Seeing Had to Become Habitual

Seeing Had to Become Habitual Paula Koneazny Profane Halo Gillian Conoley Verse Press http://www.versepress.org 91 pages; paper, $13.00 Gillian Conoley's poetry inhabits a space that Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine, among others, have called "where lyric meets language." Indeed, Conoley pays much attention to language as language ("speech for its own sake?") in her new collection, Profane Halo, and utilizes many ofthe techniques of modernism, such as fragmentation, disjunction, and parataxis, in doing so. Occasionally, she introduces a lyric "I" but with no apparent confessional intent. Her lyricism depends not so much upon having a singular voice (although there is a sensuous, singing quality to her writing) but rather upon the particularity of her intelligence and point of view. The title Profane Halo is taken from Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben, in a quotation included here as one of the book's opening epigraphs. Agamben speaks of "an incorruptible fallenness," an idea that recalls the "used world" that Conoley previously explored in Lovers in the Used World (2001). In such a world, concepts oforigin and destiny, of maker and made, appearto be obsolete. However, readers should beware ofmaking too much ofsuch correspondences, since meaning in these poems proves to be as elusive and fragmented as is the language. Even when certain motifs do emerge, I get the impression that this poet is more concerned that readers see her poetic world than interpret it. Profane Halo might also be read as Pale Halo, for most of the poems collected here seem to be bathed in moonlight or unfurled beneath cloudy skies, unlike poems in earlier books {Beckon [1996], Lovers in the Used World), which could thrive out in the red-hot sun. The temperature has dropped now, and this coolness is appropriate to the contemplation of FICTION COLLECTIVE TWOC 5FRIhQ eOOÓ Nietzsche's Kisses-Lance Olsen The Book of Portraiture-Steve Tomasula Hydroplane-Susan Steinberg http://fc2.org death and grief with which many of the poems concern themselves. In the lower light that accompanies these cooler temperatures, readers must rely upon acuteness of sight and sense. The book opens with the eponymous poem, "Profane Halo," in which we encounter a "cold sun," a "cold, dark street," and "Earth's occasional moonlessness." Midway through the collection, in "Fatherless Afternoon," we learn that "the ocean has a sunlit zone, a twilight zone, a deep ocean, and abyss. // It is a world of complete darkness, bitter cold, and crushing pressure." Here in the abyss is perhaps where griefabides. However, in other poems, such as "A Little More Red Sun on the Human," we discover that "The shapessuggest // it is late afternoon" or find ourselves, in "Three Figures at the Gates of the Gully," at "an airport by matchlight / no usual links thick the clouds." If we do enter the abyss, we don't stay there, but instead wander along the perimeter, in shaded and shadowed in-between spaces. Conoley is more concerned that readers see herpoetic world than interpret it. Memories, particularly childhood memories, figure in several of the poems in this collection, fitting in a book which locates its center in the poem "Fatherless Afternoon," written following the death ofConoley's father. She lays out her visual fragments as she would lay out the clothes of the deceased: And fatherless afternoon I spend you, big gold watch and chain big gold watch and chain Dingy pool of sunlight the white mule drinking there Lucky stag in a waterfall lucky stag washing perfume from your moonlit shirts Tide brings the one who loves you Tide pulling the world but you must not attach. Everything the poet knows is constructed from memory (even the most immediate experience), and memory here is sensual. Reaching beyond the transfer of thought, experience, and impression to memory, the poet is also compelled to "copy copy copy it as becries the scrivener. . . ." In the poem "The Pox," she asks, "what if the poems preserve us? / So no one I know will die...." However, this may be a vain hope, one that she's already discarded in "New," where she writes, One doesn't come home one wakens Persephone to ask, have you seen the daughters...