Petals of Zero Petals of One by Andrew Zawacki (review)

colorado review 172 Petals of Zero Petals of One, by Andrew Zawacki Talisman House, 2009 reviewed by Julie Carr Poetry grounded in the particulars of a place—Wordsworth’s London, Whitman’s Brooklyn, Olson’s Gloucester, Williams’s Paterson, O’Hara’s Manhattan, Niedecker’s Black Hawk Island —is a constant in our traditions. These poets, and many who have followed, investigate a place’s qualities, histories, personalities , energy, and mythology, in order, it seems, to initiate a series of questions: how can one actually know a place? How can language alone evoke a landscape? Is it ever possible to “compel” as Olson said, a place onto the page? Or does the poem, instead, take us farther from the place itself, into another place: the place of the aesthetic? Andrew Zawacki’s third book of poetry, Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), opens with the twenty-six-page poem “Georgia.” Ostensibly, the poem enters into this tradition , raising just these epistemological doubts: “And I don’t know this city Georgia / and I don’t know if I want to know / what is it that anyone knows Georgia / really Georgia / in the end Georgia.” Incantatory and loving, the poem is also angry, violent, and disgusted. Seduced by Southern lushness, by the “irises flushed in saffron,” and the “hawk owl perched on the larch’s bough,” the poem turns, frequently, to a kind of tight rage. A typical slide begins “let’s bloom Georgia” and then travels, as it were, south: “this popstand / this Podunk five and dime a dozen / our brains all over the passenger seat.” But Georgia is not, of course, only a state, it is also a woman’s name, and the poem, like the song we hear running, in a sense, under the poem, exploits this ambiguity with aplomb. “I listen to the noises every last one Georgia / I love every last noise on the violet fields,” writes Zawacki, speaking to his home state as a lover, though an ambivalent one: “Let nothing come between us Georgia / but me / and you / and the hollow between.” Yet what the poem loves best is its own music, its own rhythms, its “syllables virused by syllables.” For frequently Zawacki allows himself to get caught in eddies of sound, as in the following riff: 173 Book Notes You’re alasless Georgia harasless Georgia from your slackass jeans to your Jesus Georgia ersatz and aliased lacking alack This is playful, but it’s not without its reasons. The poem is as much about the language of place (and Zawacki’s not above making ample use of Southern colloquialisms like “willn’t” and “punkass”) as it is about the place itself. Georgia is first and foremost a word: and a special word at that, packed with four of the five vowels; it’s “vowellewd” as Zawacki writes. The one vowel that’s missing, the “u,” speaks voluminously as well, since Zawacki’s object, despite the relentless address, is not a “you”—neither a woman nor a place at all—it is rather an abstraction , word and idea; it’s a phenomenon, as Zawacki admits when he writes: “and whether these possible worlds Georgia / be many / or only / my own / I call you Georgia / in the fissure of you.” Petals of Zero Petals of One houses two other long sequences: “Arrow’s shadow,” and “Storm, lustral : unevensong.” These, even more blatantly than “Georgia,” highlight the “fissure” between place and poem, or, to put it in familiar terms, between objects and their names. The language in “Arrow’s shadow” is frequently broken, tweaked, unmade in order to be remade. The opening poem’s opening line reads, “Gauntwater and brittlewhite ,” and throughout this first poem we find words like “nowise,” “sigil,” “trefoil,” and “pinnate.” Get out your dictionaries ! We’re a far way from ordinary speech here, located nowhere, as the poem admits in its closing: “still life with eaude -nil / with zerologue / with motion.” In this rather oblique reference to the book’s title lies a key to its poetics. The “nil,” the “zero,” is the source of art itself—the openness out of which and within which imagination can move. The poem is...