A review: Via, by Claire DeVoogd
Daniel Barbiero
November 2023
Via, by Claire DeVoogd
Winter Editions, 2023
“Siste Viator” – Latin for “stop, traveler!” – is an inscription often found on roadside tombs and monuments. The purpose of the exhortation is to alert the passerby to stop and think about the historical significance of the place, or to remember the dead interred there. It also is the title of the long poem opening Via, the first book of poems by Claire DeVoogd.
“Siste Viator” begins with a dream narrative:
Today shaking wakes me at four, dream
I take you to my hometown, it’s all different
Hannibal is there with a legion of miniature
Elephants; oh, that’s how, I say to myself.
They’re smaller than dogs. Sorry I didn’t
Realize it was like this. I don’t know how to
Lead you to the water’s edge my friends go across
To die in. Sorry. The English is bad. The night
Water there licks at black stones
Like pupils mirrors watch.
Following the dream is news of the external, waking world, but it is an external world whose contradictions and absurdities seem to be pervaded by a dream-like, alogical logic of their own. Hence the poem’s transition from the dream world to the waking world is virtually undetectable, as the semantic drift of DeVoogd’s words and the images they call up follow an unreality principle that – paradoxically – tracks with the reality on the ground. Consider the next passage:
Mirrors rattle in their frames, Stacy
Wanting to know about the Taliban—
This is not the war or is it. A glass shatters. Frogs
In the pool. In wartime it’s easy for us down
Here to think of love and Britney Spears
Is there, twirling, with her eyes smudged dark with
Mirrors for us that stars reflect.
The allusion to mirrors, which replicate and distort appearances, link the dream – itself an arena in which appearances are replicated and distorted — to the world, and suddenly we’re drawn into life in wartime, which is kept at a distance by the distractions of celebrity and entertainment. What is the traveler supposed to stop and see here if not the weird juxtaposition of the tragic and the trivial that uniquely defines our moment? But “Siste Viator” doesn’t restrict itself to the present; mythical figures like Dido, who’s described as reading Henry James in Marfa, appear, as do figures from history like Henry the Navigator and Cortes. If the poem’s images of the present present a confusion of contradictions – days at the beach and of children being “suffer[ed]…into history” – there also is the wish “That there were great men who could survive/In history and make the world anew like rain.”
And yet all of these contradictions and confusions can be contained comfortably within the domain of the dream. Dreams and the dream-like play a recurring role in these poems, and are brought to the foreground in the long sequence “Emergencies,” which consists of two dozen sections titled either “Dream” or “Apocalypse.” DeVoogd’s pairing of dreams with apocalypses by itself is a thought-provoking gambit insofar as the original meaning of “apocalypse” is an unveiling while dreams, with their veiled language of misdirecting signs and opaque symbols, nevertheless can be interpreted as unveiling something hidden inside the dreamer. By juxtaposing them, DeVoogd in effect brings out the inner rhyme linking them. The dreams here are considered as riddles, as natural disasters, as originating in physical frustration, and as if their intermixture of order and disorder could permeate the waking world, as when the speaker dreams that:
I walked an industrial
part of the city
where form and chaos were grown together and become
identical to one another.
It was today
If sleep represents a withdrawal from the external world of common sense and common meaning, the dream, in imposing its own form of order on an image of that world, asserts the rights of the dreamer over the demands and restrictions of waking reality.
One of the purposes of the roadside tomb or monument was to provoke a dialogue between the living and the dead. DeVoogd provides just such a thing with “Errands,” subtitled “a correspondence with Marie de France.” Marie was a francophone poet living in England who was active in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; in the poem she’s reimagined as “a motif/which means she can people holes/over in paper or concrete and this makes them real/places or kind of like anchors.” She can also “crawl[] through some holes in reality.” “Holes” appear and reappear throughout the poem, which declares that “The world is holes, the/convexed, multiple”: perhaps holes to be filled in with what the mind can invent.
Like the other poems in Via, “Errands” is made up of startlingly sequenced, vivid images that present the facts of the world as they might appear through an imaginative kaleidoscope. DeVoogd accomplishes this through close attention to language, and particularly to the way that words play off of each other through rhyme, half-rhyme, alliteration, and conceptual likeness and contradiction. This is the focus of the couplets in “Survival Strategies,” which connect words and ideas through associations that cut across multiple axes:
Origin, not organon, not
A list. Not origin, notOrgan, not the blood on the
Mind, the vesselsPulsing purple
Leeches and cephalopodsBodies flinging themselves
In that amberIn the center of
Not continents notThe borders of a blue
Cotton shirt not…
“Origin,” “organon,” “organ,” and later “orange,” link up through their sounds; more loosely, “continents” and “cotton” suggest each other; while “not” connects disparate objects through the peculiarly intimate relationship of negation. This latter form of connection-through-negation occurs throughout the poem, at times becoming a rhythmic refrain as much as an eraser of posited referents.
With “Survival Strategies” as indeed throughout Via, DeVoogd finds in words overt and covert affinities that associate them in expressly poetic ways. As she puts it in “Errands,”
…I know
it seems unreasonable but
each word contains three
other words including
itself, this is a physical
fact of the poem…
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer, and writer in the Washington DC area. His reviews of poetry and essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, and Offcourse. He also writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His music reviews have been published in Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, Avant Music News, and elsewhere. Barbiero has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area and regularly collaborates with artists locally and in Europe. His graphic scores have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in Europe, Asia, and the US. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press.
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