Elegant Displacement

Nothing Keith Waldop writes is straight. It's all oblique, graceful, quizzical, maddening, silly, gifted, and always wryly original. True even in his first book of poems, A Windmill Near Calvary, back in 1968, and now truer than ever nineteen books later. The games he plays constitute the texture of what he says; his language is what it means. What "it" is you can't say, you can't immediately know, for it lies somewhere other than where you are, like the secret in the middle, and unravels intricately, poem after poem. Whenever you presumptuously think you've got it—when you're about to reduce the poem to your terms—Waldrop dances away again, as he does in the very first poem: "Rude instruments, product / of my garden. Might also be / different, what I am thinking of." Time and again, elegant displacemnt sweeps you on.

The book is subtitled "a trilogy," but it has four parts: "Shipwreck in Haven" (first published in 1989), "Falling in Love through a Description" (first published in French in 1995), "The Plummet of Vitruvius," and "Epilogue: Stone Angels" (first published as a chapbook in 1997). Before you begin reading, there's an epigraph that starts the game: "I can't swim at all, and it is dangerous to converse with an unaccustomed Element. -Erasmus." François Rabelais himself didn't do it better. Like that grand, sixteenth-century medicine man and scholastic scoffer whose parody of learned argument is an inflated description of an exchange of obscene gestures, Waldrop pins his surrealistic proposals to a web of earthy, biological facts, from the world of transcendence coming back to time, blood, and change, one series after another of incomplete consequence, an emotional distancing by means of a dislocation in consciousness. It's a deft, masterly technique that reads appealingly and retains its meaning:

            I must devour you—skin,hair, and all. We must providefor winter. Now let us examine

the dwellings of the kingdomof heaven. What happens tothe severed parts? I hurl an ax

into the storm. Love potion: blooddripping from the finger from oneyear into the next. Hence my dread

of day's endless chain. When darknessovertakes us, we will find noshelter. I do not mind being

coachman on the box, butdrag you myself Iwill not. Death is something

that occurs to a sleeper....

But the meaning, though directed by the syntax, doesn't follow the grammar any more than one day can make an infinite chain or a finger can drip blood year after year. The very improbability encourages discovery of the metaphoric properties of the images, the basic nature of blood and the primal emotion of dread. Fancy an axe cutting a storm to pieces—all those disjointed parts. Fancy also the pieces of self headed for death aware of the conventional appearance but filled with awe at the untimeable facts. Life is wonderful, sensual, intimate, fun: "light your candle and open the window // lines of your dress, with a hint of underthings // looking up, our problem still unsolved." In the simplest terms, the mind's vivacity rides along on the ferris wheel of daily life.

There's an aphoristic quality to many of the lines, but the context quickly disavows propaedeutic. A charming, somewhat deceptive modesty masks the intellectual firmness that, like a skeleton of steel, holds all the skin tight and upright. For example, a throwaway phrase of common speech—"Something is going on"—yields to an unexpectedly surreal joining of anti-historical fact—"The dead Archduke is resurected"—followed by auctorial indifference—"Unusual beauty of the landscape"—and romantic re-involvement of the reader by establishing a personal relationship—"I think the world is turning around me"—and concluding with a problematic fact, a statement that is both relevant and irrelevant, both true and not true—"Whatever position we take, space is not place." It's a wonder and a delight that a poetic current composed of many eddies moves ever forward...