An Extraordinary Exhibition

Erudite, elegant, beautiful, complex, lyrical, layered, challenging, profound. Not only do these words describe Virginia Konchan's new collection of poems, The End of Spectacle, but they also describe each and every poem within it. This collection is testimony to its author's mastery of her craft, where poem after poem offers up startling, original observations in splendid imagery and a musicality achieved through sharp attention to rhythm, cadence and tone. In a young contemporary voice that belongs to an old, very wise, soul, The End of Spectacle confronts loss and desire and hope in an extraordinary exhibition of how the past speaks to the right now.

Konchan, whose poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Best New Poets (to name a very few; more than half of these poems previously appeared in literary journals) is the author of the short story collection Anatomical Gift (2017) and the chapbooks That Tree is Mine (2018) and Vox Populi (2015). In addition to poetry, Konchan has published translations, literary criticism and fiction. That Konchan possesses the intelligence and skill and artistry necessary to these endeavors—the balance and manipulation of meaning from language to language, graceful analysis, invention—is dazzlingly evident in her poems.

The opening lines in The End of Spectacle—"The view from this tower is all / effluvium and waste…" from the poem "Fairy Tale"—lead to the closing lines from "Madonna and Child," "The illusion is almost complete" and in between, this collection reveals Konchan's inherent, intuitive understanding of how hard it is to navigate the "truth" of human experience, all demonstrated in her seemingly endless knowledge of history, music, art, literature, ancient culture, pop culture, faith and religion.

No matter the subject, the poetic voice, or poetic form, there is an osmotic and symbiotic movement back and forth across what might at first seem like endless gulfs or polar opposites but the process and the journey end up affirming universal connections, the shared triumphs and tragedies across ages and cultures. From Monet and Gauguin to Jackson Pollock, from Jesus and Mary to Nabokov and Dolores Haze, from Scheherazade to Whitney Houston, these poems are an odyssey—individual and communal—of shared vulnerability and desire, a journey from history's example toward a sometimes helpless, sometimes willful refusal to learn from it, as evidenced in the poem, "It Is the Perpetual Today."

It is the perpetual today, that which hashistorians runningthrough empty fields in white coats,taking the pulse of the world…

The last doctrine is that of redistribution of matter.The item is a stick, and, at the end of the stick, a soul.

Many of these poems end with the kind of revelation we see above; often, the reader makes the discoveries along with the poetic voice as in "The Red Kerchief (after Monet)" where, "Lightning zigzags across a starlit sky, / but I am stone cold, no, colder / than stone" or in the closing lines of "Façade," when, "Its edges warp. / Like a severed animal, / its essential parts cry / out—no, back—to me." The effect of this shared uncovering of perception between poet and reader contributes to one of the (many) great strengths of this collection—the communal act of trying to understand the complicated world.

Images, questions, observations, examinations appear and reappear in the poems, contributing to the collective experience. In "Zsa Zsa Gabor Learns to Read," the speaker asks, "How does one represent thinking?" and it could be argued that nearly all of the poems here attempt an answer. In "O Noir," "You are led to the table of rhetoric / Its edges beveled and smooth" but a few poems later in "The Great Physician" (the title possibly hearkening back to the "historians…running in white coats" from "It Is the Perpetual Today"), the speaker declares, "A myth is not a fact. It's a haystack"; and, finally, in "Madonna and Child," the final poem, we find that "Ideas are things./And things don't fare much better."

The End...