Static & Snow
Brian Henry
Black Ocean, 2015
Softcover / 104 p. / Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-939568-12-0
14.95
“The River of Color Buried”: Brian Henry’s Static and Snow, Reviewed by Laura Carter
What is the wreath of the day? one might ask upon reading the epigraph of Brian Henry’s latest book with Black Ocean, Static and Snow. He begins his book with a quote from Basil Bunting: “Day is wreathed in what summer lost.” The book itself invokes these images, something like winter, a seasonal book, so to speak. These are musical poems, too, that evoke the song that Henry begins his book with:
We trumple the muck,
through the lumpen
summer muck, tracked
by an angry grackle’s
grace note: it strangles
our stride, our stricken,
sickly stride, static
in that string of song.
But is this temporary winter a winter of irony, as structural critics like Northrop Frye would have us believe? Possibly. In “First Snow,” Henry writes that “Who among us / is alive / a temporary ailment.” There is a pensive quality to the book’s music, and we are loiterers, moving through some type of penitent space, perhaps, as winter becomes most glaring, gloating, odd. There seems to be a stickiness here, and the images of river and of standing in it (repeated throughout the book) evoke a sense of not really having a body, or of being less aware of one’s body, as Henry writes: “The body, my dear, counts / for so little—nothing, really—here.” I’m reminded of that Neil Young song from his earlier years, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” when Henry writes: “The river does not move, / it goes. It goes nowhere, / from nowhere to nowhere.” There’s a sense of emptiness, a mirrored world that Black Ocean’s poets capture well, at times. Here’s the first stanza, or little poem, of “Winter View”:
Sometimes I face the sky.
Sometimes I face
first in the snow.
No horse to guide
or pull me out
of, no horse to ride.
Dawn comes to he
who’s stuck in place.
Dawn comes.
We can easily read this, I think, as a critique of mediated culture, or of the antennae of the floating world, as other poets have done. Henry uses repetitive phrases to make his critique even clearer, talking of “feverdust absentia,” and of “splendor floe,” and of “bacterial regalia.” We get the clearest vision of this critique in the following lines: “The body is a money pit / for the soul.” So while we have these short, usually abbreviated (or truncated) lines making sense of what ice would look like, we get the exhaustive effect of something that is purely bathetic—bathetic in the sense that we see what utter irony looks like, but also made of something pure and interior. The sense the reader gets is of feeling this as a question—what does one make of this snow?
Henry writes of “plastic weight,” and it’s something unlike what I’ve read before.
The plastic has weight
and is real. The plastic
has substance. The substance
has texture. The plastic exists
through texture. Forms arise
and recede, advance with color
and recede. Tactile plastic
pleasure, the eye traces,
moves with what moves.
Plastic motion, plastic journey.
What is this plastic? One thinks of the smoothness of a credit card, or some other version of plasticity that makes us realize that the plastic is that which can’t move, at least not in real life. He gets at the heart of the story with this stanza, which I think describes how the plastic is itself a kind of terror, if only we could see it that way:
Beauty distorts, is
a distortion. Terror,
too, distorts.
The plastic message.
He writes, adeptly, of this icicled world, where only a few seem to see it as pure or lacking nothing. But he also highlights the hollow at the interior of this world. There is a sense in which this book wants to evoke the political, but it does it craftily. Here’s another stanza, from “Brittle Travel”:
Welcome
to the present
private
disaster.
Every thing
a scatter-
shot
bargain.
Your spot
is secure.
I think of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the modern person who stays in his or her home, as a modern-day anti-hero, this hero of irony. This book reads an a deep indictment of the position it critiques, and there is within it much to recommend it, as you have seen. From the condemnatory last couple of lines (“you static // you snow”) to the terse lines and images of severe desolation that compel it forward, Henry sings a song that is deeply moving, pure and all-of-the-same-piece. I think this may be what he was after, but it’s impossible to know entirely. Unless one backs away from the snow, entirely. Or does something to subvert it, as he has done here, and done well. Kudos.
Laura Carter lives and teaches in Atlanta, where she finished her MFA a while back. Poems have appeared widely in print and online. She has a chapbook (her seventh) coming out with WonderRoot/Loose Change in 2016, Dear Angelou, based on a Van Morrison song with a slightly different spelling. She has two cats.