The City

On the stage: a room-sized Camera Obscura. 
The audience gets in. 

         Instead of a moon, a hole. 

Stav Poleg, in her debut collection, The City, constructs rooms, buildings, and cities full of bicycles, herons, espresso, smoke, and rain, which she animates, while also describing the process of setting her unruly characters in motion. Her work recalls Wallace Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry,” in which the poet uses the metaphor of theater to describe “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice,” where the poem must “construct a new stage” and then perform, or “be on that stage.”

In Poleg’s poems, the theater of imagination is a cinema and the poet draws repeatedly on the schema of film, with the word camera—which derives from the Latin “camera obscura,” meaning “dark chamber”—recurring throughout this collection. Poleg uses poems as chambers in which to stage her curious visions and meditations, which she intersperses with phrases from French and Italian and plentiful references to art, literature, and, of course, film. In “Two Pictures of a Rose in the Dark,” Poleg draws on work by Wittgenstein and Fellini as she considers the “image as opposed to the idea of a rose”:

            […] The moon, a blue rose
on the city’s backstage. A note for the night: the stage is a motor running language as play. In the beginning there was the camera— 

a chamber of air. The night leading out of my camera
has taken me here […]

The poems often feel like a high-wire act, careening through intricate scenery in a tone by turns playful and lonely. Poleg delights in language as creative material, nowhere more so than in the funny, philosophical poem, “Saturday,” in which she speaks in the voice of a foul-mouthed God who, on the first day of rest, contemplates the creation of the world:

Hell, yes. 

Let there be Light 
a fine example 

of how syntax drives 
action—a personal high

as writer-director—an empirical 
study in minimalism and 

Whoa! Bang!