Strange communion

‘Poems reawaken in us,’ writes James Longenbach, ‘the pleasure of the unintelligibility of the world.’ They do so via ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’: disjunctive strategies that work, for Longenbach, to ‘resist our intelligence almost successfully’. What ‘almost’ means here is, of course, a matter of taste – and style. Nonetheless, this Romantic mandate – that poems achieve clarity by integrating opacity – invites a question fundamental to poetics: how much resistance is too much, or not enough?

‘welcome the dark angle that cannot be measured’: this exhortation early in Nathan Shepherdson’s collection betrays an interest in absence and negativity, as well as an aversion to literal sense that another poem calls ‘a terror attack / on the noun’. Tellingly, a line in the next poem asserts that ‘angles are never alone until they’re measured’. In a book addressed to Shepherdson’s recently deceased father and abounding in dedications to others both living and dead, poetry becomes an open field that undermines language’s differentiating – and isolating – impulse, and such openness entails a drawing together, a strange communion.