A Shield against Time

Peter Gizzi’s latest collection sees the ‘I’ of the poems evolving, or at least talking about its putative evolutions, dissolutions and multiplicity. There’s a wilful attempt at being in the world, or even of slowly disappearing into it; the material of nature is unavoidable, the self porous. The result is a sort of funhouse mirror of reflection, at times: ‘Landscape is a made thing, / to see the mind seeing itself’; ‘The world is a veil. / Its effects total / the imagination’.

That ‘total’ speaks to some of what is most striking in the collection, Gizzi’s blending of registers, his bringing in at times of a slightly slangier, more casual, diction amid the philosophising (‘It was kinda real, and kinda not’). Here, and in a number of other places, it’s a welcome gear shift, puncturing what might otherwise be a too-grandiose solemnity, especially in the prose poem ‘Roxy Music’: ‘our girl asks for a poem; each week or so she says, where is my poem, you don’t write no more you sluggard; I say I don’t care… poetry don’t matter’. It doesn’t always have the desired effect, however, at times feeling strained for, even irksome. ‘Romanticism’ starts with wit, if a little archness, ‘Why not consider the squirrel / in its leafy surround? / It may be in a state / of impersonal grief / for all I know’ but descends into an arbitrary-seeming catalogue of quirkily disjointed phraselets: ‘All I see right now / is the world / playing air guitar’; ‘Yesterday I was holding / a gemstone key / but threw it into the sun / to make it impossible / to recognise ...