After West
BY James Harms
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008)

The photograph on the cover of After West shows an old car and a caravan crossing a plain before a mountain range. The dark and light pattern of the landscape — snow-capped mountains, forest below, silvery grasslands in the foreground — recurs on the vehicles that are crossing it: light-coloured panels separated by a dark mid-band. People in their machines have long sought integrality with this landscape in a great movement toward the American Southwest: “The people in flight streamed out on 66, sometimes in a single car, sometimes a little caravan” (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath). But dreams can mislead. A quotation from Walt Whitman opens the collection, the poet self-deceived: the object of his search remains elusive and “unfound.” In Harms’ poetry, this integrality has been rent.

After West is an elegy, a Miltonesque tragedy: glimpses of a fall and the futility of hope that comes from existential disillusionment: from “too much nothing” (from “Isn’t That Enough,” p. 62) after a human utopia has gone to ruin.

The book is divided into three sections. The first creates a climate of foreboding; the second, comprising the poem “After West,” (pp. 39-48) describes a rift; the third deals with pain and fear after the end of a marriage. The sections are simply numbered “One,” “Two” and “Three”: life, they seem to say, can change as easily as that.

The opening poem, “Pisgah Church Cemetery” (pp. 13-14), introduces the theme of death, which recurs throughout the book. The first line, “They came down to the shore / in wood-paneled Fords” recalls The Grapes of Wrath. These strangers, the “drift of labor,” with their foreign cultures, their “plastic pink flamingos” would fill the graveyards with successive generations, until we “stack the dead” and thus risk forgetting those on the lower strata. If “tomorrow” no longer “lie[s] down on today,” will we, dead and unremembered, cease to exist?

After West is an elegy, a Miltonesque tragedy: glimpses of a fall and the futility of hope that comes from existential disillusionment: from “too much nothing”… after a human utopia has gone to ruin.

Death is ubiquitous. It appears in “On Beauty and West Virginia at the Blue Moose Café” (pp. 15-16) as a bird’s wing tattooed on half of a boy’s “scalp and face.” Metaphorically, the boy has scalped himself, knowing the tattoo has “limited his life,” just as the narrator scalps his marriage by letting himself become fascinated by a woman at a party, who, like a dark angel, disappears, leaving on him an evanescent shadow of missed opportunity. As Milton wrote, “govern well thy appetite, lest Sin / Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death” (Paradise Lost, Book VII). This was “the year before it all came apart,” and as we move toward this moment in “Your Favourite Things” (p. 17), time is relentless: the fireflies come “[t]oo soon,” even though spring, a calming influence after winter, is attending to “all the wounds half-healed.”

In “Held Down” (pp. 18-19), a boy is murdered by suffocation, and we are arrested by the alliteration and assonance of the “t” and “s” sounds redolent of breath and struggle. The pathos as the child in hand-me-downs expires:

The question is poignant. Not a shriek, just a question to humanity: who is there?

This child strangulation is followed directly by “Breakfast in West Virginia” (p. 20), introducing us to the poet’s young children: Walt and Phoebe. They eat milk, cereal, and peeled apples, looking out on a suburban porch and garden. This is the Eden that will fall after divorce. Already, the children are subdued and the scene is being erased; they “chew silently, snow / filling every opening in the earth.”

There is no escape from death. In “Comedy: Morgantown West Virginia” (pp. 23-24), the “cost” of comedy “is regret at best, or loss, sometimes sadness: / the happy fool trails a ghost.” There is nothing enduringly funny about the “mad chef” in “Like Mercury, the Monongahela” (pp. 21-22), who butchers the town’s ducks to make his fare; laughter has a shade called sadness, and in “Nothing New but Everything” (p. 25), our prayers, “like small snails loose in the wind,” are pathetic and ineffective. In our human pathos, we can also die for small vanities, like the “signalman” in “Tribe and Country” (pp. 26-27) who, “remembers his baldness, / clutches for his hat” and “tumbles into traffic.” “Statistics” will register this death as any other. A woman hears the news and makes to yawn, but “surprises herself by screaming.” We suffer suppressed emotion; something will give. We need to ingest the landscape as a cure, as in “Landscape as the Latest Diet (Southern California)” (pp. 28-29). But when engaging with this landscape, travelling across it, as in “If I Could Break Down Anywhere it Would Be Halfway to Todos Santos” (pp. 30-32), it remains difficult to relax, to come alive. When the old car breaks down, the narrator says, “I didn’t drink and drink / and drink for days though I thought about it.” Letting go remains a phantasy while breakdown threatens. Only at the end of the trip is there “gold tequila” with friends, “in ranks on the bar”: enough to get drunk, to escape existence.

Life’s pressures can lead to creativity. In “Elegy by Frank Gehry” (pp. 35-36), the narrator tries to make an offering to the artist who had been an abused boy “broken hard on his father’s knee,” and thus “I looked for a crack where all / the used light leaks in, where you made / your art.” The “used light” of the artist cracked by experience, the transformed light, can lift him or her above humanity, into the “emptiness above, / as once, in the cathedrals of Europe, space / was left for the angels, who never rest.” Those touched by the shadowy wing of death can become sublime — until the fall.

Section Two signals the fall. The single poem in fifteen parts, “After West” (pp. 39-48) is an elegy mourning a former state and bearing witness to a catastrophe. After west, “there wasn’t any west”: “every bit of it / was used and torn… every / mind changed” with no prospect for growth, no “way / to grow the new idea,” just disillusionment, with only the clouds over the sunset and inhospitable “boiling ocean,” finding a way out through their “transubstantiation” from water to vapour to “light.” They had “changed already into light and light / enough to float free,” with “light and light” at the end of the line evocative of an intense luminosity.

The earthbound soon faced darkness and discomfort, with “ash filling / the open eyes,” so they walked blind, “closing every eye.” After west was the prosperity of the baby boomers after 1968, turning the west into “gold”: the rise of the war children personified in the “pissed-off baby boy” who “slugs the midwife on his way to his mother’s breast.” The changes bring anger, and more misery, with the reappearance of the figure of the suffering boy, who “like bits of laughter, torn laughter” drops off the end of a pier into the waves. The anger has not saved him — it has led to self-destruction —, and Walt, at night, lies “awake after west.”

After west, words become cumbersome, “like plates of earth” that can unleash techtonic forces. The poet “inadvertently” borrows half a dozen lines from Blaise Cendrars in a description of an underwater world that is “clear and calm” though “volcanic.” The boy is now a “robot boy,” with “arms in pieces on the factory / floor” and “no way to hold the nothing left to hold.” He “would dream of singing,” but he is too “filled with circuitry / and grief” to do so. The dreamless almost come to life each morning by “reinvent[ing]” themselves and taking what they need “in their arms,” but they are unable: “those without hope… / … are forced to dream.”

The notion of scalping reappears, as pies in the “dark diner” “glow like useless brains awaiting dissection.” Further to this split, clouds need to “crack” to allow beauty to come to life, “to release a flock of gulls, a slant / of sunlight, a little air.” Ugliness and beauty are torn from people and nature before metaphor makes way for the literal source of pain:

The poet’s young children, Walt and Phoebe, are “delivered by wings after midnight” to “a lost land beneath the tide.” The west and its history are “lost;” there is no orientation, as “[w]e lost our maps, we lost our legends, / we lost the compass point spinning west.” The separation gives rise to a feeling of castration, the narrator having “lost the saddles strapped to the lost gelding”: a separation that leads to imagining that perhaps at loves’s end, the universe would end, but in our pathos we have no effect on nature; on the contrary, “the sun / went right on shining” (James Schuyler, cited by Harms).

Section Three deals with the aftermath of separation. Nature and objects are rent. Memory of the other fades. In “Love Poem by Frank Gehry” (p. 51), there is “a beer can torn to shreds,” “And every ounce / of steel in a wall above the river can’t hold / the light of your eyes slowly turning to lead in memory.” Section Three deals with the aftermath of separation. Nature and objects are rent. Memory of the other fades. Mixed with the pain darkening recollections, there is bitterness in the remark, “I remember how your face has the pretty hope / of a scar beneath makeup.” The melodramatic last line, “How I loved you” is superfluous, but a reminder of how restraint can falter in disaster and thus adds to the recurring theme of human pathos.

In “A Friday at the End of August” (pp. 52-53), memories of singing migrant workers on the family farm fade as a ray of sunlight stabs “deep and wet in the blue-black Pacific,” the “cut” not preventing the thought of a swim. Similarly, in “As If” (p. 54), the anguish of the narrator’s seeing his former lover with someone new “across the street” who “took her hand,” does not stop him looking and in jealousy demanding, “Take it back.” But he can’t take her back; perhaps there will never be another to replace her. “[O]ur fathers”, in the poem of that name (p. 55), had “new wives that never took”: he might never again be close. In “Knowing You Were Loved,” (p. 56), he can only conceive of a new, future relationship in terms of self-deception: “How long / will I wait to start pretending again?” It has been three months after the separation, and he himself is divided, having experienced them as “three months outside my body.” Again, the figure of the little boy is present, “at the edge of the sea,” looking at the waves “with a longing so pure / … he’ll truly wish to die.” This recalls the birth of Venus, who is suddenly faced with the burden of having to live and survive. The narrator is barely alive, refusing integration and the consequent pain: “I will not reenter / my body.” He is present for his new lover: “there it is, my body, waiting”; even though he is “tired of lying,” of pretending.

The world seems ill. In “Phoebe at Daybreak” (p. 58), the suburbs are depressed, “too sad to know their own sweetness,” and the neighbour is “dull-eyed.” It is to the nightingale that the narrator offers his daughter, his “moon over the suburbs,” perhaps to deliver her from earth, where in “When Dean Left West Virginia” (p. 59) “[t]he rivers / [are] silting in like a fat man’s arteries.” In “Spring in Lincoln Park, 1910” (p. 60), an artist has instead painted late autumn clouds: “He has them wrong / for spring.” They nevertheless concur with the narrator’s mood, in which he projects mourning on to the artist, asking,

Further on, he wonders about his children’s perception of his mood: “Did my son / hear the fleck of Payne’s gray… in my voice over breakfast?” His depression might distance them. In “Isn’t That Enough” (p. 62), he says that he “wants to be buried / where the kids can find me if they ever need to look,” as if they would abandon him, as their mother seems to have, in the dissolution of the dream of a union forever. Like the broken tin boy, he faces the void of nothing left to hold:

He had planned a joint grave site with the mother of his children before their divorce, a question he is struggling to deal with: “No one’s / avoiding life; no one is ignoring the plans / we made for each other: the small graveyard / near the river behind Pisgah Church.” In his fear of becoming invisible to his loved ones, in “An Accordion in Autumn” (p. 63), he gives himself over to solipsism: “I know everyone wonders what I wonder about beauty,” even though no one asks and he seems foresaken; the color “bruise of apple” mentioned in the same poem recalls the painful fall from innocence to worldly knowledge. The forlorn mood of “For Ashes, For Letting Go” (p. 64) is fraught with the angst of separation and of having to talk to others, as he wonders in trepidation:

He might lose his children. In “Everything is Given to Be Taken Away” (pp. 65-66), he imagines the “sweet terror” of his son’s death, while “sleeping off an afternoon / of steady joy.” “A life full of farewells, none so final and silencing / as a child’s.” The “punished little boy” returns in “If Afternoon” (pp. 67-68), “devastated,” his dreams broken. The narrator seems to contemplate suicide, “if nothing else works, then and only then.” Disillusioned, with “faith a thousand phantoms,” and the once beautiful “sunset as toxic as the word divorce said aloud,” children, in the midst of this fall, seem to realize that knowledge marks the end of pure love, as they

In the final lines of “My Dream of Bob Marley” (pp. 70-72), the children are asleep, but even the finest human qualities cannot ensure future well-being: “there is no bravery / in the world enough to ensure anything.”