Approximately Paradise (review)

Floyd Skloot has been writing and publishing poetry for thirty years, long enough to have become an intriguing example of how a poet comes into his own. But he is gaining notoriety at large as "the writer who got sick," an identity of convenience promulgated by reviewers of his essays on illness and loss of memory collected in In The Shadow of Memory and A World of Light. The poetry, too, has often made illness its subject since the early 1990s. But unlike the satisfactions of the essays, the pleasures of Skloot's poetry do not derive from entertaining insights into a timely subject. The pleasure comes from experiencing an evasion of doom through a careful regard of the world expressed through traditional forms. Skloot's considerations have always been thoughtful, but not particularly cerebral. He respects an actuality more than an idea. The persona, having already taken responsibility for itself, does not feel compelled to make the reader its custodian. Urgency makes way for the world, since the self in its reduced or troubled state cannot be relied on to play a title role. It is not that Skloot is modest in his voice or aims – it is that he reserves immodesty for calculated ends other than self-making.

He enrolled as a graduate student at Southern Illinois University in 1969 in order to study with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella, whose work up to that time had been taut and elegant. Skloot cultivated an early preference for leveraging form, withholding but not hiding emotion, with details of a palpable world in the foreground, the background darkening for the reader's speculation. "My Daughter Considers Her Body," the sonnet below, was written in 1977:

She examines her hand, fingers spread wide. Seated, she bends over her crossed legs to search for specks or scars and cannot hide her awe when any mark is found. She begs me to look, twisting before her mirror, at some tiny bruise on her hucklebone. Barely awake, she studies creases her arm developed as she slept. She has grown entranced with blemish, begun to know her body's facility for being flawed. She does not trust its will to grow whole again, but may learn that too, freeing herself to accept the body's deep thirst for risk. Learning to touch her wounds comes first.

This poem appeared in Skloot's first major collection, Music Appreciation (1994). By then, he had been ill for six years with a viral disease targeting his brain and severely disabling him. Ultimately disavowing the formalism that attracted Skloot, Kinsella had once said to him, "I want to stop from being crippled by form." But in Skloot's poems, form would exact a revenge on loss by forcing it to change shape. Music Appreciation, collecting the best work of his first twenty years as a poet, featured poems of domesticity, nature, and memory – and his initial poems about the disruptions of illness. The intimate title poem finds a speaker stricken by "some virus my doctors say/is deep but cannot name," and, "It's somber,/but I'm learning to appreciate/this new tone, the discordant sound/that accompanies vital change." His attitude consistently has been accepting from the beginning of the setback, while preoccupied with representing states of disorientation that ultimately yield insight. (Even in the sonnet above, the daughter is "barely awake.") For Skloot, learning to touch his own wounds comes first – his main story, even before the illness. In his new book, Approximately Paradise, the rules of his poetry take precedence over the accidents of his life, and find a route from threat to sustenance. But the intensity of such controlled tone and form also suggests a potential loss of equilibrium, an underlying dread.

In many ways, Approximately Paradise continues the interests and approaches of his last book, The Fiddler's Trance (2001). There, he concluded the poem "December Dawn" with "But still, I have never felt so strongly/before that the world has become nothing/but an image of what is inside me./I'll walk until the fog...