Linguistically Transformative Pain

American "TSlVlEWBOOK REVIEWS Linguistically Transformative Pain Gary Hawkins The Incognito Body Cynthia Hogue Red Hen Press http://www.redhen.org 96 pages; paper, $15.95 American poets have long heard Emily Dickinson as their muse. Taught to us in the common meter ofa hymn, her measured cadence metronomes our iambs—or becomes what Annie Finch calls "the ghost of meter" undertoning our free verse. And although the mythic Dickinson of high-collared prudery has no doubt inspired a good deal of doggerel , too, the radical, current Dickinson ofmultiple variant lyrics and ofabject and unfathomable epistles has loosened and enlivened contemporary poetic form. Susan Howe's landmark hybrid My Emily Dickinson (1985) re-claimed the place ofDickinson as inventor of "quite another grammar" while extending her innovation in a book ofremarkable critical autobiography; and Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters (1995) re-casts Dickinson's haunting epistles to include some "American & cracked" subjectless addresses to an auditor unknown. Now, The Incognito Body reveals Cynthia Hogue's direct lineage to Dickinson. Here, "another realm" of language emerges into the book via Dickinson, and we witness the emergence in much the same way that Hogue describes an arrival of memory, a process in which "[ijmages surface like artifacts in a midden ." Hogue's shifting quest for "what is" follows Dickinson's insistent telling of "slant" truths. And when we recognize Hogue's prominent place among the contributors to the current "Poets on Emily Dickinson " special issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal (15.2) (joining an impressive cast from Susan Howe to Linda Pastan, Marilyn Hacker to Bob Perelman), we know this is no mere coincidence. In the crisis of Cynthia Hogue's The Incognito Body, the pain suffered by the body inscribes a new prosody. Just as Dickinson outlives her crisis ofconfinement, Hogue survives by "letting go" into a remarkable form. But the transforming, central pain of The Incognito Body remains unknown as the collection begins with its confidence in the "future perfect" of "modern life" pitched in fit, certain, stanzaed poems. This assurance aligns the poet with the trajectory of the book: from the surface where she initially finds herself, she seeks the depth of the "heart" where by journey's end she will have found the "truth" she seeks. But if Dickinson on her journey from "what We see" toward "that We do not" is buttressed by her "Fierless Bridge" of"Faith," Hogue on her quest to the heart of "The Book of What Is" proceeds on more shaky scaffolding. Hogue's mode is more mystical but no less a grammatical challenge. To achieve that perfect future, she'll "fluctuate verbs to soothsay" a "dynamic" life which is ever-changing , uncertain ("very solid or shifting?" she asks); her world is an "azure plain, / a blue that shimmers, that shifts," a landscape she confesses to be made of "runes I cannot read." Still, initially her divination matches a contemporary indeterminacy—where "truth" equivocates with "wave- / marbled water" and "man walking down path"—with the certainty of a Romantic excavation. As she melts her way through the layers of a figure, the "old flame" of truth rises as a river opening under the strata of winter, a line-by-line revelation of a series of stillgreen memories. We are "in another country," whose boundary is the body and whose passport is its pain. But such revelations are soon luxuries. To enter into "The Incognito Body" (the long, sectioned title poem and heart of the book) is to "[w]ake to breeze and satin- / sheen of blue past." We are "in another country," whose boundary is the body and whose passport is its pain. A chilling epigraph from Elaine Scarry sets the stakes of the poem as they will reverberate across the entire collection, including its measured beginning: "Physicalpain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. . . ." And these stakes of pain also inaugurate Hogue's challenge to herself and to all of us, in all our pains. "[W]e must teach ourselves / a new language, simple / words with which to start—," she writes prophetically in another poem that appears to predate most of the composition of the book ("The Sibyl's...