Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Selenography: A review by J. A. Tyler
[jatyler / May 18th, 2011 / Young Bright Things ]The moon is out tonight and it is big on the horizon and the face, the man-in-the-moon face, is clearly visible, looking downward in a gesture that seems either pitying or happy from afar. The moon’s surface is an odd thing, a place of shadows made by otherness, of shadows from shadows, light not given but received, the crevices of a visible yet unknowable object.
Selenography is a book of poetry by Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Selenography is also a book of accompanying Polaroids by Tim Rutili. Selenography is also the charting of the moon’s surface. And Selenography as a book is the same as the moon, tangible yet distant, carved in voice like a face on the moon, with a layered and uncommon look, a moment not-easily-defined.
I don’t know if Selenography is meant to be read as a collection of poems or as a book-length poem divided into chapters, as a collection of five longer poems that work together or as moments of poems taken out of other separate poems. And though a part of me wants a clear-cut answer, I understand that knowing is unnecessary, that in actuality all that counts is what the poetry attempts to do and how well it does it.
Wilkinson creates a breathing rhythm for us in Selenography, a mimic of our own pulsing blood by using a mostly staccato style with a focus on small syllables:
from ‘Phantoms in the Telegraph Ink’:
myths
slacken & give
out until we
hammer a new
trapdoor
powder the cracks
with
quicklime
our wrongful noise into a
city spooked
with night mortar
collating us
And while Wilkinson’s spotlight is usually on short bursts, he occasionally reaches towards legato, stretching language out into a smooth roll, a sea after the storm, when the waves are still sloshing the sides of boats but the major angst has subsided, when our breathing has calmed:
from ‘Phantoms in the Telegraph Ink’:
phantoms in
the moss phantoms
in the train cars dressed
like porters with
black eye makeup
phantoms full of
saliva &
the cottoned virus
phantoms in the telegraph
ink
grinding
their teeth now
horses follow the
messenger girl into
the wooden woods—
In terms of content, Selenography is bound in this kind of nature play as symbol, owls and woods, dust covering the open spaces in relationships, weather and wearing out, a kind of wind that is so constant we nearly forget it exists – a way in which Wilkinson is showing us humanity in miniature:
from ‘No Clumsy Moon to Chalk Up the Doorway’:
white letters arrived in
the city of hollowed-out
furnaces dropped through a
cut transom
&
the twins
took the letters
with the biggest swooping signatures
into the trees
to
assemble the story of their fortress you’re
soft with me
& I’m never
sorry for falling
asleep on top
of you
This is the treasure of Wilkinson’s style and focus – the way he cleans the bones of a subject while leaving just enough meat and muscle for us to grasp. If we have weathered a storm and are hanging to Selenography‘s boat, Wilkinson is the rope helping us to feel tethered:
from ‘Wolf Dust’:
the woods pulled on your
sleeve
& the bathtub water went
black your
little brother’s
curtain wrapped
around your other little
brother’s quiet
what light comes
between
your nightgown & you?
I have more questions, loads of them: is Wilkinson illustrating Rutili’s Polaroids or is Wilkinson’s poetry illustrated by the photographs? Or are the two in a new kind of conversation? Is this an extension of Sidebrow’s collage / collaborative spirit, and where does it go from here? And if Selenography is book 1 of a No Volta pentalogy, as the frontispiece says, when / where are the others happening, and how can we get our hands on them?
I don’t know the answers, and I’m not actively seeking them. I am asking the questions, and I want more of Wilkinson’s poetry. That, in the end, is all. I don’t want to dissect the moon, not tonight. Tonight I want only to reside in its clefts.
Selenography is published by Sidebrow Books.
J. A. Tyler is the author of A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed from Fugue State Press. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.