What More? by Daniel Brown (review)

In his previous book of poems, Take the Occasion, Daniel Brown wrote a four-line poem, “Epitaph for Deconstruction”:

A puff of wind that really shouldn’tHave blown so many so far astray—And yet not anyone who wouldn’tHave come to nothing anyway.

In his new book, What More?, he returns to the subject, this time in “Toasting the Deconstructionists”:

Although no fan of theirs, I’ll raiseA glass to them and say, “Live long!”The sentiment behind the phrase?“Survive to see your rites of wrongGo down as yet another vainAssault on that Gibraltar, Truth,And rue it, should your hearts retainThe capability of ruth.”

No fan of the Deconstructionists myself, I was a prejudiced and pleased reader of these little sallies, each of which needs to be read more than once to follow the twisty satisfactions of lines like “And yet not anyone who wouldn’t / Have come to nothing anyway.” Anyone / anyway; not/wouldn’t … nothing—it needs a listening ear and an active mind to take in such writing.

Perhaps the best adjective overall to characterize Mr. Brown’s poetry is “cagey.” Dictionaries are cagey about the word, Fowler’s Concise omitting it as slang; an American one allowing it to mean “Wary, shrewdly knowing.” These are fair enough words to pin on Brown, and appropriate for his six-line “Judo”:

I.E., the kind of verseThat doesn’t try to forcePeople to their knees(Seeing as it seesTo people being thrownBy forces of their own).

Along with the rhymes, both strong and slant, and the echoing—“People, seeing, sees, people—it’s to be noted that half of the six-line operation is in parenthesis. Parentheses are all over the place in Brown’s poems, and their preponderance is a central fact in his caginess. One way of not trying to force people (readers) to their knees is to let up on the forcing by clearing your throat, qualifying the pronouncement you’ve just made.

The title poem, “What More?”, is a particularly expressive example of such parenthetical twisting, as it extolls the notion of repeating in music (music is all over Brown’s poetry—the volume’s final poem salutes his cello and “stowed-away” oboe): “The point of which I didn’t really get. / (Any more than what the point would be / Of saying twice a lot of what we say.”) Here the voice doesn’t only draw out the “point,” but draws it over the stanza. More assertions and qualifications follow:

A questioning I’ve long since gotten overTo where I’m more a repetition lover,From which it doesn’t follow, by the way,

That my early qualm was illegitimate.(It isn’t like it’s nuts a poet wasWhen he said a child knows truths no other does.)

Brown’s sentences court awkwardness along with parenthetical qualification: “It isn’t like it’s nuts a poet was” is hard to say and awkward to hear, but it goes on to straighten itself out—“When he said a child knows truths no other does.” The necessity of always repeating is tested in the two final stanzas, a thought and then a final afterthought:

Why shouldn’t notes be streaming ever onTo shapes and traceries forever new:A state late Debussy was drifting to,A dream an avant-garde was bent upon. …

Of course one asking this would be forgivenIf his voice were short a certain urgency,His having been conveyed repeatedlyBy music in the cumulus of heaven.

That “repeatedly” in the poem’s penultimate line is a lovely stroke.

Brown seldom attempts the longer flight in his lyrics, but the next to last poem in this volume, “Under the Sun,” is as ambitious and satisfying a one as he has written. Under the sun we know there is nothing new, and Brown’s poem takes on the question of essences: How many times do we need to register an...