On Land of Fire by Mario Chard

North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2018. 88 pages. $17.95.

To account for the astonishing choral force of Mario Chard’s haunted and hallowing debut is perhaps first of all to observe how his poems’ ostensible subjects—exile; immigration; family and fatherhood; gendered violence; masculinity; the magic and the perils of efficacious speech—return again and again to one single enveloping obsession, what we might simply call, pressed for a phrase, the pathos of return itself. Land of Fire is a book that steps forward to assume the responsibility of witness only by an anxious, continual falling back toward the unspeakable wounds at its center.

These returns are many in kind. There’s the return to the poet’s mother’s homeland, Argentina, where Land of Fire translates Tierra del Fuego into a dreamscape of sustaining mythic power, an end of the mind at “the end of the world.” Then there are those more impossible returns to an innocence shattered by violence, by human rage and error, by accidents small—a shirked chore, a bungled translation—and utterly catastrophic, as in “Caballero,” the book’s centerpiece, an elegy for eight undocumented immigrants crosscut with a Spanish-language lesson for the speaker’s son (the lesson, or one of them: even language bears the trace of deepest wrongs, but it’s all we’ve got). Finally, Chard confronts us with the painful return of what a nation willfully and guiltily casts away from itself, makes distant across borders, as well as the return of what’s made distant across those borders drawn by time, what we, Orpheus-like, can’t help turning back to with regret—“last strain of loss / and its resistance.”

This radical brand of regret Chard picks up from Milton’s Paradise Lost, another poem of exiles and outcasts. But Chard is wise to the surviving enchantments of disenchantment, too, and so the work of mourning undertaken in Land of Fire comes fueled by its awed celebration of a world made stranger in its fallenness.

In the book’s epigraph, Chard’s excerpted Milton reminds us that while the apple “darkened” the minds of Adam and Eve, it also left their eyes “opened.” Opened, Chard insists, to the sacredness of small gestures: mowing cemetery grass, repairing a son’s picture book, a father shyly “pull[ing] sleeve to wrist” to hide a lesion from his children, the simple questions that somehow seem to call the full world’s hurt to account: “What would the prison cook who made the rapist’s last meal cook finally for himself?” “The Fall” rewrites Paradise Lost by way of a wife’s hiking accident; the fateful snap of a serpentine hiking stick is followed by another fatherly lesson on gravity and one’s private revolutions:

That morning when I took our sons
outside, made each hold
the corners of a sheet
and pull it taut

to teach what I learned young
of gravity and constant fall,
in that moment
when they watched a heavy ball

sink down a star
into the bed sheet’s heart,
pull lesser weights toward it
in a curve, I thought

I saw you naked underneath,
alone, but now the swollen veins
had made your bruise a sun
to other wounds and other men.

Besides Milton, the other great poetic wind fanning Land of Fire is Robert Frost, whose measure—iambs tensing stripped speech for its “sentence sounds”—Chard exploits with care. And like Frost, this poet courts the mysteries of parable, that mode of speech that offers meaning precisely by withholding it, crib and cipher both, turning away from the world so as to return to it. “Renditions,” for example, is a poem concerned ultimately with the surrender of personhood under the intolerable pressures of forced interrogation—or so one might surmise, because this harrowing indictment wears the guise of an innocuous Q & A that begins by asking “How did the bird get inside the house?” and then delivers up its terror only obliquely:

. . . Who named the bird?
A child. A child named it.
The bird is nameless. Who named the bird?
I said No one. The bird is nameless.
What is your name? they said.
I am nameless I said.
Yes they said.

If elsewhere Land of Fire assumes the ancient lyric prerogative of restoring “sacred names” to the unclaimed or forgotten—to a childhood playmate, say, or a mother’s first love, or a life cut tragically short—Chard is also alert to the duplicity of language. In another poem on the brutal rhetorics bodied forth in torture, “Coax,” the waterboarder speaks as the poet a poet hopes never to be:

. . . When I coaxed my enemy
to speak with water,

when I showed how the uncoaxed thing
behaves, it was always language
I was after. Names.

Throughout Land of Fire the scrim of parable allows Chard to warn off those who would too eagerly impress their own motivated meanings, or bring their own prefab language to the task of witness. “Don’t make a story of it,” concludes “Callus,” rebuking our readerly attempts to make narrative sense—any kind of sense—of an unimaginable violence the poem can merely imply.

I can’t convey the thrill of Chard’s achievement without emphasizing how this obsession with modes of impossible return encompasses, too, the formal returns that lend these poems their uncommon fugal intelligence—I mean the tolling, recursive structures of refrain and rhyme around which the poems unfurl with an improbable surety that is distinctly Chard’s own. “We make a thing we marvel / and learn to worry,” he begins the book, speaking for parents, yes, but no less for poets; the burden of poetic making is here manifested as that kind of “worry” familiar to blues singers, who will “worry” a repeated line by ringing on it subtle changes. And so these poems are worried into being, as Frost said poems couldn’t be, their anxious refrains drawing language tight around the losses at their guarded centers, like an aural knot, like a mouth around a secret. Consider the anguished echolalia of “Machismo,” surely one of the collection’s standouts:

Refugio from Mexico is not Mexico,
nor is every man who makes other men small
in the convex mirror of his buckle

Refugio, who turned his daughter gold
in the mirror of his own—this last world unknowable
to Refugio—the night he carried her out of Mexico

before the war to give her Mexico
before the war, before a man named refuge
in his native tongue could be hung from an overpass in the sun

for something smaller than his buckle:
the figures of the men unmade inside it,
the thousands vanished in its glass.

Across stanzas, across poems, across the book as a whole, Chard revolves around and renews a deliberately restricted palette of sound and image, which, like the coin of a realm we’ll never visit, is meant to return us to the capriciousness and injustice (but also the world-making wonder) of our own. Land of Fire isn’t a book-length poem—its finely turned lyrics are too portable, too made-to-travel on the ritual tongue—but the coordinated effect finds each piece complexly interwoven with its others, catching and mirroring back their light. It’s a book to be read in full. It’s a light we probably need.