The Government of Nature by Afaa Michael Weaver (review)

At the end of his poem “The Impossible,” a poem that unflinchingly recounts a memory of sexual abuse, Bruce Weigl writes, “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” I’ve always had a contentious relationship with this line—feeling both its truth and its impossibility at the same time, and, of course, that’s part of the point. And this line was a kind of echo as I read Afaa Michael Weaver’s The Government of Nature, a book of narrative meditations that look bravely and, at times, with striking clarity, at the memory of childhood abuse— the poems falling down on the memory itself like so much rain. But these poems don’t point only to themselves—their reach extends out, developing a deep politics of suffering, survival, and family history. Weaver’s poems are crisp in their narrative telling, and also rich with the lyrical complexity that is the pillar of Weaver’s work. In “Washing the Car with My Father,” Weaver ends the poem:

He tells me not to miss a spot, to openthe hood when I’m done so he can checkthe oil, the vital thing like blood, bloodof kinship, blood spilled in the streetsof Baltimore, blood oozing from the soulof a son walking prodigal paths leadingto gutters. Years later I tell him the storiesof what his brother-in-law did to me, and

he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye,wraps it in a white handkerchief for church,walks up the stairs with the aluminumcrutch to scream at the feet of black Jesusand in these brittle years of his old age wegrow deeper, talk way after midnight,peeping over the rail of his hospital bedas we wash the twilight blue Chevy.

One of Weaver’s remarkable strengths in this narrative is the seamlessness of the metaphor. The car, the oil becoming blood—these are beyond vivid details or powerful descriptions. They gather meaning as the poem moves, as Weaver renames the blood over and over. The brilliance of the craft in a poem like this is that the poem doesn’t seem made at all, the metaphor not built, just there in the experience. Some poems say, look what I am making and some, the most powerful, just say look. And The Government of Nature requires that we look. However simple looking may seem, in Weaver’s collection looking is an act of survival, a deeply committed and complicated political act.

This poem’s closing marks the tenderness with which Weaver approaches the subject of family, as the conversation between father and son becomes the washing of the car, except in this future moment the two are able to recognize one another with more precision—the way we recognize one another when we are running out of moments to do so. Weaver’s poems mark the body, contending with its mortality, something he names “a throat jammed with a good-bye” in the poem “When My Heart Fails.” In this poem Weaver writes, “I have come to have a high noon with the past.” This moment reveals, for me, Weaver’s ability to take a familiar idiom, like “high noon,” and pull the phrase’s meaning into the realm of the unfamiliar. Several times in the collection, the abuser is imagined as “cowboy,” so that when we come upon the phrase “high noon,” we hear the unsettling haunting of a childhood. But, as in much of Weaver’s prior work, a “high noon” with the past is not only a personal necessity but also a deeply historical one. In this sense, while Weaver’s book is profoundly personal in its subject matter, it is also a social and political critique that calls on us to look at our personal and collective histories as reflective and therefore inseparable.

In the notes section of this book (which guide the reader through a series of Buddhist and Daoist symbols and references from the...