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Chatty Iambs:
A Review of Kate Light’s The Laws of Falling
Bodies
The Laws of Falling Bodies, by Kate Light, Story Line
Press, 1997, 73 pages, $11.00 paper, ISBN 1-885266-55-3.
In
his blurb on the back of poet Kate Light’s debut collection, Richard Howard said it
best: "How felicitous is this new poet’s name." Indeed, in this debut
collection, her words spring up as if to transcend the poems’ forms. She is a poet of
chatty iambs, dancing trochees, and lines that spin out of the poem only to surprise us in
the way that they whirl back in.
The poems navigate love, urban environments, philosophy,
and art—but where such poems can risk pedantic plodding typically associated with a
slavish devotion to formalism, Light’s poetry does not. It actually feels like what
critics say is most exciting about form: that it provides tension against which the poet
and poem can work. She says it herself, in "How Sonnets Are Like Bungi Jumping:"
"It’s the calculated danger—leap! The form will hold/ you—will be as
arms around you—ropes."
Those lines are characteristic of Light’s
acrobatics, lines that tumble together, connected by dashes and exclamations, outbursts
and short sentences, such that the predictable gallop of metrical lines is turned on its
ear, and we delight as the poems work against their forms while still inhabiting them. In
Light’s poems, one feels that this is a poet who is using what tools she wants, and
is not just filling lines—a rare feeling when reading much contemporary formal
poetry.
Light’s controlled, unusual choices are most evident
in the celebratory sonnets. For instance, in "And There Is That Incredible
Moment," the title leads us into an apt description of how it feels to read
Light’s work: "when you realize what you’re reading,/ what’s being
revealed to you, how it is not/ what you expected, what you thought/ you were reading,
where you thought you were heading." The syllables don’t come out to a perfect
ten per line, the stresses aren’t perfect, but it is through that momentum and
tension that Light builds such interesting and lively work.
Her expression, her aesthetic and voice, helps too. In
"San Francisco," part of her sonnet cycle, "Five Urban Love Songs,"
she observes, "Pierced tongue. Do it yourself lisp./ What is this? Penitence? Native
wisdom?/ Mutilation? or signal: I’ll do anything." She contemplates the state of
art through two poems dealing with the light switch plates and refrigerator magnets made
with the likeness of Michelangelo’s David. She writes, "Now who’s this in
plastic plastered against/ the refrigerator door! Not David! on whom they’ve pressed/
pants, t-shirt, shoes:. . . .
The sonnets are charming, captivating, and a delight, but
perhaps deceive readers about the limits of Light’s expressive power. To really see
and hear what Light can do, one has to look to the longer poems in this collection. They
work like spells, and demand to be read again. The poems are also frankly philosophical,
revealing a poet of intellectual acumen and an enviable ability to render an insight in
sharp, memorable metaphor. For instance, she reminds us that "love’s a specter
which haunts/ the living back to life." She states that "Sometimes,
consciousness is an ether that floats/ in a jar you must keep a lid on; see how the
vapors/ hug the edges and cure the glass." That she takes such metaphysical turns in
the poems is remarkable because it is something not often done well, and especially not in
a first book.
In poems about Martha Graham, George Sand, Isadora
Duncan, Tchaikovsky, and Galileo, Light meditates on art, on their voices, on the
duplicity of public faces, of movement. Her imagination of Sand’s hell sounds a lot
like what hers would be: "to live forever in a room// that is sparsely furnished and
forever tidy." Light (forgive me) lets the light in, the dust, the chaos, the noise,
in poems with the energy of Addonizio with the wry mischief of Collins, handling grave
matters like art and death with an assured step.
Finally, that these poems are cognizant of the stage, of
performance, of music is no surprise, considering that Light’s day job is as a
violinist for the New York Metropolitan Opera, and that she is involved in modern dance
and theatre. That, too, is perhaps why when these poems work to talk convincingly of art,
of muse and the drudgery sometimes necessary to produce it, they are utterly convincing.
Convincing, lithe, unpredictable, magical, and fierce. What a way to debut.
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Gabriel Welsch* teaches English At
Pennsylvania State University, where he earned his MFA in 1998. Recent Poetry appears in The
Carolina Quarterly and ICON, where he won the 1999 Hart Crane Award. His
reviews have found homes in The Missouri Review, Central PA and The
Heartlands Today.
*Previous Contributor |