Writings / Reviews: E. Martin Nolan

Certainly, the impressive restraint on display in Doom creates some very nice sonic moments (“eyes/are emerldine/and answer,” “all flesh becomes sheath”) that are brought out by the semantic and grammatical gaps Walschots’ tight prosodic grip imposes. But while the poet can count on the reader to fight through much of the opaqueness those gaps create, and to relish the resulting lyrical punch, that fight can at times become too much of burden on the reader, and is at times not worth it. Such is the case in “Shock Therapy:”

This poem is found in the “Arkham Asylum” sequence, and its companions there are equally evasive. Here’s the end of “Patient File,” which opens the sequence:

There are words I recognize in both of these poems, and I can sense a lunatic-asylum vibe the from list in “Shock Therapy,” and the non-description in “Patient File,” but these poems produce vague associations at best, and non-sense at worst. For instance, what could “giggles swigs” possibly mean, and how do you heal “elliptical”? The proceeding two stanzas of “Patient File” offer nothing to clarify, although we do learn that the patient “sobs articular,” whatever that means. In the end, it’s not clear what the reader is supposed to with “Arkham Asylum.” There’s not enough there to paint any kind of scene or situation, as you can in “Ore” (discussed above). Elsewhere in the book the poems gain a musical advantage when stripped of their clarity, but in “Patient File,” Walscotts writes, “she craves an orcular cavity/aqueous always humorous.” These lines tell us nothing, and do so clumsily.

That said, “Arkham Asylum” is not representative of the book, only of a strain that runs through it. This strain refuses to let any air in, threatening to suffocate the poems. If Walscott is playing dominatrix to her poems here, she at times can take it too far, so that it’s slightly sickening to watch the poems writhe in the agony of their subjugation. Again, you can argue this matches the material: after all, Walschots does describe, in “Beetle,” “your bulk in my lungs/tinkering/with my frequencies.” But when Walschots  cracks the window open just a bit, that rush of air can be quite refreshing. Here is “Master Antagonist” from the “Darkseid” sequence:

Still not very clear here, but this poem is clear enough that we can imagine, for instance, that “iron sings” refers to the ecstatic clasping of restraints, and that the final line does some kind of summing up. Then there is the musical advantage that is had at the expense of the purposeful vagueness: the “i” sound rings throughout (“licked,” “lips,” “clink,” “link,” “sings,” “fists,” “grip”) and the dynamic sound companioning that’s happening here is made to stand out all the more because there are 20 words in the whole poem and seven of them are mono-syllables with an “i” in the middle. But while they all share that sound, only two form perfect rhymes. That’s nice use of repetition and variation, with both happening in a very compressed space (within one syllable) at the same time: each repetition of “i” is coupled with the slanting effect of the differing sounds surrounding that letter.

All told, Walschots has given us an often impressive, entertaining and evocative book. Some will certainly be turned off by the tightly constrained lines, but for those not bothered by this, Doom might very well get you going. It’s the kind of book you dip in and out of; it’s not necessary to read it straight through. Doom is also a welcome foray, especially for the lyric poem, into unfamiliar (for poetry) yet common (for everyone) and deep territory. That content-based novelty does not excuse Walschots’ occasional over-constraining of the line and sentence, which can come off as gimmicky and give the reader the sense that she’s copping out (obscurity can be so easy), but that overworking is more than balanced out by the book’s genuine poetic achievements. It’s also just cool that she wrote a whole book about supervillains, one that at its best lends a fresh perspective to the global pop phenomenon that is comic books, while only occasionally losing the fun inherent to that form.

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