticoat. / The moon a noose behind us.” Here, as in each of the poems in this series, Pierce economically evokes the trademarks—possibly even clichés—of the genre but then goes one step further; the noose of the moon makes the landscape threatening in an entirely expected way.

Each of the poems in the book’s last section is titled with the last words of a celebrity, although the category “celebrity” is capacious enough to include Billy the Kid, gangster George Appel, and Marie Antoinette. In “‘Goodbye, My Friends! I Go to Glory,’” Pierce considers why these words, and not the more mundane remarks dancer Isadora Duncan might have made to her driver before being strangled by her own scarf, are how we must remember her:

we love her because the last words that we know confirm what we knew—

that she spoke in rapturous archaisms, that she had lilted and gauzed through some century from which no photographs exist. We love her because, when she bade a farewell we can only describe as gay,

she didn’t know she was in earnest.

Last words, Pierce reminds us, are their own kind of myth, and as such they always belong more to their audiences than to their speakers. This paradox is even truer in the book’s last poem, “‘Don’t Let It End Like This. Tell Them I Said Something,’” titled with what are reputedly the last words of Pancho Villa. Although sympathetic to his plea, the poem’s speaker is at a loss to supply an appropriate final sentiment. Several alternatives are tried and rejected, but because Villa’s complicated identity cannot easily...