Eastern Mountain Time, and: Black Loam (review)

Joyce Peseroff's new book, Eastern Mountain Time, is daringly original within an admirable latitude of poetic discipline and convention as she shows us the myraid perspectives on a life in process. In the title poem, the speaker intentionally conjectures what lies in the future based on the scaffolding of the past. The theme of the book is about time and its various facets. "Eastern Mountain Time" begins with a repository of nature's items, each marking its own history and measure of time. Nature, of course, is unconscious of the endings that agitate human beings, mortality and decay. The place of death is hospitable to all beings and does not discriminate.

The ledge beneathmy house cooledeons ago; it observesno distinction betweena gnat's abidanceand an elephant's.

Another poem, "Paradise" views time from a traditional Jewish point of view in which "Paradise" offers the speaker no certain promises. Acceptance for the believer must parallel acceptance for the artist: an unknown paradise that transcends literal objectification but still has a central place in imagination:

Torah, mysteryspeech of Paradise

lost—what was takenin pain remembered

what was given, pearlshemmed in an overcoat

mislaid or hiddenwho knows where.

Peseroff's book is divided into three sections; each section cycles through the poet's consistent themes: the landscape and its correspondence with the human presence that seeks to be included; the importance of silence and receptivity in poems such as "Country House" or "What I Heard at Sunset," interlaced with poems about the political world and its dangerous leaders. While Peseroff is a poet who opens herself up to those moments recollected in tranquility, she is not an escapist who eschews the responsibility of sharing life with other people. Each individual poem emerges in turn and out of a purer landscape of the mind. Peseroff accomplishes this feat so sparely and economically. Like many contemporary poets, Peseroff tries to get the natural object "right." Her friend, the late Jane Kenyon, maintained that getting the natural object right will achieve an adequate symbol. Peseroff's life is her subject; but her subject is not her life; it transcends it. Her domestic and contemplative world is laced with the claims of the broader political world such as in "Spring Cleaning Begins with Lines from Karl Marx." Identity is not a simple formula; it is always collaborative, a social pastiche of roles that will not stay stable or fixed in any time and, as all poets know, the social role and the poet's role do not always coincide passively. History has its colliding effects. In two of my favorite poems, "Zeno's Paradox" and "My Mother's Forsythia" we see the way in which harmony is achieved, an intellectual achievement that surpasses the daily and always desirable world.

Between radiance and pitch, an element'shalf life could be millisecond or an era.

Kiss the sweet that drips from open cells—Apple, almond, peach-perfumed, whatever

Blossoming orchard gorged the dozing hive—Half a moment, and I'll be satisfied.

On the axis of time, the speaker is well aware that capturing the present is always an impossible yet necessary effort. The speaker writes to her own completion, almost, but she knows as a poet that she can only go as far at that first step, with the second pleasurably withheld in the mysterious distance. Her assertion: "half and half and half and half again" emphasizes her view of the eternal, that will only partially satisfy us because perfection is ossified once is it is outside time altogether. For now the impossible, being out of reach, remains possible. Peseroff is not just satisfied with observation, with listings of objects in nature; she probes deeper into natural and human objects and processes are connected analogically. Like Emerson, Peseroff waits for the natural world to communicate with the human soul through a correspondence between two essential matters. Memory shifts throughout the volume, such as in...