Michael Daley reviews HOLY MAGIC by Priscilla Long
Holy Magic by Priscilla Long
ISBN 978-1-936657-56-8
Sally Albiso Award Winner
MoonPath Press, POB 445, Tillamook, OR 97141
2020, paper, 108 pages, $16.00
These are muscular poems, tensed and packed, powered by an effortless rigor. Each of seven sections takes a different hue as a sort of theme, while playing in and around the shades that reflect our common perceptions. Each section studded with names of artists whose work the poet obviously relishes. And each with an abundance of objects, things that play an important role in the poet’s ability to transform art into substance. In fact, the book opens with “Art & Life,” almost a manifesto whose first line is reminiscent of Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen” in his poem for Yeats, who appears in a later section of this book. Long begins by reminding us of the futility of poetry in the face of mass extinctions and our history of treating the wild as a resource colony.
Already by the third poem in the book, “Burnt Offering” I’m feeling like I can’t keep up; the poet’s span of history and compassion far exceed my piddling provincial experiences. About the artist, Arshile Gorky, the poem’s three parts overflow their own form leading us to seek out the history contained in “Notes,” at the back of the book. Surely, in part “2. Suicide Note,” the poem’s query, “the charred remains / of love?” tells us all we need to know about the poet’s singular ability to compress, as in line one, part 1., “Cadmium red, fire-charred,” then expand her line of vision through the human tragedy and into the substance itself of an art that endures in part 3—
Before the firestorm:
the yellow light
of Old Armenia.
Later, in the book’s Section 3, in the poem “What Can Happen,” she opens a door, and, as if magically, to affirm the book’s title, ushers in the possibility of improbables: “Indigo jazz stains / the visionary night.” Night vision evoked, the poem ends with that superpower’s embodiment, “her black bats.” The image of “fur-covered teacups,” referring to Oppenheim’s Object: Luncheon in Fur (1936) a sculpture which, legend has it, was created after a luncheon in which Picasso suggested “just about anything can be covered in fur,” leads us back to a lost love or a lost enjoyment, á la “The Thrill is gone,” even devoured. A certain kind of diminishment that’s not loss but letting go—voiding (explained in “Notes” and which foreshadows several later poems in praise of urine)—sheds gladness and love within the natural music of night. The poem itself is a tiny masterpiece worth quoting whole:
WHAT CAN HAPPEN
Meret Oppenheim
Indigo jazz stains
the visionary night.
Kisses rot under logs.
Lost purple thrills
perfume purloined shadows,
fur-covered teacups.
Meret, your vowels keep on
voiding. A sax sweet-talks
the moon into shedding
her black bats.
Long places the furred tea cup in its more logical setting—under or in the vicinity of a log and in the shadow of detritus, so that we see it as aging within natural rot—out beyond the museum and lunch with Pablo, where Object might be seen to represent a bygone and less useful tendency in Art, although as James Wright has said, “The Surrealists were comic artists.”
Quite some time ago the poet Jack Hirschman, a former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, told me the three qualities he hopes to find in a poem, he said, are the three P’s (he and I coincidentally were each reading Pier Paolo Pasolini at the time, whose work has these qualities): a poem must be Passionate, Provocative and Personal. Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic has all three. Beginning a series of “Things That Are. . .” poems with “Things That Are Red,” she takes us as if to a window and helps us freefall through the daylit ordinary foliage to a splendid sunset that reminds her of the then most recent racist killing, to “Trayvon Martin’s blood.” That sense of futility again, but it echoes Auden’s other line about poetry in In Memory of W.B. Yeats: “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” For she leads us to “Words Referring to Unspeakable Events,” a poem that recalls the book’s opening, “Art saves nothing . . .” where she offers the hope,
let us return to chants and songs,
to our first loves.
This murderous dawn—
Let us return to birdnest,
Storybook, pillowtalk.
I can’t help but think she wrote this while the West was burning—California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado. “Let us speak in poems / that smoke and flame,” advocating a need for poetry in spite of the little we can do for “the bereft in the temple / of our soul.”
The “Archeology of Orange” section rejects the Garden of Eden and Original Sin, “That twisting fruited tree / can’t make you die,” and embraces the factual world with a beautiful depiction of Matisse facing fire in London and his later crippled struggles to continue his art, and concludes with a metaphorical divination, “lifted by some fishy muse / into lightness and light.”
Perhaps the most ambitious poem of the section, “Grape-Colored Figured Silk,” is “Poet’s House.” Beginning with an epigraph from Muriel Rukeyser—who will appear again in the poem “Tasks of Solitude,” a counterweight to “Poet’s House”—Long reminds us of the essence of poetry, “to learn the edges of darkness.” The word for this artform, carried over from the Greek poien (ποιεῖν) “to make,” the Rukeyser epigraph is “The power to make.” “Poet’s House” has three parts. The first is a kind of setting beginning with sounds: “Logs spit guttural sparks.” Neither modern nor ancient, it brings together our contemporary era with every age and is enduring: “. . . preserving the ancient / Egyptian cat. The mantelpiece / cannot forget its tree.”
Part 2 of the poem moves suddenly into the abstracted life of the poet. Depicting a dream world where symbols go upside-down, the first of several ambiguities is “the spirit—/ at once male / and female, always dissolving”. This dream of the creative energy is somewhat like Keats’ Negative Capability, and then we get:
She won’t be bossed.
On a bad day she disappears
into someone else’s dream.
Is “she” the actual poet whose home the speaker seems to be visiting or is “she” the evolving feminine Latin noun, “anima,” soul, and is “bossed” a term for “directed,” “instructed” or “shined;” or “ornamental,” “polished“ so as to conform to our expectation of the “otherness” of the poet?
Part 3 drops nicely away from spirit and is more down-to-earth, out of the dream, addressing the necessity for the poet of letting ego loose to play. Still there’s the double meaning in the first line, “The study is sacred to the ego.” We find “study” used later as the place itself, but here in this line study seems to be a kind of religion and a symmetry is set up by the second line: “the body to its bath and pot.” Study is to ego as bath (and/or toilette), or immersion, is to body. A cleansing and steeping in what body and mind aspire to most pleasurably and dangerously. By the end we’re back to setting, the purely physical House of the title with a catalog of things within the study, tools for “making,” including the ambiguous term “peduncles,” items forking up like stems out of the ground and/or parts of the brain’s anatomy. In the last line, the practical and somewhat critical speaker claims to walk off with the earthiest and most solid item, “I take the rock.”Or does she “take,” in the sense of “get” or “takeaway,” as in journalistic jargon, “the rock,” the opposite of spirit or the thing made. A found object off the ground which the Poet may miss.
This is a book not to be missed. Holy Magic is both, touching on the sacred as well as the unexplainable; as if to counteract the book’s opening stance for the humility of poetry, this book shows us what poetry can save. It is steeped in the real, in the material world Priscilla Long speaks for and claims, resolutely—arguing passionately to provoke each of her readers to take a personal stand.
Michael Daley's most recent collection of poetry is Born With (Dos Madres, 2020). He is the current publisher of Empty Bowl books and hopes to continue to curate the Pelican Bay Books & Coffeehouse reading series in a post-pandemic future.