Occasions for Poetry: A Review of Joseph J. Capista’s Intrusive Beauty
I love this book of poems and its wild sensibility that tide pools, street violence, a vase of flowers that should have been thrown away, an osprey with its prey, teaching, fatherhood, a 19th century photograph, a crossing-guard at an elementary school, all are occasions for poetry. I appreciate that the poet looks in equal measure out at the wide world and in toward his private corner. When I was studying poetry, I was taught that in some poems, every word and phrase are like bricks in a wall—if one can be moved, the poem isn’t done. Strong walls with secure bricks—this is what a reader finds in this fine first book.
The first poem, “Telescope” is an invitation to the reader to join him. The opening couplet tells the reader look through the same telescope as the speaker. What follows is a list of what the speaker sees shifting in a delightful kaleidoscopic way. The egret turns into a cloud and more clouds, which is like the sand, then like the waves, then like shells and farther out a freighter. At the heart, where according to Gregory Orr, we come closest to a meeting between chaos and order, a poet has many choices to make including how to position himself in his own poem and this speaker, one might say, keeps his distance, but I’d add that by doing so, does the opposite. The heart of the poem occurs when the speaker looks at the egret and then at a freighter that is
farther out
Than one might ever hope
To swim, especially you
The distance that seems impossible to cross could signify any goal, artistic or otherwise, and what endears me is that the speaker tries to be distant from his fear of failure and fails. He accomplishes this via his chose of pronouns: first third-person, “one might ever hope” and then second person “especially you,” where “you” is really an aching “I”. I love this modulation and that there is no “I” in this poem, yet all we need to know is here. The self-restraint makes this listener lean in to hear.
The poem “Thaw” has a different structure. Rather than kaleidoscopic images that bear down on a private moment, the poem braids together two narratives: a moment among Baltimore’s poorest residents and a moment in a married couple’s life. The couple drives through the city watching workers perform yearly spring chores I think of as medieval; collecting the dead from mounds of snow. After the couple reaches home, an argument ensues, and the poem ends with an achingly beautiful image. In the middle, literally of the poem, the speaker sees a “drifter” who is walking through three lanes of traffic and thinks that maybe he is
conducting a rush hour
motet his ears alone could hear.
He waved. I almost waved right back.
No matter how bleak, in the middle of it all, the speaker is ready to wave, to offer and receive the smallest solace from wherever it might come. It is stunning.
“History of the Inevitable” is like a wine that begins sweet with a bitter aftertaste, an effect Capista is able to create because of the formal constraints he plays by. The poem begins funny and ends poignant. It also employs a gorgeous list, this time, more fanciful, and it too tries to create distance between the speaker and the heart of the matter; it seems to me the speaker of this poem pulls out all the stops to contain his feelings, and that makes it all the more moving. This time, instead of his pronoun choice creating distance, the tool he uses is his choice of words. The title is regal and odd—it’s impossible to write a history of the inevitable—the scope is too vague and unending, and perhaps the poet intends to suggest that the desire to do so creates one more item for this impossible history book; the title seems ironic, which is a distancing strategy to manage the emotional temperature, which all wonderfully collapses as the poem takes its turn inward. The poem begins:
Fire wants to be ash, which, wants
a bucket to hold it with unseeping certainty.
The bucket wants to look like the moon,
which it does some nights, while the moon
wants to be the storefront window, full
of something.
These images are surreal and childlike sequence, yet also stunning: that fire wants to turn to ash is devastating—who doesn’t want “unseeping certainty”? I feel for the moon. The entrance of Mainstreet into the poem surprises, yet who doesn’t window shop and dream? Instead of the Latinate word “longing, the poet uses a Germanic word want three times in the first three stanzas. For all kinds of reasons, a Germanic word places the emotion inside the ribcage rather than in the mind. Then the poem gradually returns to more Latinate words (long, boughs, propel) to prepare us, to distance us, before the last couplet and the heart of the poem. A feeling of being conflicted, I read once, Freud introduced to us in a non-religious context in the word ambivalent. That is, before he gave us this word, I read, people didn’t think much about this internal split or if they thought about it, it was in a religious context. Here the speaker feels pulled in two directions between, well, I assume between his poetry and the demands of the world. To my reading, the speaker distances from the feeling by his use of diction. The final item in the sequence is a man in repose wondering “how he will ever go to his desire when / the universe so needs his tending hand.” There is no “I” in this poem or “you” understood as “I” but a poem full of feeling non the less.
Another way to look at these poems is that they navigate the sacred and secular, sometimes with wit and sometimes with prayer and often with both. “Devotional of Daily Apprehension” is eighteen tercets. The title suggests a page from a Book of Days, a daily reading to calm an agitated mind, to put one’s mind on God. With archaic diction and inverted syntax, the poem’s first line, “When at dawn, I set forth to find the bell resounding,” repeats sixteen times, suggesting many things: a ringing bell, urgency, prayer. I think it is gorgeous. The poem begins:
When at dawn I set forth to find the bell resounding
Through unclouded air I find myself beside the tide pool
Anemones, exquisite predators enamored of a world.
The religious overtones are Judaic-Christian in tone, but not content—the speaker is not looking for God of any of the versions of the Bible, the speaker is looking at “exquisite predators enamored of the world.” Isn’t this wonderful, this oxymoron—and it resonates with many poems in the book. In each tercet the speaker finds himself somewhere new. The diction is religious in tone; the subject matter is earth bound. As lyrical, meditative, prayerful as this poem is, it is anchored by place: the speaker is looking at a tide pool by the ocean at the beginning and in the last stanza “wakes up” still by the sea. In between, the poem tumbles from world to world like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. The final image, what an image, soars:
When at dawn I set forth to find the bell resounding
I come to on the dune and if to bend’s to ache O
these swallows how they ache supreme in flight.
These are formal poems. The collection includes sonnets, villanelles, pantoums and blank verse; I’m pretty sure there isn’t a free verse poem among this collection. Capista employs all the tools of creating melodic lines in his poems. These are poems of the ear more than the eye. The musicality of the lines allows these poems to play cords—they juxtapose what is said with how it is said again and again and again. One last comment on prosody: the first poem of the book “Telescope” discussed earlier that invites the reader to come along, it uses a capital letter at the beginning of each line which seems a practice of yesteryear, and it seems to me that by doing this in the first poem, Capista is signaling that he has his mind on poetry’s past as well as on his own good verse.
The variety of subject matter, the formal constraints, the way the poet positions himself within the poems, the way the poems look out at the world and find an occasion for poetry in the most unexpected places and lastly, the images—a look at Capista’s images is worth another essay—all makes this a terrifically satisfying book. Did I mention that these poems contain echoes of poets who have past—the more I read them, the more I hear their guiding hand.
