Grace, Fallen from
BY Marianne Boruch
(Wesleyan University Press, 2010)

The painting on the cover of Grace, Fallen from, by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, shows in muted tones a close-up of a woman sitting on a chair. At first glance, Rest (1905) exudes calm, but the woman is looking away from us: we have no clue as to her disposition. The painting recalls a note from another Dane, Søren Kierkegaard’s, “Journal IV A 164” (1843):^[1] “It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backwards.” This form of existential restlessness pervades Grace, Fallen from. The semantics of the title, stating a present state and then, in hindsight, a detraction from it, resumes the experience of disillusionment when finding that present certainties are problematized by past conflicts and experiences.

The collection of poems is organized in three parts, titled simply I, II, and III, with a poem that precedes them called “A Moment.” In this poem, the poet waits in anticipation — it is spring, with “every tree gloriously poised” — for a man whom she has not yet met. He arrives, and mistakes someone else for her. Normally, she would be there, “rushing in,” as is socially “required,” but something “small” in her makes her hold back and take the risk of “giving up” her date “just like that,” as if her inaction was involuntary and, in retrospect, unsettling. This “small” part of herself, which intrudes into the present and brings pain, recalls the focus on her childhood self throughout this collection.

The semantics of the title, stating a present state and then, in hindsight, a detraction from it, resumes the experience of disillusionment when finding that present certainties are problematized by past conflicts and experiences.

The message in part I is that the past is in the present, and is powerful in its capacity to hurt. The part opens with “Still Life,” an ambiguous title referring both to the seventeenth-century still-life painting discussed in the text, and to the event of life that still continues in the present. The poet imagines the setting-up of the fruit and animal parts in preparation for the artist. Suggestions of pain infuse the description: the lemon was “rare,” so someone “paid a lot”; the garden from which the apple came is now “lost”; as the wine was “for the painting,” someone was deprived of it; a rabbit has been killed so that its skull can join the arrangement; a workman moving the table toward the light is heard to “cry out” in “pain.” His “sharp” howl momentarily distracts those making the arrangement, who accuse him of howling for “no good reason.” He had distracted them from “the talk of beauty,” which soon “started up again.” Beauty not only conceals present pain; it can be used to cause it.

In “Studying History,” the poet’s childhood is juxtaposed with the task of reading about the past. Childhood enters the author’s peripheral vision as an unsettling disturbance of her present engagement with the text – and is discussed as an afterthought: “Was that childhood going on? That noise / in the background – half-starved, deranged bird…?” This irony of past-in-past-in-present is in itself painful, as the intrusion of childhood arose from a thought that life was but drudgery and fleeting joy: “happiness is momentary / and eternity is work.” The poem exposes our limits as historians: how we create and recreate our own fiction from texts, interspersing elements from the author and ourselves. Similarly, our own memories are continually being reconstructed. In “A Musical Idea,” one of the poet’s memories is undermined by her brother’s recollection of events, and she suffers a breakdown. She remembers her stoic confrontation of situations in her childhood: “I kept turning / full-faced into everything, never // saying a word.” Her brother disagrees: “You like / to think that… I heard you / plenty of times. And you were hiding.”

The strength of part I lies in the juxtaposition of both the pain and the uplifting excitement the reader often simultaneously experiences. “A Musical Idea,” whose beginning, “At the second light, you turn,” is typical of the many exhilarating poems in part I, in which the reader embarks on a journey of discovery of a past event, jolting from one thought to the next as the subject takes on unexpected dimensions. In this poem, there is also the delight of a childhood game, and of the alliteration of t’s and d’s, as in “…turn, the boy tells me. / I turn… then,” and “Dark end of the day on the street. Dark / late afternoon,” and the alliteration of s’s, as in “down / the lower shelves, takes the stove back / to its fire.”

The strength of part I lies in the juxtaposition of both the pain and the uplifting excitement the reader often simultaneously experiences.

In “Omniscience,” the poet finds that she can’t know too many things because of the paradox that memory is “all about forgetting”: like a “box of odds and ends,” meaning that the past is “a broken mirror,” making memory like fiction, though not in consequence less astounding, as she recalls a serendipitous moment: “…and here I thought // it merely some brilliant bit of the novel / my life was writing.” Sometimes what is known is felt, not understood. In “Seven Aubades for Summer,” adults “protect” themselves from their pain by a “change [of] subject,” and thus “leave the wound” to the child, who is left burdened, “staring down and down.” These accumulated injuries demand our attention. Like a “bird [who] can’t get over his song,”we think over and over our past: “to repeat is to remember.” The poet thinks of her mother’s separation from her father, which the poet was too young to understand: her mother’s “plotting herself out of a marriage,” and subsequent ambivalence, her “splintered look of no and yes,” and the poet’s feeling “emptied.” In contrast to the ambiguity, ambivalence, and unreliability of memory, which has left the poet with a “blurred self,” a “baby… / who dreams without / language, without any past at all,” is able to rest peacefully.

In “The Park in November,” the first line, “could be part rain or part twilight,” follows symantically and syntactially from the title. It is as if the poet cannot bear to separate the present object, as expressed in the title, from its constitutive past, as it is recalled in the poem. A couple sit in a car, “hardly any words / between them,” rain outside, the breath of a sigh frosting the glass as the poet watches this autistic tragedy, asking “why breath / goes white on a window if certain / things cannot be said.”

The final poem in part I is a transition poem, portentious in its allusions to the end of life and presaging the focus of parts II and III on the imminence of death. The poem quickly sets a tone of melancholy:

Death comes along in the guise of a woman who does not look the poet in the eye as she seeks reassurance concerning the value of her existence, “I’ve led a good life, haven’t I? / haven’t I?… / almost screaming,” the rhetorical question futile in its absence of an interlocutor. “Almost” is an important word; the built-up tension reaching unbearable intensity as the poet

The “ticking quiet” is fraught with the possibility of self-disintegration. The poet “feel[s] its rise,” paradoxically at its greatest height struggling with the feeling of fading to nothingness,

A final paradox is that the experience of the unthought known that surged up in the dream, though unsettling, seemed fortuitous, leading the poet to rejoice in hindsight that “this thing / so buried in us … has / any words at all,” and that, “happiness so deeply / surprises.”

The themes of death and happiness are further juxtaposed in part II in “Simple Machines” and “Happiness: Three Definitions.” The “ticking quiet” is recalled in “Simple Machines” in the form of a knife that is invested with potential energy, allowing the poet deadly thoughts:

These few lines, redolent with the sharp alliteration of “t” sounds and the soft slicing suggested by its “s” alliteration, describes a moment in which the poet seems to feel the impetus for potentially harmful action. The poem following this chilling contemplation, “Happiness: Three Definitions,” sees humour in the Italian sacred relics industry, remarking that the bone set in plastic for sale was from “St Whoever,” “led to light,” “cost several dollars,” and meant that “one chicken / [had] died an awful death.” The poet’s dwelling on her lighter mood — “Can you be too happy? Put some / in a box… / Come Sadness” — recalls Keat’s “too happy in thy happiness” in “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which being too happy is closely associated with “sorrow / And leaden-eyed despairs.”

We are able to be happy because, as we are told in “Think of Words,” “life… seems unstoppable;” it is this that occupies our thoughts, “never the small, / hard eraser at the end of it.” In part II, the difficult reality of death is clearly in focus. “In a Frame, It Matters,” the poet considers “the days // one is grateful to eke out / in old age,” and in “All Night,” her partner exclaims, “Hey, we’re old!” This poem takes on a nostalgic mood as the poet recalls earlier times, until the tragedy of war interrupts with its deceptions and unspeakable pain:

Here, war, as with the eraser in “Think of Words,” breaks the comfortable though often fast-moving moments of train-of-thought reflection and braces us with the inevitability and perhaps suddenness of death. Similarly, in “The Drawing Manual,” the discussion on the essential aspects of shadow ends with the arresting revelation that, more than just an absence of light, it represents a passage to the realm of the devil: “it’s a window, throwing his underworld / shape to the floor.”

In part III, the poet recalls childhood events in the context of an awareness of her own ageing. “To be an animal / is to watch,” the poet says in “The Deer,” “Is to think / about eating all the time;” in a similar way she watches her childhood, nourishing herself on memories. In a moment of thoughtless “cruelty,” in “The Tin House,” she and her brother run a stick along the metal corrugations of an old man’s dwelling, tormenting him and witnessing his silent suffering: “he stood quiet, not moving / … a shape in a window.” In “Winter,” the poet dreams of her former partner and their children: “my here to your not-here,” “And our boy was a boy,” and of the continuity of the bloodline over time, as seen in the dream’s clever symbolism: “You and he / were putting up flags… you standing / at the rope’s one end, our boy / at the other. The dream’s genius.”

As part III progresses, death becomes ever-present. In the poem “Yes Loves No,” Yes has a fascination with the place of death: “Yes just wants / to get to the graveyard.” As with the above homage to Keats, the poet recalls Frost here: “by the side / of that road rarely traveled,” though giving the line a macabre twist in suggesting that the road “less traveled” (Frost, “The Road Not Taken”) is actually the path to death. Continuing the Frost metaphor of the forest, a friend dies in the poem “In the Woods: A Suite.” Here, we find the most moving passage in this collection of poetry, in which music takes us — in spite of ourselves, our fear, our angry rejection of the end — to that nonverbal place in which we know about death:

If Brahms’s fury is a catalyst that can enable us to face death, this emotion is suppressed in the final poem in the collection, “O Gods of Smallest Clarity.” Like the “exhausted / baby” at the beginning of its life in the poem “Elevator,” also in part III, the poet herself seems exhausted by life — by human conflict, human selfishness, and perhaps by her own restless looking back — calling on the gods to