Book Review

By now, a new collection of Heather Christle poems comes with a certain set of expectations. Even after a decade since her last poetry collection, her voice and poetic sensibility feel immediately recognizable. In her previous books, I’ve admired Christle’s inventiveness, playfulness, and dexterity, as well as her thematic treatments of mutability, disconnection, and that treacherous line between the real and the imagined. In Paper Crown, I admire those qualities and preoccupations again, but this time there is an added element of forthrightness in the everyday, the domestic. More weighs on these poems. If the prevailing tone of The Trees The Trees is knowing and bemused—“you have to live where the house lands on you”—in Paper Crown, it’s knowing and knowingly weary: “Every morning in the mirror / I say welcome back to my face. / We both made it through the night / with no major damage.” These poems live both at home and in an imagination saturated with nuclear war, mysterious glowing doors, perpetually replicating cups, and antennas on which one’s name bounces over one’s head. They will take you to remarkable and unexpected places. Then they’ll drop you back into a more enchanted but more unsettled version of your life.

The quintessential Heather Christle poem comes from a slippage on one of the fault lines of ordinary experience. In Paper Crown, these are often simple misconceptions. Take the poem “Mistake,” in which the speaker believes she sees dead animals on the side of the highway, but then realizes they’re

not dead animals

they are t shirts

or bits of blown tire

and I have found

myself with this

excess of grief

I have made with

no object to let

it spill over and

I have not known

where to put it or

keep it and then today

I thought I know

I can give it to you

I for one am more than willing to handle this speaker’s excess of grief. I’m moved by its discovery and its articulation. I now possess it uneasily, and who knows but I may even bequeath it to my heirs.

Similar occasions abound in Paper Crown. There is the poem “Eff,” in which the speaker grows sad when she learns the meaning of “ineffable” doesn’t involve, as she thought, some kind of hanging mist. There’s the poem where the speaker dreams her husband died, so she writes a dream elegy. There is another in which the speaker believes “There is a word for everything / I thought, but I was wrong / or else am wrong now, I cannot / tell . . .” In Paper Crown, imaginative preconception lends slippery, shifting feeling and significance to reality. Imagination, with all its bends and faults, is where we primarily live. It’s no accident that Wallace Stevens’s name is dropped; there is clearly a conversation happening about whether the imaginative animation of ordinary reality is entirely wonderful. To Stevens’s Romantic understanding of imagination, Christle adds its social baggage: its affects, terrors, wasted efforts, its tendency to afflict the imaginer. Uneasy lies the head that wears the paper crown.

This is not to contrast Christle’s writing with Stevens’s in stark terms. They start from the same place, “the nothing that is,” and they both understand imaginative labor as springing from and replying to it. Christle writes, “If you see something say nothing. / In reverse that would make you // Wallace Stevens.” If you see nothing, say something—this could serve as the beginning of a Christle manifesto. Her poems envelop and embellish voids. Take “Is This Happy Like Is a Happy Javelin Run Through Me.” The poem’s occasion is the speaker not knowing the names of half the plants in her garden, which leads her to consider her own name.

Because in the garden I don’t know

the names of half the plants

I don’t wear my own name either

and the white meat of me cooks pink.

Is a name meant to fit over or inside or

next to? I find when I do wear my name

it boings from my head on some kind

of antenna and our movements

are related but do not match.

The sun has burned into my back

the shape of a window and now

I can see through it to the sky.

The surrealism in this poem is the collection’s most delightful, in my opinion. Wallace Stevens could never. There are so many ways to understand “I can see through it,” each one stranger than the last, but somehow the line strains sense without breaking it. The voids that were summoned remain: The void of not knowing plants’ names, the one differentiating a name and the self it refers to—not to mention the running through of the “happy javelin,” an invention remarkable for its startling, apparently joyful violence. But how joyful? Look at it long enough, and this poem looks back with almost visceral anguish, its smile melting off its skull, gesturing urgently at Shakespeare’s Juliet clutching her “happy dagger.” More often than not, Christle’s poems sound serenely and surreally playful, but they do not neglect existential bass notes or the strange, dark, quintessentially poetic feeling of being out of place. The speaker in a different poem, “On a Walk,” also gets in the way of the sun, but there she reflects how sunbeams “traveled so far only for the lump of me / to get between them and the ground.” The surrealist gestures of the happy javelin and the window to the sky aren’t only there to amuse and delight with their wit and beauty, but to express an artistic and personal truth. Christle writes joyfully toward the void.

I hasten to add that Paper Crown is not all secret, buried anguish. Christle summons joyous voids as often as troubled ones. Take “Far-fetched vs. Far-flung,” a poem that catalogues the speaker’s private associations around 1920s European aesthetics. It’s framed with the lines

If a glowing door

were to appear in

the air would you

step through it and

out of your life?

and

If the glowing door

were to appear I’d

tell you all about it.

I would miss my life.

How sweet! How crushing! The trick this poem pulls off is to show where it came from and what it’s doing, while it’s doing it. The speaker has stepped through a glowing door, if not a series of them, as she recalls pretending to be a character in an old children’s book series; imagining getting lost in the Alps; and, shifting to the present day, buying potassium pills on Amazon in case of nuclear war “because I have / a great imagination.” The leaps and recollections are delightful, and, just as delightfully, Christle has brought us with her. Imagination, no matter how errant, wayward, or far-flung, allows for change—at least hypothetically, as the conditional hedge of “I would miss my life” suggests. For the record, though, I would follow Heather Christle through any mysterious glowing door she cared to conjure.