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Acclaim for Joshua Auerbach's Radius of Light, now available from DC Books.
Joshua Auerbach's Radius of Light , a nominee for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for a first book, is a nice contrast to the two veterans. Everything here, even the title, says this is poetry, and that here, words are never to be treated as ordinary, but as luminous sparks against the darkness. The poems are precocious, excited, smart, deliberately elusive at times and hyper-aware of sound as well as meaning.
Take the first poem, "Slant of Light", and how its charged lines slide indirectly into its subject of illness:
Jaundiced is the note that sings out in terror When life denies the presence of light. Day shines And light pours like a slant of God's rays. Here in The moment, away from traffic and distractions, Your cells metastasize.
This poem, like the others, reads well aloud, with its sharp consonants and subtle cadences. The heart of the book is the sort-of love poem, "Love in the Time of Dioxin", whose shorter and less ornate lines show an admirable restraint.
Radius of Light is sprinkled with miracles - small ones, to be sure, but that will be more than enough to bring me back to this book.
- The MontrealGazette
*****
Joshua Auerbach's excellent book has a miscellaneous quality that is not uncommon in first collections. It contains travel poems, translations (mostly from Paul Éluard, but Rilke and Lorca are here too), satires, love poems, and landscapes. His diction is remarkably fresh and precise: he is sensitive not only to words but to syllables, to the sonic qualities of every phoneme. In "Spirit Intrusion: Herniated Disc," a poem informed by John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV," we can hear the grinding of the vertebrae in his use of consonants, two kinds of articulation. In the sequel, "Spirit Intrusion II," he explicitly links bone images and the "clash and grind" of sounds like "k," "d," and "t." He has several poems that use damaged bones and joints to suggest spiritual anguish. Like John Donne in T.S. Eliot's "Whispers of Immortality," Auerbach knows "the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton." Two outstanding poems are "Love in the Time of Dioxin," a look at romance in a toxic and brutal world where lovers feel more anguish than rapture, and "Love in the Time of Dioxin II," an excruciating account of a woman undergoing a tattoo. These poems are not gratuitously brutal, but they leave marks. The poisoning of earth and air is a theme in "New Breed," a poem that sketches a world filled with carcinogens, where the new breeds are likely to be two-headed frogs and hermaphroditic toads. Not everything here is written in the shadow of apocalypse. There are travel poems about Armenia and Barcelona, and closer to home, views of the East End of Montreal and the Gatineau Hills, and even a panoramic view from a Cessna. The translations of Paul Éluard are graceful little lyrics. But the startling originality of the book lies in its edgy confrontations: the human in a perilous landscape, the spirit struggling with bodily pain. Radius of Light is a fine debut.
- Montreal Review of Books
*****
Radius of Light is an incandescent book, marked by intense lyricism and probing intelligence and manifesting a confident knowledge of poetic tradition.
- Jurors' Comments for the A. M. Klein Award for Poetry
*****
Joshua Auerbach is the editor of Vallum, a Montreal-based poetry magazine for which I serve as an honorary patron. Having admitted that personal tie, I also need to say that his first full-length collection of poems, Radius of Light (DC Books, $16.95), is estimable, and praise from Canadian poets Stephanie Bolster and A.F. Moritz offers further evidence, as do kudos from British novelist D.M. Thomas and critic John Kinsella.
Auerbach's poetry follows a particular Montreal tradition that combines philosophical / spiritual musing, painterly imagery and expansive vocabulary, borrowing terminologies from various lexicons. Think A.M. Klein, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton and Erin Moure (who lived for a while in Montreal ), not to mention Bolster, and you have the background for Auerbach's poetics.
See "Herniated Disc". The lyric's title comes from medicine but its rhetoric is an imagistic rendering of the word "supine": "the edge of scalpel, / The osteopath's blunt manipulations. I know / The angle of the sky, flat on the ground / Drugged, as waves of cloud pass by. . . . " The series of descriptions includes "the lopsidedness / Of a wolf in some other skin" — a surrealist moment.
The poem concludes by moving back into the surgery, so to speak: "Supine is marrow, digs into the coccyx. / Supine waits & cannot stand." But the last line hurtles us into the scriptural: "Supine grimps along, stung by the eyes of angels." That's the kind of move one sees in Layton or Cohen. Possibly too, Auerbach is channelling 2004 U.S. Poetry Pulitzer Prize-winner Franz Wright, who he has published.
But the tracing of genealogies aside, Auerbach is exciting for his skilled use of the right words — chosen from whatever dictionary is most applicable for the moment.
Try "Blow of Hammers": "you with your visions / 'hammers' // dark blows hitting skin // your bones withstand steel /your face contorts / you pour salt around the pentagram // to hear your arrhythmic heart beating / (suicide pacts) // there is no comfort / relief is a word / & the blows leave marks // malignancy in the bruises."
The unexpected words — "pentagram," "arrhythmic," "(suicide pacts)", and "malignancy" — play nicely against the others illustrating the impact of metal on skin. Such verbal surprise keeps a poem riveting.
Also appreciable is Auerbach's clear-eyed treatment of nature, showing us both itself and humanity's interventions, as in "Harvest": "In an open field / crates of apples. . . . // Roots draw up to ground / junk-metals thrown // into the river, near the mountain / with steel mills on its base."
Radius of Light is a very fine debut, one bearing witness to the poet's sense of discipline, encyclopedic mind, and writerly — to coin a term — revelry in literature.
- George Elliott Clarke, writing for Halifax Chronicle-Herald, June 29, 2008.
*****
Stride Magazine: 'To locate a center, walk in circles'
Radius of Light, Joshua Auerbach (78 pp, $16.95, DC Books,Montreal)
It feels inappropriate to wax lyrical about a first collection that comprises such taut, spare poems throughout, but in a sense that's my job here: so I'll try to evoke the compressed power of this book in some way. 'Radius of Light' is not an easy book to read, despite the apparent accessibility of its briefest pieces. It does, however, get under your skin, and create reaction, whether irritation, painful insight, or a sudden sunlit shaft of euphoria. Like the opening of 'Bee's Edge', 'it stings/ & stings deep'. This visceral response, reactions felt in the veins or the bones, are of perennial concern to Auerbach. And bees are quite a presence too, and echoing the uneasy processes of poetic creativity:
I spiral by petals
Beware of my razor point
My proboscis dips &
Pulls our primrose nectar
I sink farther into pollen, my legs covered with granules
Then on to the next iridescent blossom
('Dance of the Arrogant Bee')
Corporeality, landscape and language are all profoundly connected in the poems. To take the body first, poems such as 'Concinnity' look at the cellular origins of both physicality and phrasing: 'Axons & dendrites: a body's sentence.//Cells, the red-basalt churn of sound deep within a/ Barrier'. The system – linguistic or physiological - admits of slips and dissolution: 'Words break down, discs rearrange themselves/ To forge a deeper mine'. Language and humanity both are forged from creative tensions, Auerbach seems to suggest here: the 'cell sounds' that 'clash in the electron rush' with which this poem concludes.
But the scope of this collection extends beyond the body to the earth itself, both deep structure and specific location. 'Earth Marks' evokes the earth as primal poet itself:
basalt, slate
torc-curves of glacial
moraine-lines drawn
from the core
alluvial-flow, stonemason
the surface that erodes...
water cascade pushes
slowly into the forest bed
morass, butte, carved
and scored by a needle, slow, planet lines
I'm reminded of the tattooist's needle which scores its text directly onto the body: 'cuts with a drill's precision/ injects ink near veins' ('Love in the Time of Dioxin II').
Also, tangentially, of Basil Bunting: 'Words are too light/ take a chisel to write': the heaviness of poetry that taps into our global core.
Auerbach is not merely an ecologically informed poet, however. Body and landscape can merge, a perfectly unremarkable trope in itself of course, except here it is more frequently done with disturbing imagery than peaceful pastoral: 'cracked earth-ribs vault open...ore spilt, veins ripped/ crimson pockets of a tobacconist's dream' ('Reading the River from a Cessna'). The more you read 'Radius of Light', the more apparent it becomes that there is an apocalyptic vein in Auerbach's body of work; it pulses uncomfortably and more often than not heralds dissolution of conciousness, white-out, oblivion on a personal and perhaps massive scale too. This reaches a kind of climax in the central poems 'Reflection' ('Will it be black? I will not know/ But I don't want to be dust/ burned in a fire') and 'When the Door Opens': 'In the heat, white lines glow,/ Grow wide or shrink/ Or fuse into the distance').
Reference to 'the Door' here, together with allusions to 'lysergic/ and dopamine-induced/ Visions, swirling circles' inevitably indicates homage to Huxley's 'Doors of Perception' and its hallucinogenic exploration of the worlds beyond everyday consciousness. And there is indeed an hallucinatory shade to many of Auerbach's poems, quite explicitly in the psychedelic 'Phanerothyme' (the word indicates a drug induced mystical experience). This poem comprises a series of stanzas laid out as prose, unlike the spare lineation of the majority of the poems. There is a splitting and reforming of consciousness here, a shamanistic intrusion into other planes; an uncertain return:
If he shook your hand, would you know if it's him, or his double?
The meeting of minds melts the fractal space, reverberates through
iron. After blitzing wildly like an elk, he dreamt of her face in the light,
the cave, and the shadows. He stirred the wind with stars, against the
backdrop of a cloudy sea.
Heady stuff. And not to say that such barging into the presence of God offers much by way of an answer: 'He tries to find the missing link. If there is a way, it would seem to be through theories of the Absurd'. Theories that don't necessarily have to be explored through the use of pharmaceuticals, perhaps. The unpromising sounding 'Herniated Disc' for instance, suggests, along with other poems, that mundance physical incapacity affords space for meditation: 'I know vanishing/ Points, the way light splits into dark then back/ If you stare at it too long.' 'The Spider' offers a similar perspective:
...As I lie on my back, sundered,
unable to lift, the world revolves.
Invisible center up above, a point
recedes into nothingness. The weight of matter.
Is there a nothingness waiting behind the fractured façade of language; nothing else? 'Tears close the wind's mouth/ And nothing is heard but weeping' as Auerbach's translation of Lorca's 'Casida del llanto' concludes (there are some lovely, eloquent translations in this collection, incidentally). Interestingly, if Auerbach's volume ends with oblivion, it is a strangely passionate state and one which might just necessitate a rereading of the previous poems in the light of its reflected flare – more ambiguous than purely nihilistic; more mystical than conventionally romantic:
Always, you say, & draw near the sun,
the steady progress
of our hands across each other.
You search for the center.
Continue till you are my body & I
your source
('Drawing Near the Sun')
An experience of communion rather than an Icarus-like fall - though with what and at what cost is left for the reader to decide.
- Sarah Law
*****
Joshua Auerbach's Radius of Light fuses lyrical grace and often searing insights with the almost clinical precision of that modern tradition which favors the fewest possible words, each in the most effective place. The startling result is something like a mosaic which is alive and flowing in service of a severe but generous vision. We hear echoes of classical China and of Zen poetry, of the imagists, of W.W.E. Ross and Margaret Avison, of Pierre Reverdy and Paul Celan and Pillippe Jaccottet - echoes which Auerbach welcomes into a voice which is wholly contemporary and his own.
The poems are calm and omni-observant in their loving survey of a world that is remote and intimate, brutal and beautiful, eloquent yes seemingly indecipherable: "night fills with dust / or could it be supernal light". They are remarkable for their discovery of depth and resonant mystery within realistic detail. Auerbach's view is as unflinching as his lines are terse; he speaks of "our engraving / marks made in flesh & wood / reminders of the trail / without bread or salves" and makes no compromise in delineating the difficulties of our natural existence, and the brutality and self-delusion we ourselves contribute. But his hope is unfailing too: "again we gather dust, / fashion a house from frost".
A reader will long remember the accent as well as the import of flinty, beautiful poems like "Fire Quotas," "Catalan," and the paired "New Breed" and "Bring the Rain On," the first with its angry satire and the second with its seismographic, almost mute transcription of subtle communications from the earth. Finally, the poems of Radius of Light are most remarkable not for their great precision and unremitting clarity but for the powerful acceptance and readiness they maintain:
Come morning,
we gather our charnel grief
& look, through open windows
A. F. Moritz has written fifteen books of poetry, and has been honoured with the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the Jack McClelland Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto.
*****
Joshua Auerbach's Radius of Light is a "Karmic-payoff". Growth in 'nature' is played against the endgame of human 'progress'. Auerbach's rich language is a conceit for itself — his often stunning insights into the substance of things remind us of the artificiality of language, and the subjectivity of observation and experience. His work presents a paradox: language is liberating but also imprisoning. These poems don't so much offer answers, as offer the soul behind the soul. Learned, political, these poems are vistas of "self-animated" words that entrap us in the poetic moment — in their depth and complexity we are left wondering, , though always with a "will to preserve", a will to persist against the odds.These poems don't so much offer answers, as offer the soul behind the soul. Learned, political, these poems are vistas of "self-animated" words that entrap us in the poetic moment — in their depth and complexity we are left wondering, Furthermore, his wonder at the "natural" world, and his moments of experience, resonate long after reading. A brilliantly unusual book with its own vocabulary of line and intimacy with the reader, with the self, with personal pronouns that amplify into the multitude.
John Kinsella is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. He is the editor of Salt and international editor of The Kenyon Review. A fellow of Cambridge University, England, Kinsella teaches at Kenyon College, USA. He is senior poetry critic with The Observer newspaper and WW Norton released his Selected Poems in 2003.
*****
“The voice in these poems resonates with power and conviction, as the poems themselves exemplify considerable technical sophistication; they are subtle and refined and manage to be at once elemental and precise... a considerable achievement.”
Stephanie Bolster, winner of Governor General’s Award for Poetry
*****
“Joshua Auerbach’s poetry reminds me of Eliot’s phrase ‘At the still point of the turning world’. Auerbach has a gift for penetrating through the noisy superficialities of life to the stillness and mystery at its heart. He employs language sincerely and sensitively.”
D. M. Thomas, poet and novelist, author of The White Hotel
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