Lyrical Idiolect

AHBTiCM Review Lyrical Idiolect Ravi Shankar Orient Point Julie Sheehan Norton http://www.wwnorton.com 128 pages; cloth, $23.95 Taken literally, Orient Point is the easternmost tip of the North Fork of Long Island, a sinuous strip of land counterpoised to the tonier enclaves of the Hamptons and Shelter Island, a hamlet once used as a base of operations by the Tories during the American Revolution and now a quiet seaside town where the winter population can verge to less than that of a Manhattan high-rise. Taken figuratively, in the context of Julie Sheehan's extraordinarily fine second book, Orient Point offers a vantage on clarity , a poetic space that allows the speaker of these lyrics to search for some kind of navigational tool that would help recalibrate a sense of personhood in the face of a collapsing relationship. A tool that would help untangle the knotty rapport between the races, that might even parse (and praise) the force ofme contemporary colliding with the archaic, both formally and linguistically. A tool that finally would blaze a trail into and out of the wilderness of urban decay and technological proliferation that threatens at every moment to overwhelm, even while offering itself as abundant with trope and image. The title poem of the collection, "Ghazal: Orient Point," prefigures many of these themes. As the great master of the ghazal in the English language, Agha Shahid Ali wrote, "There is, underlying a ghazal, a profound and complex cultural unity, built on association and memory and expectation, as well as an implicit recognition of the human personality and its infinite variety." In Sheehan's ghazal, complexity and unification work on many levels; first, there is the nautical imagery which permeates the piece, from the first couplet's reference to whales and lighthouses, to the barnacles, the brimless fishing cap, the mast and high wind that recur throughout the poem. Then, there is memory, never explicit in any obvious way, but present nonetheless in the specter of a crumbling marriage ("1 know / It's love, that sidestepping afterthought, mislaid and always off-point") and the passage of time ("The hour wrecks, it sinks, for time honors no distant point"). Finally, there is the way in which the form of the poem is mimetic of the content ("lash ofcouplets, broken/lines"), so that every choice feels manifest in necessity. There are also a number of other poems in this collection that deals with the implosion of love from the opening poem of the collection, "Honeymoon in the Grenadines," where a beach is filled with metaphorically apt skeletons of bleached, empty conch shells, to the gleefully malicious "Hate Poem," which begins "I hate you truly. Truly I do. / Everything about me hates everything about you." There is a pall cast over this collection that obviates reconciliation, that casts shadows over romantic love, but rather man tip into melodrama or self-pity, as it would have been tempting to do, Orient Point retains the edge of finely honed intelligence and bitter wit. Human behavior is minutely observed and reflected back at us with a characteristic flourish. Take, for example, "Sonnet: On a Recurring Argument Going Nowhere," one ofthe many pieces that display Sheehan's formal chops; here a car running out of gas and breaking down becomes the objective correlative for a relationship taking its last wheezy breaths. Or take the poem "Dependent Clause," which in grammar is the subordinate idea of the sentence and necessarily dependent on anotherclause for meaning and context. In this poem, the miserliness ofone dinner guest with a "kissy British accent," "a house in the Hamptons," and a "pure-bred Weimaraner" is more reprehensible only when read in context of his obliviousness. Here's a poet who can trundle the ruckus with the best ofthem. In reading Orient Point, one word that comes to mind is idiolect, manifestations of grammar and diction and syntax unique to their user. Sheehan's idiolect is so compelling because it is so capacious. She incorporates rhetoric from field guides and urban slang, legalese and Biblical elocutions, and yet the net result is not one of hodge-podge but something that is remarkably of a piece...