The Crack in Everything (review)

In each of her eight books of poetry, Alicia Ostriker has pondered the elusive meaning of sexuality, the looming catastrophes of marriage, the ongoing atavistic bloodshed of history. In all of her books she has held sons, daughters, and husband, sanity and justice, beauty and God, in a precarious balance between disenchantment and epiphany. Her poems are frequently launched as possible elegies should they fail as pieces of resistance. The world through which she travels “records catastrophe. / Literature,” she adds laconically, “does the same.” ¹ It is a world whose catastrophes elicit such metaphors as, “hill of illness,” “hard breast,” “stone blister.”² It is, throughout Ostriker’s work, a “wounded / World that we cannot heal,” but that is yet “our bride.”³

The elegist of Ostriker’s splendid “A Meditation in Seven Days” in Green Age encounters her god on the seventh day, resting, murderous, drunken, exhausted but loved. God’s excessively human qualities epitomize Ostriker’s disillusioned view of history and its various subtle and not-so-subtle traditions of violence, many of which have their causes in patriarchy, some of which trace themselves through Ostriker’s Jewish heritage. When, out of the struggle with those traditions, she seeks to revise and rewrite the master narratives, her poetry, she insists, will attempt neither the “words addressed to an atomic father” nor the emotional distance of (male) “speculation” nor the self-validating “wisdom of the wise” if only “so that suddenly / Our human grief illuminated, we’re a circle / Practical and magical.”⁴ To such a circle, to such grief and illumination, we are invited in Ostriker’s eighth volume of poetry, The Crack in Everything.

The title is repeated in an epigraph from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” It is a redemptive, but paradoxical principle that structures the poetic vision of this book. The incurability of history, the violence of cities, the randomness of illness, the incomprehensibility of pain: these are the cracks. And while they elicit Ostriker’s warning against “the old myth that suffering is virtue” (“The Russian Army Goes into Baku,” 27), in her poem titled “The Class” the light nevertheless gets in:

Against evidence, the teacher believes Poetry heals, or redeems suffering, If we can enter its house of judgment.

(P. 61)

Unlike the judgment of history (which is that the mistakes of the past shall be repeated), the poetic house of judgment would liberate rather than condemn, would forgive rather than indict, would “give...permission / To gather pain into language” (p. 60). Although “The Class” ends with Ostriker’s wistful contemplation of such redemptive possibility, it is “against evidence.” Poetry is no “safe-house.” All the teacher can do is to lead her students into (and hopefully through) their private infernos:

The teacher helps them descend to hell, Where she cannot reach them, where books are ashes, Where language is hieroglyphs carved in walls Running with slime, which they’ll have to feel for In the steamy mist, while the whip opens their backs.

(P. 61)

The Crack in Everything testifies to the effort, often a vain effort, of entering the poetic house of judgment—life is unforgivable. When Ostriker seeks out those supremely (for)given moments—Wordsworthian spots of time as in “Appearance and Reality” or in “Taylor Lake,” or in “Still Life: A Glassful of Zinnias on My Daughter’s Kitchen Table”— such purely aesthetic, redemptive moments are rare. In “After Illness” she laments:

Whatever I can consciously intend By definition isn’t it! What I want Is to listen, what I want Is to follow instructions.

(P. 53)

But the instructions emanate from indeterminate sources. Ostriker’s “guides” are “presences” (p. 52) and her presences are fortuitous and temporary: “It never lasts” (“Still Life,” 81). “The Nature of Beauty” ends with an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s aesthetic/spiritual quest:

A brief raid on the inarticulate Is what we get, and in retreat we cannot Tell...