Impeccable Regret by Judith Fitzgerald (review)

The Canadian poet Judith Fitzgerald died in the fall of 2015 at the age of sixty-three, not long before what would be her last book was published. What irony and sadness are there in its title, with its winking but surely unplanned acknowledgement of the end of life. It was never an easy life, a fact she did not hide. Abused by her mother as a young child, abandoned by her father, and raised by a series of stand-in parents (she has called her biological grandmother her “biological monster”), Judith Fitzgerald eventually found unconditional love in the parents of a high school friend, and was able to pull her life together, attend university, and start a career as a poet and writer. (Her first collection of poems was published when she was just eighteen years old.) She built a kind of bulwark with words. She found maîtres in Marshall McLuhan, whose biography she wrote, and in the English professor and writer Thomas Dilworth, who supplies a brief introduction to her last book in which he concludes by placing her in the company—the odd company at first blush—of David Jones and David Foster Wallace. Those two writers did share an uncompromising love of language and were masters in their individual ways of sprezzatura. In that sense at least, Judith Fitzgerald does belong among the Davids, for she is nothing if not a playful alchemist with words.

Dilworth locates Fitzgerald’s company of elders in the Joyce of Finnegans Wake and in Hopkins, and those literary alliances seem undeniable. He might have added cummings, although Fitzgerald’s sense of play in poetry centers not so much on typography as on invention and variation. Here is a particularly audacious example, the opening lines of a poem entitled “Existentuality Two : Wave of Radiant Silence”:

How I wanted you, hearthening, soulstitious, wholly opensighed, seaswirl ingathering, leaving your damned wreck, my tearstream, interramingling, celebreathing, neither burning nor brimmungling;

The relentless emphasis on portmanteau words bespeaks an unappeasable psychic pressure that comes close to being inarticulate, and it is no surprise when this stanza concludes with the imperative “Live outrageously.” Certainly the poems in Impeccable Regret live outrageously. At times the verbal legerdemain can be tiring for the reader, but fortunately Fitzgerald lets up on the throttle often enough to provide solace and relief, or at the least a change of pace. Here, for example, in its entirety, is a poem called “Contemptus Mundi”:

He unfolds and smooths [sic] your annotated life starry; no matter, no mindfulness, even less indifference past imaginable. Talk invincible defeat. Go ahead. See if I cry. Life worthy of affirmation, glimpses of discovery, delight, a thrilling quietude prevails.

Of course there is some word play here—“life starry” working a variation on “life story,” and “See if I cry” a suggestive alternative to the usual “See if I care”—but the play is ornamental rather than essential, appoggiaturas and mordents on an otherwise straightforward melody, subtle and suggestive rather than outrageous.

The theme of contempt for the physical world is not limited to the poem of that title, and it forms part of a broader spiritual, even Christian, thematic in the book. Titles such as “Trinity,” “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” “Triangular Benedictions,” “Reticulated Salvation,” and even “We Hit Our BVM Knees/Sashay Sway” (and that is a V, not a U) contribute to a liturgical order in the poems that is otherwise not especially overt in the language. Christ is invoked more than once, but in what Fitzgerald calls a “secularly sacred” context; often one has the sense that the wild language is intended to evoke a parallel world, somewhere beyond the pain and complexity of this one, “divorced from furniture” and “divinely fine.” Fitzgerald can say something as simple and beautiful as “The truly innocent yet lucent urgency of love / Stays with me, always an alluring green light,” but usually she senses something bloodied or anguished around the corner or down the street. The opening poem, an address to “Dear Reader,” bids us be welcomed:

To...