Charles Durning Carroll

Poetry Review

Mercury

by Phillis Levin

Damn the reviewer’s objectivity; Phillis Levin is a friend of mine. As so often in these situations, it turned out we had someone in common—a Canadian expatriate photographer living in Italy. Last summer, as I lay naked soaking up the sun in Sardinia, this photographer said that she knew a poet called Phillis Levin, who was living in Rome for a year. Somehow I knew the name, and as I racked my sun-addled brain, I recalled that a year earlier I had heard her read at KGB Bar. She was tall and slim, with skin white as a new tooth. She quoted philosophers and as I remember had some knowledge of the classics. But quoting is not a sign of anything; any moron can quote. Still, I had thought her poetry quite good; she was interested in ideas, always an auspicious sign. I met her in Rome. She swept down the stairs like a winged Greek goddess, and I was sure at the time I was in love. Still, as I spent time with her, I found something very nineteenth-century about her. She seemed gaunt yet oddly sensual; she reminded me of how one might imagine Emily Dickinson, with the same austerity; though with a quite different kind of poetry.

My life at that time was at a critical juncture. I was in love with an Italian woman and I wondered why I was so attracted to Europe and to this woman. Phillis urged me to write about my conundrum. I did it, and felt better. On my last day in Rome we went to see a fabulous Sebastiano Salgado photography show. We saw so many suffering faces in those pictures, so many lives unlike our own silly, privileged ones. I found Phillis remarkable that day. Of course, I returned to New York and left Phillis behind. She was working on an anthology, about sonnets I believe. That was in August. Now it’s April, and Phillis’s new book Mercury has just come out from Penguin. It’s a deceptive book: many of the poems seem light, almost frail. Often they speak quietly. Yet like a silk curtain, what they reveal is often shadowy. The whole substance of the poems is often discovered only by parting the curtain, by carefully penetrating the surface of the words.

I like poems about ideas. There’s a reason for this. Most poems for me are too personal or too sweet; they’re rehashings of bad nature poems or transcribed sessions from a visit with the therapist. Sometimes, as with Ashbery and a few others, the poems can avoid ideas yet still be terrific, as if some light were shining through them. But most poets throw words around with little sense of direction or of purpose. They want to discuss an experience, but they structure that experience in an entirely personal way and fail to create any shared elements. Phillis’s work is altogether different. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t like everything she does. But Mercury is definitely a buy and hold. Her work here is as clear as winter rain puddles, and as quiet as breakfast with a hermit.

One of the nice qualities of her work, is that it bears rereading. A poem which at first blush has one meaning, turns out to also have another meaning. It is these multiple levels of signifying that makes Mercury interesting. Take for example, the opening poem “Part.” On the surface this appears to be essentially a definitional poem. Phillis looks at the multitude of things the word part means. It would seem at first that this poem is a purely analytical study of a word. Yet note the word she has chosen: part. Phillis says: Also a piece, a section, as in/Part of me is here, part of me/Is missing, an essential portion… Now the poem begins to look like either an examination of the poet’s psychology, or a love poem. The very fact that both are possible is a testament to the poem’s complexity. Perhaps they are equally true: her lover has left her because some essential part of her is missing; she misses love, yet cannot love because she is somehow incomplete.

This conflict between intimacy and closeness on one hand and analytical distance on the other seems to be a recurring part of Mercury. In the poem “Conversation in an Empty Room” she sets forth an imaginary dialogue, but without quotations or any obvious sign that the speaker has changed. We might assume it’s a true dialogue, but it may also be the internal dialogue we all carry on inside our heads. Again, it’s important to look at the title: logically speaking a room remains empty until someone enters it. So logically, if anything is happening in an empty room, it is no longer empty. The conversation then, it at once there and not there, in the room and not. This kind of contradiction again plays with the idea of a connection with an other that is somehow faulty, or fatally flawed, so that the conversation that should have taken place, never quite does.“Mercury,” the title poem of the collection, seems equally concerned with parting and joining. Mercury, as anyone knows who has seen it rolling about a surface has, because of its relatively high specific gravity, a tendency to form little balls like liquid ball-bearings. Beyond this, mercury can split and rejoin almost infinitely without any external signs of disturbance; it simply reforms into its liquid ball-bearing shape. Unlike the human heart, it can merge and be sundered without damage or effect. Though Phillis’s poem here is rather more personal, and so to my mind less powerful than other poems in the collection, still she finds in the experience of disturbing the element a powerful metaphor for the contradictions of her own condition.

The last poem “A Meditation on A and The” though perhaps not directly about her, still carries forth the duality she has established between distance and closeness. Phillis shows how our use of articles influences how we think. A she notes is only used for singulars whereas the is used both for singulars and plurals. She also deftly notes how intimacy is bound up with the; we talk about “a chair,” in the abstract, but a particular chair that we sit in becomes “the chair.” Even more intimate she slyly suggests, and “the chair” becomes “thee chair”. These to my mind are the most elegant poems in the collection: they push me to reconsider my world view; they alter, even if slightly, my perspective on the world. Unfortunately, many of the poems in the middle seem like filler. They are the kind of sweet personal history poems that everyone writes and many seem to love. But the purpose of a poem is not to reveal the poet’s soul, but to push the mind to light. When Phillis holds strongly to ideas and to abstract principles she can work wonders.

At the launch party for the book, a very beautiful woman said to me: “If you have to question whether something is beautiful, then it is beautiful.” And what if I’m sure it is beautiful, like Phillis’s book; what then?

C. Durning Carroll