Dream of the Gone-From City by Barbara Edelman (review)

"The problem in the dream is to get home at night," so begins the opening and title poem of Barbara Edelman's visionary first full-length collection, The Dream of the Gone-From City. And it is the working out of that very problem—how to get home at night—that drives and shapes this startling collection traversing both urban and rural landscapes through tunnels, over roads, and into dreams.

Throughout, there are maps that are hard to navigate and places hard to find, harder still to get back to, as in "Tunnel Road" where the speaker recalls

There was a road called Tunnel Roadwe never found,a mated set of tracks we never saw,a warming hut we never reached,

In poems like this it is unclear whether we are in a dreamscape or historical reality. Likewise, the noir plot evoked in "The River" with its suggestion of foul play and a noir setting, might or might not have ever happened. Set in a dreamscape that is menacing and part industrial, where "Trucks on either side of like fists, like cities" (20) and part forest primeval where there is

So much darkness around it, so much mist.    Night woodsthick with the wing song of insects.    Wide bendon a night with no moon, no wind.

Thematically, intentional disorientation in "The River" as well as other poems, makes for tough going. And readers not ready to suspend their attachments to solid ground and the daylight of reason may be frustrated by what could feel like opacity for the sake of opacity. But, a if arguing against th illogic of memory and dreams, Edelman offers punctuates the poems with the empirical evidence of photographs, maps and film suggesting another kind of proof. Sometimes a slightly tilted mathematics, an emotionally-charged algebra or a geometric proof missing a postulate seems to govern, as in "Algebra Problem" when the speaker recalls the unexpected attentiveness of her father during teenage tutoring sessions:

…until I felt I could rebuild our housefrom its foundation up with those fleshless X's and Y's—my brief grasp of a universe that fit perfectly together—my father almost reachable across his fence of numbers.

Edelman's poems find their shapes easily and inhabit a prose structure as deftly as long, staggered lines or regular, shorter-lined stanzas. Narrative prose poems bloom throughout in the form of recalled dreams, vignettes of a past, gone-from life, a therapy session with its dream-like experience of analysis, or the recalled monologue in the voice of the speaker's memory-addled mother, its associative logic running on like water: "I call my daughter by her mother's name, that fiend, you're like a mother to me, you're like Helen Mirren in The Queen, no, scratch that, Helen Mirren's like my mother in The Queen, we saw it in an empty theater," ("It is nor hand nor foot in mouth").

Dazzling figurative language and strong musicality cutting against cliché suggests the powerful and even surreal imagery and synesthesia of dreams. For instance, "the red sun hung above the ocean like a bullet wound," with its attention to grunting, wounding assonance is at welcome odds with the conventional images of sunset. And in "The River," she pairs the natural image of the river with the deadly artifice of knife, mitigating the otherwise predictable assonance of green sheath to conclude, "The river's a knife in its green sheath." In other poems, knotted syntax recalls obsessive forms, a working over and over of an idea or image, as when she reflects on her mother's failing memory in "Evening Song": "…Let's face it, / she's a marvel, a maze, I'm amazed/ that she can still feel marvel." Edelman's method in the first three sections is to tack between her present and past relationships to aging parents, colleagues, friends and lovers, often with the effect of looking through the wrong end of binoculars—things that are close...