Flares of Light

Page 12 American Book Review Flares of Light Annie Finch I will never forget the impact that the opening of Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn” had on me when I first read it at about the age of eighteen: “This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless. / His head is air. Beneath his tip at night / Eyes open and fix on us in every sky….” The lines literally seemed to take my breath away, to breathe it out far away, down those abysses between the stars. The same disorienting sensation recurred at further moments throughout the poem: “This is form gulping after formlessness…,” “Farewell to an idea…,” “Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick”—a recurring cascade of those intersections of thought and image that Paul Mariani, in his perceptive preface to this unique new edition of “The Auroras of Autumn,” calls “some of Stevens’s most rapt and abstract imaginings.” Such distinctively powerful moments have kept “TheAuroras ofAutumn” one of my favorite Stevens poems, in spite of other passages distinguished by various oddities, offenses, and obscurities. It is not a poem that easily hangs together emotionally, at least at first; unlike, say, “Sunday Morning,” it does not enter us and build, but rather dashes at us in intermittent glories. This flashing quality makes it the perfect vehicle for a remarkable project undertaken by painter Oriole Farb Feshbach. To open this colorful, large-format book felt like suddenly being granted a blameless childhood in a poet’s playground. Luminations is a forty-five-page edition of “The Auroras ofAutumn” illustrated with color paintings, often two or three to a page (and, given this fact, surprisingly affordable).The resulting poetry-reading experience is unique, combining an exuberant massage of our childlike senses with a subtle verbal encounter. For me to open this colorful, large-format book and find the familiar opening stanzas of “The Auroras of Autumn” alone on a big page, with a gorgeous red-and-green-on-black abstract painting reproduced opposite, felt like suddenly being granted a blameless childhood in a poet’s playground where right and left brain are not only allowed but encouraged to play together. For any reader who has suffered the recognition that poetry’s physical joys are largely kept under wraps while its mental exigencies are celebrated in community, this book offers a healing experience. Reading Feshbach’s book is of course not a substitute for reading Stevens’s poem the usual way; it is an additional experience, a gloss, a visceral midrash. It’s not only the numerous colorful paintings (many stanzas have two or three of them, one printed large and other supplementary scenes laid out separately, each painstakingly linked to its accompanying phrase, line, or pair of lines). It’s also that the very act of cutting the poem into vignettes renders it cinematic and also staccato, with a rhythm of pages and images akin to heartbeats. Feshbach is a skilled painter with a long and significant career that has encompassed illustrations of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. While many of the paintings here do convey the feeling of “auroras”— flares of light against an outer-spacey looking background —others suggest water, trees, or heiroglyphs. The variety of illustrations even extends to representative images, such as a magnificently rendered, realistic sheaf of leaves. It is fascinating to watch the poem develop through these images; for example, the transition to the beginning of part 2 is accomplished with sudden blocks of white and black. The book is intelligently designed, with attractive French flaps. One charming design choice is the clear but unobtrusive bullets marking the lines illustrated by the various paintings. Since Feshbach keyed each painting to a particular passage, sometimes a longish passage and sometimes only half a line long, this is an important resource for any serious reader of the book. Like many significant works, “Luminations” teaches us to think like someone else—in this case, ultimately like the artist, rather than the poet. For example, from the memorably moving stanzas of part 3, neither the mother’s face, necklace, and hands, nor the crumbling books are illustrated—but...