Declan Ryan

An Exile in Time

Before Dawn on Bluff Road: Selected New Jersey Poems/Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected San Francisco Poems, August Kleinzahler, Faber & Faber, 2018, pp. 176, £14.99 (paperback)

In the rightly-named ‘Poetics’, August Kleinzahler writes ‘I have loved the air above ShopRite Liquors/on summer evenings/better than the Marin hills at dusk’, a hands-up gesture, at once defiant and soft-hearted. In the same poem, other of Kleinzahler’s proclivities are apparent, the poem’s final stanza a microcosm of his scuffed, beguiling style:

Air full of living dust: bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust wounded crystals appearing, disappearing among streetlights and unsuccessful neon.

There is the subtle, closely-patterned but unobtrusive music of dust/ exhaust/crust, a match for Hart Crane in its sonic elegance yet grimy and demotic, a suburban sort of rhapsody. There’s the surprise of ‘wounded’, and the tightening of the line to suggest withdrawing, of vision or care, and finally the clincher, the ‘unsuccessful neon’ at once bathetic and strangely ennobling. Kleinzahler is drawn to just this, a singer of the thwarted and down-at-heel, offering something like fellow-feeling, the grace of noticing, to apparently discarded, unfashionable, out-of-hours people, places and their leftovers.

Kleinzahler was born in New Jersey in 1949 and has lived something of a peripatetic life, taking in Portugal, Berlin and Vancouver, among other places, moving from small-press obscurity and manual labour to garlands and university teaching jobs; as he writes in ‘A History of Western Music:

Chapter 63’ – ‘Because of your unconventional lifestyle/you have been shopping among women your entire life’. His mentors were, among others, Basil Bunting and Thom Gunn, and there is a pleasing blend of the two found in his visionary lyrics of material seemingly unfit for dignified attention. It’s another New Jersey native, William Carlos Williams, who feels closest cousin to some of the quietly meditative, ‘no ideas but in things’ approach on show in most of the poems here, however, as well as an austere but never cold shadow of Chinese influence – perhaps via the Ezra Pound expressway to Black Mountain. Kleinzahler is, despite being drawn to the uglier, sweating and industrial corners of urban life, a rapture-seeker, and his line on loving the air above ShopRite is in earnest, neither pose nor contrariness. In part this is because of something like filial loyalty – his confession ‘I always head back to Jersey in a pinch’ from ‘Self Portrait’ having something like an inversion of Robert Frost’s definition of home as ‘the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ It’s also because he has found a way to quench his desire for beauty among Jersey’s garbage, warehouses and formaldehyde smells, as evidenced in the distinctly Oriental ‘Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall in a Parking Lot off Route 46’:

The adulterated, pearly light and bleak perfume of benzene and exhaust

make this solitary tree and the last of its bloom as stirring somehow after another day

at the hospital with Mother and the ashen old ladies lost to TV reruns flickering overhead

as that shower of peach blossoms Tu Fu watched fall on the riverbank

from the shadow of the Jade Pavilion, while ghosts and the music

of yellow orioles found out the seam of him and slowly cut along it.

Kleinzahler here, as often, is open to the sublime in the unlikeliest of places, and his image-laden language is capable of capturing it with its pacing, the staggered joints of couplets enforcing pause in the reader, suggestive of slow descent, the decline implicit in ‘Mother and the ashen old ladies’ echoed in the peach blossoms’ fall, but also anticipating their ghosts while looking back to the delivery room, the narrator’s seam, as much as Tu Fu’s, slowly cut. It is at once umbilical and otherworldly, a pressure point for the tide of grief to come, arrested by a counterbalancing joy against the odds.

Kleinzahler is especially moving when writing of his family. There are slumbering, protective poems about his mother and father in quiet moments, approaching dotage, and his sister’s voice carrying from a park at night; he is at his most open at home, in ‘1975’, a recollection of return ‘with a suitcase full of useless books and no prospects’ where new ‘duck egg blue’ bed linen bought by his mother for the prodigal poet is ‘so clean and cool I could be afloat on a lake’, a pastoral idyll under the skyscrapers’ glare. Likewise in ‘Family Album’ an older Kleinzahler is even more alone, lost to memory rather than the place, the ‘smushfaced bus from New York’ now ‘lets off no one I know, or want to’ and the ending is almost histrionically vulnerable, a Poetic gesture masking the tide of feeling behind it, again couched in meaningful imagism: ‘Warm grass and dragonflies -/O my heart.’ There is a yearning for what’s been lost, the beloved smells and sights clutched to the chest for their resonances, their Proustian conjuring of the past – less madeleine than marinara – ‘Memory stinks,/like good marinara sauce./You never get that garlic smell/off the walls.’ Kleinzahler seems throughout like someone not so much hunting joy as trying to recover it, a point made somewhat elliptically in the totemically titled ‘Art & Youth’: ‘An ache so sweet was born those nights/in the heat, in the grass, at summer’s waning/that we try for it years later in the dance/of lust and lust’s passing.’

It happens to be that these early nights occurred in New Jersey, among these particular sights and sounds, and it is for that happenstance that they

become near-sacred, in Kleinzahler’s personal astrology, as for anything innate to them. It is this resonant charm which he sings of, convincingly; despite all the ‘liquefaction’ of the ‘city’s shimmering membrane’ he is able to conceive of the afterlife as a stroll through neighbouring Brooklyn, in ‘Where Souls Go’, and convince us this is a glorious vision:

…make that Friday night July say. We are walking past the liquor store to visit our love. Two black boys are eating Corn Doodles in the most flamboyant manner possible. She waits, trying to have the best song on as we arrive. The moon is blurred. Our helicopters are shooting at field workers. The Mets are down 3-1 in the sixth.

Hardly epiphanic, for all the observed delight of the “best song” the crowding in of politics in those distant, death-dealing, choppers ensures that even in the beyond delight has to be picked at among the detritus of complicated living, that nothing is untouched by the frenzied activity of life in busy, grasping times.

The idea of connection is fundamental to Kleinzahler’s vision, his desire to cram in the underbelly, the unpretty and seemingly squalid rather than focus only on the more obviously appealing facets of Jersey speaks to a wider desire to remember things as they are, instead of whitewashing or simplifying, and to make this inheritance of sensory information portable in its entirety. Kleinzahler now lives in San Francisco, and the second half of this flippable volume contains poems of, or to do with, this other coastal home. Kleinzahler doesn’t change when he hits the west coast, his knack for the visual as the centre of a poem, his rigorous desire to ‘take in the avenues,/actually take them in’ no less exacting. ‘San Francisco/ New York’ is a highpoint, not only for its fluency but also for the insight it gives us to Kleinzahler’s divided self, he is still himself out west but there

is a paradoxical diminishment and increase, ‘How utterly provincial and doomed we feel/tonight with the streetcar appearing above the rise’ leading into a questioning of the poem’s addressee, still in New York, and how the shared moon hits their eye among starkly different surroundings:

Did you see it in the East 60s or bother to look up for it downtown?

And where would you have found it shimmering over Bensonhurst, over Jackson Heights? It fairly booms down on us tonight with the sky so clear,

and through us

as if these were ruins, as if we were ghosts.

There is an unreality here to his dislocation from Jersey, which renders the whole experience into something akin to the afterlife imagined as a Brooklyn nightwalk, the echo of moon in ‘booms’ nursery-rhyme like, and yet ominous, likewise the ruins of this new town, when what actually occurs is an opening out, rather than a disintegration. Kleinzahler has something of the exile about him, he is an exile in time, often turning away from the scene at hand into recollection, but that trait is especially pronounced in the San Francisco poems. If Jersey gave him a degree of wistful rootedness, the voice here is, more often than not, speaking through a fog, disorientated or prone to lapses in certainty. The air is different, in ‘Land’s End’ it ‘ feels as if it hasn’t touched land/for a thousand miles’ and the poem addressed to a lover might as easily be speaking to Jersey, the idea that these beauty spots, discovered in the course of making a new life, are renewed on contact with something loved, and known more fully: ‘what has become dormant,/meager, or hardened/passes through the electric/of you, the fugitive scattered pieces/are called back to their nature -/light pouring through muslin//in a strange, bare room.’

Sooner or later, through exposure, time and close attention, the unfamiliar becomes less so, as in poems so in life – ‘One finds one’s way,/slowly,/

as there is no place to really hurry, is there?/Always in the small things’. Kleinzahler’s narrators encounter exes in dreams of department stores, and sometimes wake ‘forgetting/for a minute who it is with her back pressed/ against the length of you,//breathing softly’ but for all that uncertainty, all the blurring of time and memory, there is something of the self that is owned by the people and places of the shared past, the landscapes walked through and friends who are living witnesses of all that’s shifted and dissolved, as in ‘Friends Through at New Years: 1987’:

How well they seem to know you, or what they remember of you, better than family, than the dearest, most enduring of lovers, it seems hardly possible, so much that you yourself had forgotten, alive in them still,

whose children fall asleep in your arms.

It’s not only a moving ending for its catching of the warmth of domestic fidelity built over a life of movement, disconnection and reunion, but for that final image, where future and past meet in an embrace, the children at once animate and symbol, a loving inheritance that speaks to Jersey nights ‘in the heat, in the grass’ as much as to all the other rabbit holes of memory Kleinzahler escapes into, his remembered skylines and smells of the bluff and the bay.

This collection doesn’t get in all of Kleinzahler, but its geographical loci are loose enough to allow for most of him; the voices various, thrown and speculative, the line and syntax his recognisable taut, pliant free verse with an inborne musicality, its modulations and occasional tightening into couplet rhyme or heavier assonance so deft as to pass without announcement or disruption of a naturalistic, spoken diction. Kleinzahler’s careful but never uptight phrasing is flexible enough to take in street-talk or factory banter as well as rising without a creak to the understated benedictions of poems like ‘Watching Dogwood Blossoms…’. He’s never precious, and often risks embarrassment in order to be as true as possible to the haunted sounds he

hears as he looks to recapture those feelings of waning summer. Perhaps only Kleinzahler would dare write a poem called ‘Cat in Late Autumn’ which veers every bit as close to mawkishness as its title hints it might; the fact he can pull off the balancing act and end on something as gently seen and insistingly felt as this:

His whiskers’ occasional twitch: you see the heart jump in his fur as he stalks the perimeter of an enormous dream, rain turning so heavy near dusk night slips in without you even noticing.

makes him rare company indeed. Kleinzahler notices everything, even this night ‘you’ missed at the time, and this collection is proof of how well he’s learnt to talk back from his constantly restored, evocative places, even in a pinch.