Civil Service

Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service is a hybrid debut incorporating deceptively simple line drawings of geometric shapes whose meaning evolves along with the accompanying verses. The interplay between sketch and text in the opening poem takes on increasing significance as a single line becomes a square (“Is this a town square or a cell?” the poet asks), becomes a rectangle, becomes two rectangles set at an angle (and we are informed that “The spine of the book is I”), joining more lines (“Is this a house or a cell?”) until we are presented with the evocative outline of a milk carton (“The children are missing / Can you see their faces here?”).

Each of the six sections that follow open with an “Interrogation Room” with line drawings and stage directions (“[Amira sits at the table. Her back does not touch the chair.]”) drawing the reader in as witness to the interrogation of a woman named Amira (“Now Amira is a part of you. // You are responsible for Amira”), whose answers and actions lurk in the margins in right-justified grey text:

She releases the names to the wind.
The wind churns the names to pigment,
carries the colors off ...

Elsewhere, workers identified only by their bureaucratic professions—for example, Archivist, Stenographer, Censor—are observed by a removed speaker who highlights the impossibility of avoiding complicity, the inevitability of finding oneself among those “who brunched about thread count” while violence rages on.

While I normally bristle at self-reflexive poems concerned with the efficacy of the craft, part of Schwartz’s undertaking here is to dissect the role of language in empire and, in so doing, to consider poetry’s ability to communicate directly with the reader and keep them from turning away: “A poem is a line cast into the distance.” This metatextual contemplation is built into Civil Service’s core strategy so elegantly that I soon stopped resisting and allowed myself to be drawn in:

Because you needed a fence to limit your loneliness.
Because haunting needed a form.