James Richardson, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms
(Ausable Press, 2004), pbk, 280pp., $11.00.

      It is easy to see why some would call James Richardson a “nature poet”; not only do his poems, and especially his early ones, draw on fairly common images and the phenomena of the physical world, he also shows a likeably human relationship to his environment, the kind we tend to imagine Wordsworth had—this work is feeling and respectful, written very much from open-minded observation and experience. However, it is also easy to see why Richardson writes, in “Afterword” (a prose piece included in this Selected), that “nature poet” is “a term I detest.” The moniker does smack of tenderheartedness, a blowsy descriptiveness that prefers atmosphere to rigorous analysis, and even a flaky sort of mysticism. For Richardson is not tenderhearted (he is sometimes unforgiving) or romantically atmospheric (his playfulness is exact, almost academic)—nor, most importantly, does he have the sureness of a visionary. His is neither a self-absorbed nor a unifying vision: he doesn’t use what he sees to make something of himself, and he doesn’t let his self melt entire into what it is he sees. Instead, he stands in weird and admirable balance with the world, trying to understand, as he writes in the poem that opens this Selected, how, in the image of a flock of starlings landing all together, “something senseless, even selfish, absurdly magnified / becomes grandeur….”

     Even so, these are nature poems—at least in so far as they ground, often with a great deal of visual and musical brio, the poet’s epistemological speculations in the here-and-now. Formally and imagistically, these poems are often beautiful, but they are not virtuostic artifacts, written after the fact. Tracing the process of a mind trying to make sense of what it sees, or has seen, they are natural in technique as well as in image. In this way, Richardson is a formalist who doesn’t quite read like one. His voice, steady, considered, truthful and attentive, seems as wary of shapeless extravagance as it does of the circumscriptions of an overadherence to design.

     And this attraction to and wariness with design seems to be his main concern: design’s reach, its various correspondences, as well as our ability to know it and understand it. He articulates the slipperiest of thoughts with an amazing precision of analogy: “…oh you you / who are a galaxy that has never heard of you, / as words have never heard of a beautiful line / or the beautiful line of its explanation” (“How Things Are”), the same precision he uses to try to “read” the mysterious observable facts around him, as in the echoey closing segment of “For the Birds” (a poem on bird’s birdsongs) “Is this the end   the end / one says / one says / no this is   this is.”  It must be said, though, that some of these early poems, written for the most part in the gentlest of the lyrical present tense, are so unencumbered, so undisrupted by the jingle-jangle of a life outside of the sense-making mind that they feel almost determinedly modest, sealed. The shorter lined poems, then, often work better to my ear—the prickliness of their rhythms roughs up the lack of emphasis one sometimes finds in the longer-lined poems (a phenomenon that his newest work with aphorisms tackles in provocative and successful ways). One of the most immediately appealing of these early poems, “Post-Romantic,” puts his idiomatic tendencies to work with a more smiling wryness than he shows elsewhere, no less intent on their study of grey area than the others, but tonally, linguistically, emotionally, more popped into focus. Beginning “Now that it’s over / between me and Nature / I like her better,” its second stanza (of three) reads:

          Just hanging on, but trim,
          surprising, capable,
          she shows, towards evening,
          some of the old flashes.
          If her solitudes,
          amazed and kind,
          can’t be mine,
          or her gaze of waters
          stirs others,
          no harm done.
          She’s on her own.

Here, Richardson does not overwork the poem’s conceit; its middle aged melancholy, its learnedness, its gentle off-rhymes—even the joke of its title—has a lightness of touch that another poet might mangle with the application of too much effort or too much heat.

     Moreover, it is, in a poem like this, the personality of the poet’s thought that comes through, not the personality of the poet himself. Much of the contemporary poetry that specializes in the ambiguous feels like coded confession, its metaphysics just a fancy way of working out personal—and often, for the reader, inscrutable—obsessions: what is at stake in such work can be irritatingly, and pretentiously, kept just out of reach. Not so for Richardson, whose attentiveness towards his subject is sincere. His work reminds us that there is a virtue in old fashioned self-effacement—or at least in the attempt at it. Richardson’s poetry is metaphysics administered carefully and knowingly; it does not degenerate into endless mirror-play pretending at profundity, or into flourishy effervescence.

     One could argue, of course, that Richardson’s sense of slight remove, along with his formal nuancing, bespeaks a certain privilege, a kind of noblesse oblige that can afford to be quiet, unobtrusive, even “traditional,” in the face of what it observes. However, there is also a strange hint of dissatisfaction in most of Richardson’s work, and it is to the advantage of his poetry’s tonal subtlety that these moments neither take over nor are smoothed completely away—nor can be entirely pinned down. His early work is pleasing, but not always as pointed as it could be—yet there is something admirably truthful about the way he balances the natural echoes, pauses and parentheticals of his thinking with little flashes of pithy wisdom. His ideas, though gentle in demeanor, feel genuinely hard won.

     To my mind, though, Richardson’s most exciting work is his most recent. His newest poems and his work from Vectors (2001), both of which constitute the last half of this Selected, are partly made up of what he calls “aphorisms and ten second essays,” single-line and often one-sentence poems with a risky (and sometimes deceptive) air of generalization. These poems are simultaneously looser and more distilled than the early work, which on occasion risks fading into the shadows of its own thoughtfulness. With this new form, he pushes himself out of the old habits of the meditative follow-through, and isolates the very ambiguity at the heart of his desire to make a sensible (in both senses of the word) observation.

     Of the aphorisms (there are more than 500 here) all are thought-provoking in their articulation of the subtlest difference—“Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says I do not have to”—but the best are unforgiving, even a little scary, despite their sure and placid surface: “Your lie is white only if you’re sure you won’t come to believe it.” The plainness of their packaging belies the unplumbed loneliness they often describe: “I only like being the center of the universe when no one else is there.” Tonally, they seem prosy, but their use of figurative language gives them a resonance that is neither paraphrasable nor entirely soluble: “The chorus fills what the soloist has emptied.” Like Frost’s most famous lines, quotable and ripe for misinterpretation, Richardson’s have an air of serviceability, though the actual service their wisdom provides is sometimes knotty, paradoxical, ambiguous: “The lonelier the road, the more creatures you startle.” “The despair of the blank page: it is so full.” At first glance, these seem recognizably simple and true; reread, they gain mystery and echoes. Here, Richardson’s natural lack of inflection is put to what could be its best use; combined with an extreme brevity, it gives these declarations a weird authority, an air of quiet testiness.

     These poems, then, are an experiment with durability and resonance. They do not sting like La Rouchfoucauld’s clunky and cynical maxims; nor are they willowy art objects, built to be admired. They are wise, worthwhile. But they also call into question the precise function that “general truth” has in poetry, caught as it necessarily is in specific, figural, and ever-shifting time. Richardson’s work, even if boiled down to something that looks like a quip, still maintains the thinking mind’s essential ambivalence, and this, I would argue, is what most gives these tiny poems their affecting and provocative quality. Richardson’s formalism is far more thoughtful than most of that in contemporary poetry, where it often manifests as something more concerned with formatting, or slavish and almost unintentionally ironical. But this is a formalism which never falls into glibness or virtuosity, and is highly attuned to the dangers of self-satisfied declaiming. The best of his work opens up an idea rather than shutting it down: “Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method,” he writes, beautifully if not methodically. Here is a poet who seems to know these temptations, both those of nature and those of art, intimately, but who will not allow either to overpower the sense-making impulse of his remarkable mind.

                                                                               — Lizzie Hutton