Flashes of Light

Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith, Chatto & Windus, 2018, 112pp, £10.99

Black Sun, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Faber & Faber, 2018, 72pp, £10.99

Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead has been singing and whistling in my mind since reading it; Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Black Sun contains a very different kind of music. Both collections were shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize, with Smith winning, and both dwell on death and the suffering body, with images of earth and dirt running through each. This aside, it would be difficult to find two more different collections.

Danez Smith’s book has garnered explosive praise, and rightly so. On its back cover, Roxane Gay draws attention to the ‘intelligence and fervour’ of the poems inside, and reading them is a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, fury-stoking experience. The collection opens with the sequence ‘summer, somewhere’:

somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown as rye play the dozens & ball, jump

in the air & stay there.

The double line break after the verb ‘jump’ emphasises the boys’ midair suspension, perhaps providing inspiration for the book’s cover. Here, hovering in white space, two unclothed black boys hold hands, with one of them stepping, gracefully and lightly, into the air and floating upwards. The image is dreamy, with an emphasis on the black body as a site of beauty; given the violence towards this same body that Smith’s book charts, it is also haunting. ‘history is what it is. it knows what it did’, the

poem continues. In a beautiful formal turn, the end of the poem answers the opening sound play (‘somewhere, a sun’) with its own rhyme, hidden poignantly in the text, heard but not seen:

if snow fell, it would fall black. Please, don’t call us dead, call us alive someplace better.

we say our own names when we pray. we go out for sweets and come back.

Other poems in the sequence turn to lost friends and family members – ‘ dear air where you used to be’ – often speaking with immense tenderness. ‘ i woke knowing your hands // were the only place in the world’. Smith draws parallels between the organic undoing of the departed and the imagined in-between world that they now occupy, ‘a world where everything / is sanctuary and nothing is a gun’; between the dangers of the ‘old world’ where ‘we wake hands up’ and the new ‘paradise’, earned ‘by a death we didn’t deserve’. In some passages, hurt is evident in the curt, cut sentences:

‘come. celebrate. this is everyday. everyday

holy. everyday high holiday. everyday new

year. every year, days get longer. time clogged with boys.’

One striking section juxtaposes a piece spoken by a police officer with one voiced by a murdered black boy or man. ‘ dear ghost i made’, the first voice starts. ‘ dear badge number’, the other replies. ‘ what did I do wrong? / be born? be black? meet you?’

It is an astonishing opening to a collection which then continues to be astonishing. After the expansive couplets of the first sequence, Smith, who

uses the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’, turns their attention to the often-perpetrators of violence in ‘dear white america’. This poem is presented in a whole-page prose block, sentence tumbling after sentence as the speaker describes a desire to leave Earth for somewhere else, somewhere better: ‘take your God back. though his songs area beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha […] i reach for black folks & touch only air’. Smith also highlights certain inconsistencies of racism: ‘i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race’ and mimics the affronted questions posed by those who assume that the problem is on the other side: ‘ why does it always have to be about race? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?!’; black boys, on the other hand, ‘can always be too loud to live’. The end of the poem chokes into pain-filled iterations, mimicking the repetitions of the acts described: ‘or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail of shoot or ruin’, before, with the breath of a line-break, claiming a new, un-earthly existence as ‘ours’.

White America, then, has blood on its hands, as both past and present indicate. Smith, in ‘litany with blood all over’, has ‘blood on the brain’, and images of blood pulse through the veins of the collection, from the ‘bad blood’ of history in the opening poem to the HIV positive blood of later works: ‘the test results say i am the father / of my own end’. In Smith’s ‘litany’, as shape-shifting a poem as many of the others in the collection, the words ‘my blood’ and ‘his blood’ merge typographically into a thick sea of overlapping letters, an effect which becomes yet more powerful as the reader turns the page to even denser overlap. ‘our blood-wedding’, Smith notes, was also a ‘blood-funeral’. Elsewhere, it is noted that one in two black men who have sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime. Despite Smith’s own diagnosis, and poem titles such as ‘every day is a funeral and every day is a miracle’, there are electric flashes of joy in Don’t Call Us Dead, particularly in the visceral eroticism of moments in ‘bare’ and other poems; in ‘last summer of innocence’ in ‘boy after boy after boy / pulling me down into the dirt’.

Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Black Sun is also lit with flashes of unexpected light, although much of the collection focuses on absence of light and images of negation. Where Smith is expansive, Martinez de las Rivas is more constrained, and other similarities between the two poets paradoxically highlight their differences. While both poets favour the ampersand over the longhand ‘and’, for example, Smith’s seem to come from a place of urgency, from wanting to speed up the poems, or from a natural colloquial ease; Martinez de las Rivas’s, on the other hand, appear to relate more to ideas of compression or contraction (although, in my mind, his poems would work as well, perhaps better, with the longhand version). Martinez de las Rivas also frequently uses ‘yr’ in place of ‘your’, a contraction that also seems to have more to do with lack than any sort of informality. The beauty of his poems tends to be more chilled than wildly joyous, although when it comes it can be surprising, as in ‘Thalictrum “Elin”, Wildhern’, where the titular flowers are ‘like an airburst candled in pearls of dew’; later in the poem, ‘the flowers exhale beneath the threshold of / hearing, constellate their little season / with pinpricks of joy’, in lines that remind me of the close attention paid to plants in Katharine Towers’s Remedies. The flowers in Martinez de las Rivas’s poem, however, ‘suffer the tempest, fall / & sleep untroubled through wintry soil’, perhaps in echo of the Biblical Fall.

Theology is, in fact, at the heart of Martinez de las Rivas’s writing. While the critic Dave Coates has interpreted the image of the black sun in the eponymous collection as a fascist one (‘On the pale sun of Toby Martinez de las Rivas’, davepoems.wordpress.com, 13 September 2018), and readers have suggested the same of Martinez de las Rivas’s poem ‘Titan / All Is Still’, published in Poetry in November 2018, the poet argues against this. In a response published in Poetry (27 November 2018), he writes:

Say ‘black sun’ to some people now, some infer Nazism. Say it in a theological context, as was my intention, and you have a very different response. Three gospels – Matthew, Mark, and John – all mention the sun going down at the crucifixion. I connect this intimately with the point at which Christ cries out ‘Eli, Eli, lama

sabacthani’, and receives no response: nothing but a veiled sun, a black hole.

As for the symbol of the black sun, which appears typographically in his collection, Martinez de las Rivas suggests that its ‘genesis’ was ‘utterly banal’. Looking for a way of dividing poems, he came up with a white circle, and then a black circle:

It instantly hit me as I looked at it. It was hypnotic. A hole in the paper. A black hole, which, I knew, would drag things into it: would drag everything into it – as it is doing – but also, I sensed, a door from which things might emerge. A boundary between the living and the dead, between the dreamed and the spoken, both attractive and frightening to me.

Another thing that the reader must grapple with before plunging into the main of the collection is its extensive (and somewhat off-putting) paratext. Black Sun opens and closes with a volley of quotations: Miguel de Unamuno, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Psalms at the beginning; W. G. Sebald in the middle; and The Tempest, Kenneth Grahame, and the cryptic capitalised statement ‘LET THIS BE YOUR BLIND & FINAL ZEUGMA’ at the end. The final quotations appear after extensive notes to the poems, which are themselves preceded and followed by images of a large black sun (and, in the final pages, a white sun set against a black page). Then there is Martinez de las Rivas’s unusual approach to poem titles, which are presented in superscript to the side of the poems, so that the pieces themselves seem to read almost as one continual text, interrupted only by the typographical sun and various quotations. Other superscriptions dance around the poems (and around images of the black sun), so that while a large number of Martinez de las Rivas’s poems are sonnets, they are often set off or undercut with a whispered addition, as in the ‘ Lully, Lully, Lully, Lulley’ of ‘At Lullington Church / To My Daughter’. (The poem titles are also in italicised superscript, but for ease of reading I’ll print them as above in this review.)

‘At Lullington Church / To My Daughter’ is one of the poems that most obviously deals with the negation that characterises Martinez de las Rivas’s writing. In an interview with Lucy Mercer for the Los Angeles Review of Books (13 September 2017), the poet commented that Black Sun is ‘a book that attempts to come to terms with the intense fear of disintegration that drove Terror [Martinez de las Rivas’s first collection] – the fear of nothingness’. In this poem, nothingness is everywhere, woven into the poem linguistically (in the repetitions ‘no’, ‘nor’, ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘never’, ‘nor’, ‘no’, and so on, with the poem hinging on its almost-middle word ‘Nothing’), as well as in the blank image of snow. ‘In my kingdom it is winter forever’ the poem begins, before returning to the idea of an original Fall, ‘no flaw to taint our rudimentary clay’. The poem strongly recalls the ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ in Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, which opens with the line ‘One must have a mind of winter’; in other senses, Martinez de las Rivas’s poem is hymn-like. The final couplet is particularly fascinating; the iambic pentameter of its first line undone by its last, which itself is rocked by incantatory repetitions:

Until she wakes & finds herself alone, you are her rock, Lord. Lord, you are stone. Lully, Lully, Lully, Lulley.

In other poems, Martinez de las Rivas is drawn to images of blank, cold light, as in ‘Crucifixion, Winter, Córdoba’ – ‘Behind coloured glass casting its glory / into the high, cold darkness of the church’ – and in the ‘glorious dead light’ of the moon with its ‘gaze of deep anxiety’ in ‘Diptych: At Matfen / Address to My Daughter’. Just as often, however, light is sucked into a black hole. The sun, usually a source of life and warmth, is in Martinez de las Rivas’s poems a ‘great blind eye shaking with laughter’, or else a ‘disc of clay’. The first appearance of the miniature typographical black sun is in the poem ‘Breakfast, Plaza de la Magdalena, Córdoba’, where the black circle is ‘a well cut into the rock / opening like a mouth pocked with green ferns’; in later poems, the circle represents a dead owl’s eye, ‘a burnt zero of ground’, and death as an eclipse upon the body. The final large image of the black sun, where it is set against repetitions of

the word ‘Judgement’, certainly feels ominous, as does the invocation in ‘Avenging & Bright’, ‘Black sun – rise in glory & begin to shine / as the rock dove cries its expiation’.

There is much more to say about Black Sun – its horror at the failings of the human body, its interest in doubt, and suffering, and redemption, its notion of England, its Eliotic and Biblical cadences (read Eliot’s Four Quartets, note the repetitions, and then return to Black Sun), its subtle rhymes, and a certain ‘merciless cold rigor’ (‘Hope / Against Nature’) that runs through it, making the reading experience rather bleak, and at times chilling. For now, I’ll say that the feeling evident in Danez Smith’s collection, the sense of dreams ‘possible, pulsing, & right there’, despite the agonies of loss, is an excellent antidote to the absences and ‘frozen tears’ of Black Sun.