Reading a book of poems is an encounter with the poet’s vision of the world and her sense of how language shapes perceptions, extends the reach of reality itself. And, to be sure, most poetry collections are also more or less consciously committed to a project of stylized self-disclosure. However, the book in which these two gestures—linguistic invention and emotional fluency—come together is not only rare but positively exotic. Beth Gylys’s Sky Blue Enough to Drink is precisely that kind of book: wondrously conceived, brilliantly executed; by turns comic and heartbreaking; open always to surprise but searching, first, for truth.
Her narrators mourn loss in animal dreams, map love’s perilous topography from shoulders to airports, negotiate with death over brass doorknobs, and trace infinity down from mountain skies. At every moment, Gylys is present not only to the lyrical possibilities of daily experience but also, crucially, to the human limits of every wild desire. This tension–more than merely a congruence between formal rigor and linguistic invention—is indeed the premise of Gylys’s poetics itself. Consider two remarkable episodes from “What Drives Us” in which the narrator struggles to come to terms with the complex thrill of the reckless and irrational, a familiar theme for most of us, but spun here into operatic scale:
“He was like the key to a cellar
where they store moonshine,
like lightning sluicing an alley
where rats live and tricks
turn. His hands made my body
irresponsible…”
And further in the second stanza:
“I lived for clutches of moments
behind locked doors, for the sound
of his voice that brought myself
into myself, like slipping on a dress
in a room tongued by moonlight,
a saxophone’s dark chocolate
rising through floorboards.”
Here, then, is a characteristic Gylys tableau in which the vicissitudes of emotional turbulence are held in flux by the interrogating mind. But as Gylys never accepts the easy solution to an aesthetic problem, neither does she ever force our hand. At the center of each poem is always some radical displacement of the self, and our reading of the poem becomes thus an act of witness that mirrors the exigence of Gylys’s astonishing language. These poems feel both inevitable as if they had arrived fully-formed on the page and yet, delightfully, composed again for the first time with each new reading.
In Gylys’s world, poetic representation is transmuted into rediscovery and the familiar, shot through with the blaze of the new. Observe as a received form disappears behind this extraordinary crie de coeur in “Fall Villanelle”:
Would I fall in love with you again
if we met today as strangers?
Would our love again ripen into pain
and fester like a rotten fruit that drains
stinks and only gives maggots pleasure?
Would I fall in love with you again?
or would I think you dull or strange
or simply unattractive? How to measure
if our love again would ripen into pain
or if our former selves were just insane
with hormones and distraction? Would the juncture
between then and now make love with you again
a foreign land? The language new, in vain
we’d try to speak, our mangled words another
way for love to ripen into pain.
Why think of it at all? Call it the rain,
the musk of decay: a little regret, a little danger,
I’d surely fall in love with you again,
our love ripening into pain.
Among Gylys’s most striking achievements, throughout a book filled with sui generis effects, is her facility with the intorsion of knowledge, in which the question becomes less easily answered the instant it is asked. I begin with something relatively simple from the villanelle above: “Would I fall in love with you again / if we met today as strangers?” Difficult, yes, but not yet exceeding the boundaries of language.
In “What the Evil Dream,” Glylys quite rightly wonders about the inner life of the Evil all around us. She cares about them and about us all. And this shadowy, comic poem demonstrates that Gylys’s personal values are not merely expressive motifs for her art, they are indeed her convictions. In this sense, Gylys sometimes sings her moral songs in a minor key: “Do they fall through tunnels, / spinning like weeds in a cyclone?….Have they ever stood in graveyards / along the grassy hilltop, their hands, / held high to catch the light?” And with that moment, the irruptive force of Gylys’s compassion and wry sense of humor obviate, if only for a brief interlude, darkness in a poetic reverie, torqued on Socratic methodology. However, Gylys will break us down and leave us to document the crisis but only after she has given it a name. Still, she knows an indissoluble mystery must be addressed in this final moment from “Lover as Precipice.” For Gylys, love, like art, is a responsibility.
I can’t
begin–or stop…I’m balanced on a cliff
of need, of doubt, of you as thought and edge
and can’t imagine what I ought to want
This is the condition of human life in the early years of the 21st century. And Gylys, bless her, invokes the question anyway: can we even figure out what we should want? That subtle move requires the vast resources of a major artist, and Gylys is such a one.
Withal, we are impelled toward obvious but nonetheless pressing questions: what is the secret name for this space Gylys inhabits? What is the axis around which these poems turn? The answer, I believe, is clearly an elegant imagination and an honest heart. There is real risk in every line and her fearlessness is framed insided parentheses of dazzling intellect and graceful charm. Sky Blue Enough to Drink is truly poetry enough to make us demand, of ourselves and our own lives, the virtues of Beth Gylys’s splendid, transformative art.
