One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan
Driftwood Press, 2022
Or rather, One Syllable Holds So Much Power. The poems in Greenspan’s collection are smartly, sensitively constructed at the elemental and chemical level, amassing a remarkably powerful after-effect that lasts long after the first read.
I keep coming back to this phrase from the opening poem: “by frond rot the cut.” The repeated consonants typify the mouthfeel of so many lines in the collection; we get “no spit to speak of,” “high bright whine,” and “pills and pills, limbs.” But the generous spending on consonants is not for mere show. There is a substantial image or impression produced by the use of this texture that works to deliver each poem with a fully rendered reason for being. That reason is often an exploration of the pain, resilience, life, and death of the body.
In three prose poems under the title We the Dead Balk, all written in the first person plural, we get complete sentences offering a cadence of self-description and affirmation: “We clot each other,” “We will illustrate this failed animal,” “We question a logic of consumption.” The dead are offering their own reflection on being alive, while also mourning—mourning both themselves and our inadequate notions about the power of the human body itself.
“No more than several / members of their family have asked for death.” The griefwork is more gothic than elegiac, for the poems find some limited solidarity with, but not comfort in, nature. If you thought a gothic syllogism was impossible, be amazed: “All ash is tactile. Lungs are ash. Therefore lungs / are tactile.” I keep coming back to this line and to the poem it’s in. It is not that lungs can become ash; they “are ash” now. We cannot remain stunned by the present tense too long though. The imperative hustles us back into the action: “Dig feet into the apologizing / remains.” In this and so many of the poems, death manifests in every tense, until the border between living now and dying later is contested.
Or rather, One Chemical Holds So Much Meaning. In a two-part poem in her 2018 collection The Radio, acclaimed poet Leontia Flynn offers the line, “Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed.” Greenspan’s pharmaceutical diction similarly picks up an emergent and powerful new register in poetic work: talk of substances, drugs, chemicals, in a way that is not so much about the exception or the experiment, but their ubiquitous status as rule. In Greenspan’s poems, we hear “ethanol and animal,” “reaches of lithium,” “with clonidine and gabapentin,” “codeine from a friend.” But just as “lungs are ash,” no efficient barrier remains between the human body and the environment. The world is “full of sparkly / paint thinner,” “burnt plastic,” “silicate & dirt,” “burning rubber.”
Greenspan’s poems expose the weak barriers between the world of the poem and the book in our hands, your lungs or mine, purity and pollution, life and death. Thus, their power is fully present to the reader and sustained throughout the collection.
–
Molly Sturdevant writes in multiple genres. Her work has appeared in Orion, The Dark Mountain Project, Little Patuxent Review, Five South, Newfound, About Place Journal, The Nashville Review, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, she is currently working on a novel.