Djelloul Marbrook

Every admired poet instills in us a unique effect. Sometimes we’re compelled to analyze the rhetoric, to probe a poem’s workings, to x-ray it. Sometimes we bathe in afterglow. Sometimes we wander among capriccios or think of other arts.

As I read F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Neck of the World I thought of certain painters who would have been familiar with the poet’s country, not just his natural world but his interior world. The fifty-seven poems in this award-winning collection have such a distinct interiority that we understand implicitly that they only seem to be about the natural world but are in fact about everything we are capable of apprehending.

Poets almost always push this particular envelope. A culture relies on them to do this for it. A society relies on its poets to explore the outer limits of its collective sensibility, and whether the poet is a rapper or a professor makes little difference in this light.

These columnar and cylindrical poems often remind me of water spouts, snow dervishes and streams shimmering under snowmelt. They turn around upon themselves with breathtaking speed and economy. One is never halted; the effect is to feel

F. Daniel Rzicznek

compelled to start over again to make sure we’ve been where we think we’ve been. Rzicznek has little interest in bringing readers up short for effect or inviting them to consider something. He’s not that kind of poet. He’s more like the sort of person you enjoy taking long walks with because he doesn’t talk too much.

The title poem, which unlike many of the poems, is stanzaic, reveals this momentum. Watch this enjambment of the first line:

The dim aubades of pears
release, echo around the tree.
While eating, thoughts motion
out ahead in the day’s reserve:

You’re tempted to linger and savor the first line, because it’s lovely, but the poem swings around back on itself and hurries you along. The same thing happens in the last two lines:

A watery daughter I hadn’t
dared imagine pleads goodbye.

You want to stop to consider the watery daughter, but the poem moves you on to yet another surprise, and then another. You hadn’t dared imagined her, and now she’s pleading goodbye, just like the poems themselves: watery daughters pleading goodbye almost before you had imagined them. This is so remarkable precisely because it’s so unobtrusive.

A good poet can get away with a certain amount of pretension and even affectation in a good cause, but there’s no evidence this poet even thinks about it. This may be why I think of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s famous Ville d’Avray series when I read this book. There is something of the shimmer of a copse of aspens that Corot is determined to arrest, the heat of a summer day. He returns to the scene again and again, but each time he captures something different. The light is still silvern, but something, someone has moved, or the artist has changed his position. In most of these poems I get the impression that each sensibility is not so much an impression caught on the fly as the distillation of a series of contemplations.

There is also the fey impendingness and storm light of Salomon van Ruysdael and Meindert Hobbema, the Dutch landscapists, in these poems, and the wan light of a Thomas Eakins sculling scene.

A poem is not unlike a painting in its intent. It can, for instance, slow-walk a reader at a considered pace, inviting him to visit certain aspects of the work, or it can hurry the reader in order to convey a certain overriding impulse. Rzicznek doesn’t hurry the reader, but he sets a brisk pace, often by his deployment of breakages but more often by the mercurial nature of the poetic line itself; and yet his is a mercurial line that carries the reader rather than slipping away from the reader.

In the poetics here, the shape of these meditations, I see the pen and ink and color washes the Eighteenth Century draftsmen brought to graphite drawings, cajoling the viewers’ perception, suggesting not only what to notice but when to notice it and leaving a great deal to be savored over time. That’s part of the charm of such drawings; they have a great deal of respect for the viewers’ time and acuity. They’re never loud or showy, the exact virtue Rzicznek’s poems share with them.

His work is more formalist than it seems at first glance. With such a disciplined observer of the natural world, it’s not surprising. Observation is discipline. If on shipboard watch you must scan the horizon, not absently cherry-pick it. These poems are the constructs of a seasoned observer.

Some poetry has the effect of seeming to have said something definitively. This kind of poetry is likely to draw immediate attention to itself, not always an admirable quality. But the poems here often finish their work before the reader is aware of something having been deftly said, and it’s this quality I find exciting. They’re not poems like the blonde cheerleader who wears the circle pin; they’re like the exquisite beauty who occasionally takes her glasses off and sees you—yes, you—across the room. For that reason it’s fortunate Alice Quinn was the judge when this work was submitted to the May Swenson Contest at Utah State University. Quinn’s years as poetry editor of The New Yorker undoubtedly accustomed her to the dangers of overlooking such subtle and understated work in the midst of showier poems.

Poets from Ezra Pound to Charles Olson challenged the hold of typography on the look of a poem, the placement of words and lines on a page. Why should each line begin at the left? they asked. Why capitalization? asked e.e. cummings. Aren’t these mere conventions? Yes, they are, but since a poem must have a shape, these conventions in themselves need not limit it. One must throw a convention out the window for a purpose, not in a tantrum, not for the sake of attracting attention, and each poet has his purpose. For Rzicznek formality doesn’t impede his poems; in fact it gives him an opportunity to fashion poems within poems so that in time his reader becomes aware that what seems to be going on with the page is not the whole of what is going on; there is in fact a poem within the poem, and it is this interior, secret poem with which the reader finds himself wholly engaged. —DM