Oriflamme (review)

"I take space to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now," writes Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael. "The fulcrum of America is the plains, half sea half land, a high sun as metal and obdurate as the iron horizon, and a man's job to square the circle." Almost sixty years after Olson's study of Melville, the young poet Sandra Miller has arguably made it her job "to square the circle," imbuing poems in her remarkable debut collection Oriflamme with many of the same omnivorous compositional qualities so characteristic of Olson's verse. Sprawling in their typography, compact in their syntax and constellate imagery, the poems in Oriflamme locate themselves halfway between an astute grammar of perception and an American vernacular from within this "fulcrum."

Indeed, there is much "reshaping," much "squaring" in Miller's work. The dimensions of the book alone-almost exactly nine inches by nine inches-suggest that Sandra Miller's poetics calls for an initial recalibration of the page. The poems occasionally read like serialist compositions on the page, relying heavily on compression, fragmentation, and loosely tethered imagery. Take, for example, these stanzas from "passes months of landscape gloom," one of the many poignant and intriguing poems in Oriflamme:

pursuit of gravel skirt-pursuit of grass-

    an overbit bowl was also green enough-but still-still the distil-

chains laid on the sod-grass like coin-

Pastoral, meditative, antique, and intimate, sparse lines like these appear throughout the book. The poems in the collection always seek out meaning but sometimes evade (very intentionally) our expectations of what a poem should do. Consider the progression of the previous lines. The opening line, "pursuit of gravel skirt-," in and of itself is narrative enough. One encounters an initial struggle, a persistence. But the skirt's being "gravel" sparks the reader's interest. In the second line, one encounters a second struggle, the "pursuit of grass." The third line makes reference to a container ("bowl," perhaps part of the scene, perhaps not) and that its overuse ("overbit") is its most striking quality. But when coming to the more meditative lines "but still-/ still the distil-"), one begins to wonder if this poem isn't as much about the process of making a poem (or the inability to make a poem) as it is an actual pastoral scene. The "chains laid on the sod" could be indicative of several things: an echo of the "gravel skirt," another isolate image, or perhaps the making of the poem, itself a sort of "chain" laid out on the page. In addition to all this, the ubiquitous dash makes the work appear as though something were always left out, as if a speaker were always about to say something but forgot. And so one has the sense of looking at isolated cinematic frames, frames that sometimes work against each other and often appear to omit.

In what follows, a further semantic rift appears. The poem's subsequent lines modify the eerily distant tone by personalizing the "pursuit" and instilling a body in the poem's patchwork:

lay down for watering the back-neck lace shirt twists around neck-green stained knuckle stands up-    to rue-

    a house bout in the yard fell-    seen through armored window-

pruned & blind-shade from it kneelin the stripped pasture-grazeover the hidden hill bones-

The imperative "lay down," the "shirt twist[ing] around neck," and the "green stained knuckle stand[ing] up" give this picture its kinesthetic and corporeal quality. In terms of the picture around the body, one senses from the verb forms and adjectives ("fell," "armored," "pruned," "blind" "stripped") that the scene has come undone. All this seems to exacerbate the incomplete narrative of the opening lines. But what results is a dynamic poetry that not only is about apprehension, but is also aprehension itself. From the fragmented "pursuit[s]" of the opening lines to the kinesthetic human frame of the middle stanzas, the poem reveals the mind in the midst of processing the workings of landscape-a...