The Certain Body

In the title poem from Julia Guez’s second collection, The Certain Body, the speaker reflects on art by Vija Celmins that meticulously re-creates a stone and invites the viewer to judge its verisimilitude by setting it beside the original stone. In Guez’s words, the artist creates

[…] a canvas meant
to remember the real
thing, painted stones whose 
stoniness fix the image
in memory—

Pondering “the certain body” of the title, I’m struck by how widespread the theme of bodies is in contemporary American poetry, and what Guez says of the connection between writing and “gendered bodies, material // bodies, bodies in conflict,” including the speaker’s afflicted body during the pandemic, would be unexceptional if she stopped there. But she goes on to connect “body” to something effectively disembodied and uncertain: Celmins’s unreal stone that fixes an image in memory, or “shadows cast on the watery // surfaces of my mind by invisible fingers / whose energy is everything […]” Intriguingly, a disembodied embodiment appears central to Guez’s understanding of art, like the “shaping” from a poet’s debt to her predecessors:

If we write, we are in debt.
If we write, we owe.
This debt transverses all writing;

it shapes it. It gives it life.

If a few of her references to poets she admires, like Hannah Sullivan (“There is saying the same thing again in a different form”), fail to inspire Guez to say unexpected things in renewed forms, she possesses an eloquence of her own, an elegiacal cadence that resonates in accounts of life in New York City with the speaker’s wife and other loved ones, and in a delicate birthday piece, “Forty”:

All the purple flowers, 
the way they fall,
white and purple, falling. 
See how they turn
their skirts, turning their 
white and purple skirts, 
so that at least
they fall slowly, make
no sound, beginning soon 
to yellow then brown.