Djelloul Marbrook

(Human Dark With Sugar, Brenda Shaughnessy, Copper Canyon Press, 77 pp, $15)

Anyone who has ever watched—observed—a dragonfly alight on a leaf will appreciate Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems. The difference between the poems in her second book, Human Dark With Sugar, and my own poems or those of any number of poets whose work I read is the difference between plunk and alight, not that there’s anything wrong with plunk, but the ability to make words hover like hummingbirds and dragonflies is cause for celebration:

This planet spins so it shouldn’t be so hot.
You’ve never felt the sun

on me. And nothing will fall with the exact
weight of itself until you do.

When I study her poems—hummingbirds and dragonflies—I experience a kind of ecstatic aggravation because there is nothing quite like the electrifying, itchy whir that enables them to so improbably stand in air. There is an incomparable energy, a celestial anxiety.

A scientist would see the variations in styles of the bird and the dragonfly, whereas I see the similarities, and yet reading this work I do see the variations—this wing slightly injured, this creature prone to approach and fall back, this one certain of its flight plot.

The poet’s subjects and prosody are restless. They are about the roil, toil and small triumphs with which we observe our lives—grief, comebacks, comeuppance, disappointments, recognitions, apostrophes. She is as visual and she is aural—she cares how her poems take up positions on the page, deploy their frontiers and their reconnaissances, not as an expressionist painter might, but more as a cubist: there are blocs of light and shadows.
Ms. Shaughnessy’s poems often say, See, this is how I do this, which is not to say that their seams show but rather that there aren’t any tricks, any bacterial creases or shell games. The poems are what they say they are, and so I read them quickly and assuredly—and then go back and read them again because I’m amazed that they carried me along so swiftly. I’ve forgotten to breathe, just the feeling I get watching dragonflies and hummingbirds.

She is a poet of improbabilities, sometimes impossibilities, a dangerous person for her scalpel-like acuity. We like to think of poets as magisterial, avuncular, sexy, lyrical, wry, funny—anything but dangerous in, say, the way Arthur Rimbaud is, and yet dangerous is what poets should be. They should endanger our way of seeing and reacting. They should upset our apple carts. They should be horrific experiences: if they don’t kill us, they make us stronger. We can enjoy a poem, a body of poems, sure we can, but to be harrowed and changed by them is better, if not everyone’s cup of tea.
Ordinarily a reviewer cites more examples than I have. I am tempted for example to quote from Shaughnessy’s exquisite A Poet’s Poem about writing with an icicle, but it feels like sacrilege. These poems are not meant to be talked about, because they are such transformative actions themselves.

If you’d read this kind of poet, no, this particular poet, and then met her, you might well suspect she knows something about your underwear and the way you smell in the presence of certain people and situations. You might be inclined to fear not that she knows too much but that she can say what she knows in a way that will block your way back to that comfortable place you were in before ever she laid eyes on you. And this is the effect of her poetry; there is no way back from it. This is uh-oh poetry. You’re not meant to lounge around it.

The poet’s first book is Interior with Sudden Joy. Human Dark With Sugar is the winner of the James Laughlin Award of the American Academy of Poets. It should win more prizes.—DM