The Obsessions Remain: A Review of Rosmarie Waldrop's Selected Poems, Gap Gardening

Eric Dean Wilson writes about Gap Gardening, a new selected poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, for Music & Literature. "This volume, edited by Nikolai Duffy alongside the poet herself, offers selections from each of Waldrop’s seventeen collections of poetry, plus a verse section of her 'novel,' A Form / Of Taking / It All."

Much of Waldrop’s foundational work is out of print or rare, making this collection especially welcome as a primer, and this selection tethers that early work to the more recent and readily-found. In particular, the choice of earlier pieces offers either a lucid introduction to the objects orbited in the later books, or, perhaps, a curated look at her shift from fragmented lyric to prose poetry.

In his introduction, Duffy reminds us that “continuities, smooth transitions, tend to be false.” Within the poems themselves, this holds true; her chief tool is sharp juxtaposition. But it’s uncharacteristic of her work as a whole. One of the remarkable qualities of this selection, between books, is the effect of one smooth transition after another. Though the form evolves, the obsessions remain.

Her earliest poems establish the problem of the thinking body in space. The volume plunges into literal darkness with “Dark Octave,” from The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger (1972). The poet attempts to render the unseen:

To see darkness
the eye withdraws from light
in light
the darkness is invisible
the eye’s weakness
is no weakness of the light
but the eye
away from light
is eyeless
its power is not-seeing
and this not-seeing
sees the night

The poem “Between” digs the ubiquitous “gap” of the title, a trench that widens in each of Waldrop’s poems. Here, it’s physical displacement, the rift between Europe and America, here and there:

I’m not quite at home
on either side of the Atlantic
I’m not irritated the fish
kept me
a home makes you forget
unaware
where you are
unless you think you’d like
to be some other place
I can’t think I’d like to be
some other place
places are much the same

This is as personal as Waldrop gets, but the detail is worth emphasis. Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935 but emigrated to the States about twenty years later, where she’s lived since, pouring meaning from one language to another, culture to culture. Her work as translator, most notably in bringing the French writer Edmond Jabès into English, is crucial to her experience with language. In this respect, she is always “between” languages, negotiating sound and sense.

In this respect, too, she’s not unlike Einstein, also German-American, who fled Nazi Germany for New Jersey in 1933. This is, perhaps, a superficial and obvious comparison, but more striking similarities appear in concept: both are Copernicans, further removing human experience from the center of the universe; both are deeply suspicious of the established order, culturally, linguistically; and both seek to illuminate the unseen of the void.

Of course, “gap” is hardly “void.”

Hardly. Read on at Music & Literature.