Saint Torch by Emily Fragos (review)

"There are two worlds I know of: / the vast illumined / and the place where I am." So writes Fragos in her poem "Host." I would suggest Fragos's poetic world is indeed an illumined one, visually filled with the vivid iconography of an artistic past. This past reflects a wide knowledge of art and literary history as well as classical Western myth. The selected poems from Hostage (her 2011 collection) included in Saint Torch are perhaps the more painterly of this book. They are very much under the influence of Classic, Biblical, Medieval, Renaissance and Romantic imagery. They also capture 19th Century European culture, such as the French circus, the music of Chopin, and a vision of Notre Dame De Paris. All of these poems have a feverish surreal aspect. Fragos's word palette is rich and haunted, mysterious and profound.

In "19 Chopin Waltzes" Fragos speaks of "snow falls from rafters of pink, swollen clouds," "moonlight," "silver rivers," and "The ship that sails to dreams of Achilles." She closes with: "the crying of turtle doves, the fleet-footed dancing. / On earth as in heaven, beauty without reason." We hear in these last lines both a biblical tone of address and a Keatsian note of epiphany.

"The Last Circus on Earth" includes "papier-mâché parrots …strapped / To each child's wrist," a "human elephant with a broken back," and "The night watchman [who] has cut loose the bear with a chained ring through its snout, / And the plumed, trick poodles, and run away with the woman who gets sawed / In half. The stuporous contortionist drowses inside the clown's yellow barrel." This delirious stream of images comes alive like an old French illustrated advertisement.

In the poem, "Into Great Silence," monks "answer to the ringing of the bell / and course down the stone halls to eat together: celery broth, / baguette, pears, hard cheese. Their brown robes sail like wings behind them." An "old monk, hunched" climbs some stairs to feed stray cats that "set to the brimming food / with loud licks." Cows, sheep, and flocked birds inhabit this world as well. Fragos is at ease drawing on Bosch and Dürer as she sets out on her imaginative course.

And in "Notre Dame De Paris" Fragos employs a deeply Romantic, charged language, one that harkens to the Symbolist verse of Baudelaire with its "gusts of raw, mad emotion, of unbearable expectation," its "Quaking birds" whose "plaintive crying is being carried over the voice / of the gun." And the dead who call from "the deck of their boat: Bon voyage, mes chers! We are beside our- /selves: in ekstasis!"

In her newer work featured in the first half of Saint Torch Fragos returns to art history in such poems as "After Dürer," and "At the Burning of Saint Torch." She also engages with Francisco de Goya's late 18th century prints and paintings in "Goya's Mirth" and "Goya Gazed." And perhaps most masterfully and skillfully continues this ekphrastic impulse with her wonderful poem "Inventory of The Royal War Paintings." Here Fragos creates the aural and sensory details of the paintings: the "soldier / shrieks, up to his knees in muck" and from the "muttering fields" comes "cretinous Death / in his grinning black-cat mask, // riding a flying, red-plumed horse. Catapults arch like vultures."

That reference to Death riding "a flying, red-plumed horse" is arresting as it is suggestive of the horrific bloodshed all around on the field of battle in contrast with Death's eternal blackness. Fragos mines the war paintings' imagery to underscore in verse each dramatic element.

The turn toward history is also one of literary communion with past writers such as Kafka, Walt Whitman, Emma Hauck, and Robert Walser. "To Walt Whitman on His May 31st Birthday" has all the earthiness and rough-and-tumble of American life. Like the Good Grey Poet, Fragos affirms Whitman's expansive democratic spirit in a more modern context and setting: "… I celebrate you, / dancing poodle, old man and tired aide, solemn delivery boy on your clunky...