Portland, OR: Octopus Books, 2019. 112 pages. $16.95.
At the 2018 AWP Conference in Tampa, Mary Ruefle delivered a talk on tone titled “Hell’s Bells.” There she reflects, “When I asked poets under the age of fifty what tone was (in a poem) they all said more or less it was the contextual inflection or attitude that helped determine meaning in a poem.” And poets over fifty “all said more or less that tone was a presence that was helplessly itself.” Without setting up an evaluative construct, Ruefle gestures at what time may do to a poet’s relationship to tone. Calculation—as in consulting a recipe for fish, she later suggests—dissolves into near-instinctual action: throwing the fish in a pan and cooking it. Tone, not devoid of rhetorical significance, may be an inextricable part of the act of the poem, the same way weather is part of the day, of time. It may affect mood, sure. And it can be analyzed. But for Ruefle, it seems, how tone suggests itself is more interesting, emerging from and suffusing the poem’s language. One cannot escape tone. Once a word is spoken or written, a tone reverberates, and how far that tone reaches and how it interacts with an environment is a variable matter. Its presence rumbles out from every center, like bells of neighboring towns tolling, like weather systems colliding and dispersing.
For Bill Carty in his debut collection, Huge Cloudy, the weather is as helplessly present as tone. The ships, water, quality of light, and clouds of the Pacific Northwest might offer atmosphere, an image system to riff on, and a setting that rewards literary discourses like critical geographies, ecocriticism, poetics of the everyday, or thing theory (rethinking relationships to objects, to a boat or bell, say). Fog swallows, wind battles heat, rain roils the sea, clouds mimic other clouds, “rain plumps the country up,” “trick snow . . . changes as it falls” and “melts to change again,” cattle kneel in a storm, “caliginous green clouds” appear underwater, “sun / solicits each filament” of hair and draws a moth to them, wind fells a cypress, “rain pelts early tomatoes / from the vine,” and “a little sun shines on / a weathered tin of pemmican / beneath the oak where / the metro driver pisses.” Instances of weather and light function not only as mere description here. Though perhaps incidental, in surrounding humans and objects, weather and light clarify behavior.
At weather’s mercy but also impacting it, the speaker measures people against weather and climate. Bandied about by late-capitalist routine, the speaker says, “I was having things, / then having to have them.” This oxymoronic fortune and burden of possession is a weight that amounts to a loss: “so I felt that loss / leave me. A hot-air / balloon” as lightness becomes not absence but another possession now rising, “Yes, a balloon. / Lightness is what I lost. / It couldn’t have been anything else.” The layers of this metaphor also complicate how we relate to atmosphere, by analogy and production. These poems often attend to human influence. “We must revise / the ship we sail in,” the poem “Happyish” says, at once treating the earth as a human-made vessel and admitting error. Considering a celery boat recipe and its insistence that “a boat / is anything we can breathe / through,” the speaker pauses to note water’s presence in vegetables, water in air, and the corrosive nature of air or breath. “It’s near constant, our breathing,” the poem laments, “which is why we hoard these / plastic bags, totems to / a change in fortune,” as if plastic’s nonbiodegradability signals a hope for our own immortality. A dread lifts into humor or delight and dips again, like barometric pressure, in Huge Cloudy. Observation of the everyday—replacing parts of a handed-down axe until it becomes yours, a man sitting on steps where a sign reads “No Sitting On The Steps” and giving the middle finger, flags outside a VFW—suggests larger figurative meaning as well as complexities of perception, time, and the nature of attention somewhat reminiscent of James Schuyler. Arguably, poetry is a record of attention. Whereas a child, let’s say, with an audience may moan and “take that moaning as far / as is profitable” because “There’s no despair // like inattention,” the earth’s moaning is not theatrical or profit-based. Carty’s poems want to pay it due attention.
It seems, though, some just try to avoid immediate destruction; postponement, waiting for the weather to change, seems to suffice. Minute weather fluctuations, however, can distract from climate. In the poem “Troublesome Pilot,” its title referencing a note tacked to a stove, the speaker charts predictions and responses to pattern. The unpunctuated, double-spaced poem hinges on modifiers and barrels forward from its O’Hara-Berrigan-like time-stamped opening:
Here I am 11:23 AM
half hour before
the senator will announce
her disappointing position
finger to the wind
I guess or age
much goes sideways
within an age
comfort becomes
a certain couch
or faith
a trust in what
the digital model augurs
effects of sea rise
on the least tern
the pattern of the great
auk egg is gone
tides won’t watch us
until we look away
The notion that tides will watch us—or that we may want them to—suggests diagnostic need beyond comfort. And the passage builds, ebbs. Its language alternates between the diaristic and chiseled sound, with assonance and slant rhyme guiding the reader across line breaks that stitch and split grammar. This delicate crafting is common in the collection. Carty approaches the edges of epiphany without falling into didacticism.
Many poems’ final lines offer understated insight. Watching from a ferry as a parade passes a cemetery, holding a handrail strap to keep from tipping over, the speaker wonders, “What else am I doing? / What am I pretending / to do while doing it?” In another section of that long poem, “Aurora,” the speaker eavesdrops on a mother and daughter practicing interview questions: “That’s not a real weakness, / says the mother. / Tell me a real weakness.” Such vulnerability, especially when surrounded by danger, the absurd, and raw beauty, is striking. These poems push into moments of heightened stakes, emotion, and clarity. At a wedding, the couple’s first dance “looks like an aquarium. Some elms / catch all the light. I press to the edge. There’s no edge.” The simile seems abandoned for subsequent observation and action but finds explanation there. Again, environment becomes inextricable from and beyond the human. Elsewhere, the black string of a “magenta tetragonal lattice kite” released in the sky stands out as starkly as the way “we only know each other / by a thread, but we love that thread.” This human connection is as fleeting as the soaring kite string then. Regardless, we try:
we are enlarged
as Shelley said
by a sympathy
when the impulse is
to recoil.
Carty does not recoil. He gathers variety into his poems. He strikes a balance between the easeful conversational and intricately sonic, embracing the private and public’s overlap, admitting both the (post-)pastoral and (sub)urban, traversing a lot of ground. Formal variation and differences in linguistic density are also notable characteristics of the collection. His range and capacity for image, music, metaphor, feeling, and thought stand beyond poetic movements and discrete devices. It reminds me of Ruefle’s comments on tone: he puts the fish in the pan and cooks it. And his particular voice—playful but never glib, perspicacious but not self-serious—emanates naturally from each decision and turn, bringing itself into being. Huge Cloudy is a remarkable example of nuance and calibration of language. Even its title illustrates this. It truncates and pokes at the grandiosity of Keats’s lines, “When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.” Carty’s titular poem’s line break—“October means huge cloudy / days”—remakes the adjectival coupling, tonally elastic and bright.
Like tone, weather reacts to the past, determines the present (whether a natural disaster or blissfully sweaty afternoon picnic), and accumulates force with markers of the future. It is not instinctual exactly, but in part learned. It is not pure accident, but contingent on circumstances, seemingly inevitable but delicate. Like Carty’s tone. A distant meteorological system. The bell of an old village too many miles away to hear, ringing. It’s as if Carty can hear it. I thank him for that.