John High

The goal of a quest is often return: in John High’s A Book of Unknowing, a mute girl and a one-eyed boy move through a war-marked landscape, orphaned and adopted and orphaned anew. They seek to return not to pre-lapsarian purity but to the vivid articulation of “a brilliance of green across meadow in this / day when we find so much arrangement in myriad trees. Coming to terms with fine / bladed yellow grass” (99). That is, aware that “in order / to get out we have to go through / language,” the characters in High’s poetic sequence “come to terms” with the hardy arrangements underlying innocence and loss. Traveling the “wounded way / back to our beginning” (116), they return to an advanced childhood in which they parent themselves and forgive all, having found “how / a question might endure alive internal workings / in mutual air moving / toward a quiet believing and awe” (111). This arrival is gorgeous, paradisiacal without the Billy Graham bromides of Beatrice browbeating Dante and that pilgrim’s attendant forgetting of earth. Rather, this arrival remains committed to the world High has been at pains to show, in which “sometimes what / we live in order to affirm / a truth” brings us ashore with scarred clarity. The book’s singular language permits its culminating vision, and High’s breathless neuro-cinematic syntax unifies his story and ideas. Yet the ambitious content at which High arrives is more than a linguistic effect: it shows a place not just made of the book’s guiding questions but made for them to continue in, allowing his readers, as well as his characters, to recover and retain “a sense of awe & condolence” (129). This sense makes the larger questions one may have about poems — why even read? what do you do upon finishing a thrilling volume? — part of the work; it investigates them expansively rather than whittling them away in a perfection of posture. As a result, as in this untitled verse from A Book of Unknowing’s final sequence, High’s lines take on cosmological and moral significance: Where do we go now the fisher boy asks looking into a blue winter horizon rising around wooded vessels moored over waning flashlights if you have come this far why stop now the monk says wings flapping first snow over wing a woman beside me laughs as the boy casts nets off a dock drinking coca cola cormorant flock around him nothing left to prove no need for approval only coming back to where we are touching fingers and reeds as I see her bend again kiss a scar on his left eye reaching inside & past all reckon & shame (115) Pound’s “make it new” may be the most misconstrued statement in poetic history — he was concerned with continuance, not blithe novelty — but High’s “where do we go now” and “if you have come / this far why stop now” take up its truer sense. If a poem, or spiritual journey, culminates because one has moved mindfully through the things of the world, one undercuts that culmination by subsequently turning from those things; you can’t treat emptiness as a view without continually constructing its frame. Thus, the “unknowing” High arrives at knows well the questions and motives it is made of. In this passage, realization does not stop perception but leads it through memory (“again”) to a further moral possibility: the potential loss of shame. High’s “small insistence” (137) on the ongoingness at the heart of all arrival super-saturates A Book of Unknowing. The moral and philosophical vision he insists upon is “clear” with the true roots of the word — not “easily understood,” but “luminous, bright” and “to summon or call.” I love this book for reminding me that poetry does not need to be flatly wise or flatly wild but can accommodate the luminous summons of “a woman tying her / tennis shoes in a make-believe diary” (65) and of “a boy hungry / for cake & pineapple” who sees in his companion “a 1000 years / of sorrow already ended in / her touch of a finger” (77). The vision, here, sees past itself by the light it makes. * A sense of being reminded — that mental return — comes over A Book of Unknowing’s characters as well, enriching their experiences of the present. Sometimes, these reminders come through refrain: early in the book, in a passage that foresees war’s effects in its earliest tidings, High reports, “the TV is alive he shouted out the window / dying in the moment of the images before war / & the girl out there already peeing in an alley” (33). Later, “the mute girl mouths in an alley” (122) and we recall her earlier posture and all that has happened since. Elsewhere, High sows reminders through motifs that, in their use of character and place, recall Nathaniel Mackey’s worlds of displacement and migration. High, though, typically stays more closely with his emblematic figures, for whom there is a “hum breaking thru the poverty / Once settled in the bone of a gone nation” (9). His iconic motifs — pelicans; monks; frogs; Paul Celan, occasionally — crop up in the poems’ continuous present. Their recurrences feel more like memory than outright interruptions, however, because the present adapts around them, becoming larger. High conveys this adaptation through syntax that swells as it lists, making fruitful use of ambiguous but distinct capitalization and punctuation: As if in an old movie only the actors ourselves & this Miraculous set of cliffs who Could ever unrepresent the Bell chiming the leaves on shore the girl in her plaid Skirt as turtles & pelicans Gather around her language forgets itself Celan sips on a brandy looking out the café (8) By moving in and out of such lists, High suspends the reader’s knowledge (and perhaps knowledge is an attempt to systematically “unrepresent” the world, to sift it into human sense?) of what is another item in the sequence and what is the beginning of an off-shooting phrase, like the one above beginning “as turtles.” This technique is especially poignant when a long run settles in tenderness, reminding us that the world can arrive there as well, even as the momentum of arrival skids: “One tall sycamore loomed a sparrow lighted / The first utterances the boy read aloud / I love you.” Characteristically, High does not conclude there but just pauses a moment before showing the continuing world. This world now seems changed by the realization of love, so that the resulting “finely tuned” images enlarge human emotion, even if they do not stop for it: “All these figs & mustard seeds / Arising around us in finely-tuned grass” (96). Juxtaposition seems the wrong word for High’s mingling of emotion, memory, and perception, perhaps because language leaves traces more continuous than Eisenstein’s images could, letting High move swiftly among setting, character, and plot. It shows that the possibilities for narrative in verse extend beyond the sturdy detailing of posed moments or plodding gestures at epic. Instead, High mobilizes the elements of story, as though dangling them from a mobile he then spins...(excerpt from "On Return," a review by Zach Savich in JACKET 2, May 2011) Read the full review at http://jacket2.org/reviews/returning