Kimberly Grey’s “Investigation 46,” “Investigation 17,” “Investigation 15,” “Investigation 12,” “Investigation 9,” and “Investigation 3” appear in the Spring 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review.
It’s a touching moment in Camera Lucida: there, with an old photograph in his hand, Roland Barthes carefully examines his mother as a young girl in a winter garden, reflecting on her image sometime after her passing. “My grief wanted a just image,” he writes, “an image which would be both justice and accuracy—justesse: just an image, but a just image” (70; emphasis in the original).[1] Barthes’s invocation of the just image gestures toward the authenticityof an unrepeatable moment and highlights a longing for an intimate, yet absent, subject. There is, indeed, a sense of fatality and nonexistence—and of division, too—in the photograph upon which he gazes (see Barthes 70). Barthes, we find, grapples for “the impossible science of the unique being,” whose afterlife in the image haunts the viewer (71; emphasis in the original). And so for Barthes, this old image of this young girl exposes the punctum; that is, the wound, the prick, the bruise that arises from a personal detail, one imbued with affect for him-as-receptor alone.
I can see the vibrant connection between Barthes’s reflections on photography and Kimberly Grey’s “Investigation” series, which similarly calls us to occupy the position not of readers but of open witnesses, who must gaze upon a poem with scientific precision. For Grey, the prose poem imposes its own frame much like a photograph; it accurately captures a moment but not necessarily that moment’s memory. This sequence is replete with stunning lineated pricks: “I flip language under itself to illuminate everything reversed: the sun coming, found afternoons, berries the color of the sun—which has no memory” (“Investigation 3”). Elsewhere Grey wonders, “Perhaps the photograph is something I love because it is the last moment of a moment” (“Investigation 12”). The poet demonstrates the profound intensities of observation: “I found you where the bow split and rings of time ridged themselves into the seafloor” (“Investigation 17”). These poems are crisp with peculiar detail even if time has abstracted their subjects into ambiguity.
Throughout this sequence, Grey’s poems seem to confess the tension between the private utopic moment, which they refuse to supress, and the public space of spectatorship. Grey navigates this tension with lyrical singularity:
The softest part of you was your earlobe (this I remember) and if I were to zoom in on it, I’d be able to represent vulnerability as skin. But if I chose not to do this, not to frame it for a spectator to see, would it remain (in perpetuity) mine? (“Investigation 12”)
As Grey notes, this spectatorship exists at the global scale—as in the lonely last moment of the Titan submersible, which imploded in June 2023 (“Investigation 17”)—and on the local terrain, where the poem’s observer witnesses the poignant theater of a solitary spider: “When I realize the reality of my spectatorship I stop, but the spider is gone, and there is no evidence, except in my mind, that she and I existed at all” (“Investigation 46”). Here we might question the stakes of observation: What does the poem fail to capture? What, then, remains in memory?
I fell in love with these prose poems: the poem-as-photograph calls us to observe the buoyant movements between the lyric and absence, the private and the public, what is hidden in the murk and what these art forms might illuminate. Indeed, there is a beauty to these prose poems that show us both the light and the darkness. In the end, we must hold up these poems to the light; we must watch them develop. The subtlety of their grain reveals their gentle music to us.
[1] Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
