Audiation by Anne-Marie Thompson (review)

Music and poetry apparently share fewer similarities than has been previously believed. In his foreword to The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology, J.D. McClatchy exalts the former as “the most godly of the arts in its ability to take possession of us, literally take us out of this world” while relegating the latter to the physical and imperfect realm of language which can only strive to “imitate” music’s rhythms and patterns. As a pianist and poet, Anne-Marie Thompson seems deeply invested in exploring this distinction. Awarded the 2013 Donald Justice Prize, her first collection of poems chooses for its title a word that defines listening to music as a cerebral act: audiation, which is the process of comprehending music when a sound may or may not have existed. That is to say: the mind can inhabit a musical language. Edwin E. Gordon coined the word because the imagination, usually connected to the visual, lacked an auditory equivalent. For Thompson, the impulse to imagine that lies behind both music and poetry fundamentally joins them as twin arts. Whether the poems honor the musician or music itself, whether they take place in a concert hall or the basement of a university library, and whether they unfold in free or formal verse, Thompson provides a strong counterargument to McClatchy’s claims by making her own elegant and intelligent music.

The sheer lyricism and cadence of Thompson’s poems first struck me as Yeatsian. One might discover, just as one might when memorizing a poem by Yeats, that Thompson’s phrasing relies on far more complicated rhythms than those dictated by line breaks. This beginning stanza from “Wild Geese,” for example, would be a pleasure to recite:

Through midday woods, where sunlight played its tricks Against the gravity of nature’s open hand,     I walked to understand my recent sadnesses—to find bleak sticks or a rough patch of earth that matched the cold       and lonely scene inside my mind, that I might somehow hold the sorrow still and grasp what might have been.

That the poem moves from thought to thought or image to image rather than word to word or line to line might help to explain my comment about memorizing Yeats. Though phrases like “sunlight played its tricks” and “the cold and lonely scene” might risk cliché, they are all necessary parts to this melodious and whole reflection on loss. Thankfully, Thompson’s ear favors uncluttered expression. Her poetry eschews the faddish word-play found in overwritten poetry published today. But the simplicity belies a sharp mind that exerts masterful control over language in all the poems. The sestina “First Concerto” flows naturally despite the form’s challenges so that each end word’s reappearance takes on a welcome freshness. And “Black Ice,” which is written in free verse, derives its music from the repetition of both words and sounds: “I grew up in a Texas town with oil / the color of everything / a town the color of oil.”

There is an elegiac tone that both Yeats and Thompson’s poetry share, that of profound emotion and wonderment tempered by nostalgia, meditation, or longing. So it did not surprise me to find poems directly alluding to the Irish poet whose works have inspired musicians and composers alike (including John Harbison, the composer of a one-act chamber opera inspired by “A Full Moon in March”). “Flight Patterns” begins with “Yeats country, and the only swans / are in the hotel pool / beneath my window.” The reference not only locates the speaker, but also establishes the book’s recurring theme of distance, both literal and emotional. Thompson’s swans, like Yeats’s, embody a standard of permanence by which the speaker measures her changing life and relationships. The speaker is “not sure” why she is visiting Europe again while contemplating the absence of her beloved and his “separate explorations”:

    . . . In flight I tracked the dotted progress of my plane across the cushion-backed display screen, that grand distance suddenly turned palm sized and cartooned

in its exaggerated, plotted...