POETRY IN REVIEW

1 5 8 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W D A N I E L L E C H A P M A N A survey of ten recent, celebrated poetry books suggests that today’s poets have, in our unprecedented times, come upon an unprecedented discovery: each of us, it turns out, has a body. Actually, each of us has the body. While the corpus has been electric since Whitman at least, references to ‘‘the body’’ have, in our times, become something of an epidemic. In almost every book in my stack, ‘‘the body’’ looms portentously (but without clear intention) through poem after poem, leaving me to wonder, as I sit here on my own bodily butt (I’m pretty sure it’s not the butt), narrowing my eyes (deepening some crow’s feet that I hope don’t qualify as the crow’s feet) – what, for the life of me, ‘‘the body’’ is, other than, that is, a body. My main problem with this tic of period style – which will probably one day seem as antiquated as Tennyson’s ‘‘woven copses’’ and ‘‘slumberous sheets’’ – is that it is both self-important and reductive. ‘‘The body’’ rarifies one of the most elemental facts of being human and the basic requirement of most poetic gifts: the B l o o d r o o t , by Annemarie Ní Churreáin (Doire Press, 72 pp., $13.99 paper) T h e U n s t i l l O n e s , by Miller Oberman (Princeton University Press, 96 pp., $17.95 paper) 1 5 9 R ability to perceive the world around us through our senses. Often ‘‘the body’’ seems not a body at all but a by-product of the poet’s self, whose ego is always trying to take credit for the creation of the world, and the creatures in it, by coming up with theoretical formulations of them. What complicates this is that ‘‘the body’’ is usually political in tone. The foregrounding of bodies brings to mind those harassed, objectified, or oppressed by society – particularly the bodies of people of color, LGBTQ people, and women. One would have to be senseless not to hear their cries for justice. Still, the reason that poets have always provoked authoritarian states is that a singular voice is intrinsically antithetical to an oppressive power. The more individual a voice is, the more it undermines the authority that seeks to oppress by denying the humanity of a silenced or victimized group. The ultimate expression of resistance on behalf of ‘‘the body’’ in poetry, then, is that of the most precise singularity. Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Miller Oberman share this preoccupation with ‘‘the body,’’ but their sharp, faceted first books are full of poems that defy generality. Ní Churreáin is explicit about the political intentions of her poetry. As Dr. Sinead Kennedy (who, the book jacket tells us, is not only a professor of English, but also the secretary of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, which made abortion illegal in Ireland) puts it, ‘‘Ní Churreáin bears witness to the lived experiences of women . . . disregarded women who lived lives of imprisonment within Irish institutions; women whose stories are haunted by the ever present specter of the patriarchal Irish state.’’ The poet herself has a compelling personal connection to this history. In 1951, her grandmother gave birth to her father at the Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home and then was forced to give him up for adoption because she was a single woman. ‘‘It is at this point in the history of the State that poetry as a form of protest began like a code to write and rewrite itself into the DNA of who I am,’’ Ní Churreáin has written. Ní Churreáin dramatizes her story in poems which, with economical epigraphs – like ‘‘Penance,’’ for a girl in trouble 1951 – allude to the poet’s stake in the stories she tells, without allowing narrative details to compromise the music of her lines. She’s tuned to the wildness within the feminine, and her lines bristle and 1...