{"id":572,"date":"2017-06-14T13:56:28","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T13:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&amp;p=572"},"modified":"2017-06-14T13:56:28","modified_gmt":"2017-06-14T13:56:28","slug":"invitations-to-linger","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/invitations-to-linger\/","title":{"rendered":"Invitations to Linger"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Infinite Altars: Poems<\/em> by James Brasfield<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong>LSU Press, 2016<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong>92 pages, paper, $17.95<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-573\" src=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2017\/06\/Brasfield-James-Infinite-Altars-cover.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"144\" height=\"223\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In an age submerged by torrents of evanescent information, the poems in James Brasfield\u2019s second book, <em>Infinite Altars<\/em>, extend invitations to linger that prove a pleasure to accept. The collection has at its heart an instinctive patience, asking of its readers a corresponding willingness not just to witness or overhear, but to engage in the construction and accumulation of meditative insight. That responsive participation constitutes the most valuable (and these days, somewhat unusual) pleasure of lyric poetry, which Brasfield\u2019s book offers generously throughout.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<pre>                                                             From our<\/pre>\n<pre>seeing more closely, always more closely\nin our extreme attention, light\u2019s angles and subtle shade,\na recognition comes, this for the first time always\u2014\nsuch presence, hidden from plain sight, emerges,\nas though it trusted our seeing\u2014...\n\n<\/pre>\n<p>These lines from \u201cHomage to Piero Della Francesca\u201d in the book\u2019s vividly pictorial opening section could be understood as a motto for the entire collection\u2019s acts of attention, which consistently draw what Hopkins called inscapes out of their hiding places in ordinary experience. The volume\u2019s opening poem, \u201cNorthern Bay,\u201d gently turns its detailed landscape vision indoors and inward: \u201cDiamond glints coming in, wind-driven, \/ a rhythm like rows of woodgrain \/ through a plank table&#8230;,\u201d deftly evoking the life lived in \u201ca room \/ arrayed with what\u2019s been salvaged from a tide: \/ what a hand reached for, what remains.\u201d\u00a0 The lyric strategies Brasfield explores are various: painterly meditations on the act of perception (\u201cWindow Frame\u201d), delightful symbolist impersonations, as of a snail in \u201cThe Night of Daydream,\u201d the gently mythic and allusive \u201cMap,\u201d and a lovely homage (\u201cThe Magic Gardener\u201d) to Stanley Kunitz, one of Brasfield\u2019s teachers and a presiding, one might say permission-giving spirit for the collection as a whole. The sensibility informing these poems thus establishes itself as trustworthily ambitious, refusing merely performative gestures, while premising a range of subject and approach that\u2019s amply fulfilled by the book\u2019s succeeding two sections.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If the book\u2019s opening portion invites us to experience the evolution of perception toward illumination in language gently, slyly, honestly aware of its own interposition between what it presents and who perceives it, the middle section features pieces more various in their subjects and development. \u00a0Daringly long, cinematic sentences still find their inherently apt pacing enhanced by Brasfield\u2019s excellent instinct for line, but the range of tone broadens, and several of the poems pay discreet homage to canonical American voices. \u00a0A gentle resonance of Hart Crane informs \u201cBrooklyn to Menatay,\u201d in which a train ride fosters access to the original inhabitation of this continent. \u201cThe Incorporation\u201d recalls surviving factory work with a wonderment reminiscent of Philip Levine, and \u201cStandard Time\u201d meditates on the provisioning of firewood in manner that brings to mind Robert Frost and perhaps Richard Hugo. Brasfield closes this section of the book with an affectionate, evocative elegy for his long-widowed mother, \u201cAfternoons Into Evenings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The elegiac tones established in that section\u2019s closing poem gently suffuse this beautifully crafted book\u2019s final third. Haunting poems such as \u201cDemopolis\u201d (a portrait of Brasfield\u2019s grandmother), \u201cStray Stone,\u201d and \u201cDaylight Ghosts\u201d have the courage of their mystery, of their moods and intimations. \u00a0The social, the familial, the solitary aspects of experience all find expression here. Often in this culminating portion of the book, place and memory find each other out, penetrating experience to discover imaginative obligations, as in these lines from the poem \u201cSoundings\u201d:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<pre>                                   Despite\na shell held to my ear,\n\nthere is no sound to memory\u2014\n only remembrance, how-it-was-heard,\n\nas in the museum I saw de Kooning\u2019s\n <em>Screams of Children Come from Seagulls.<\/em>\n\nSeeing it, I heard them again.<\/pre>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If a book of poems is indeed, as Wallace Stevens once opined, \u201ca damned serious affair,\u201d obligated to sing essences back into experience, it\u2019s heartening to read Brasfield\u2019s, so firmly rooted in its variety of \u00a0impulse and settings, from Kiev to Brooklyn to Savannah, and so convinced of the value of patient, reverent attention, and its potentially exalting pleasures:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<pre>...a lark singing\n and you barefoot, standing in the celestial\n solitude of your identities\u2014all around you\n silence has sung light into song.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Infinite Altars: Poems by James Brasfield<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":574,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[269,270,271],"class_list":["post-572","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-infinite-altars","tag-james-brasfield","tag-poems"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - 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