American Book Review

Finalists is, as we usually like a book of poetry to be, a treasury of small pleasures. The prevailing trends have taught us to expect little insights and clever wording. This book, however, uses those expectations in order to critique them. They are not just met here, but made part of how the book attacks the usual. Rae Armantrout's works have all along been twists on poetry's ways, incorporating the expected while offering new perspectives on expectations themselves.

From "Compound" in Crawl Out Your Window 11 (1983) to "Crescendo," prominently placed in the October 18, 2021, New Yorker, Armantrout's short lyrics have kept up a throbbing basso continuo of tension within perceptions of the world and our ways of putting them into language or finding them there. Those two poems, embracing forty years of an expanding career that has brought her a Pulitzer and other honors, have in them the momentary perceptions we expect as insight from the best poets along with an undertow of penetrating social critique. Armantrout's analyses are subtle, hidden in an approach that looks at things and ways of putting things—and at the world that encompasses both of those—with the same ever-so-slight snarkiness that Dickinson used in "Some Keep the Sabbath." One might call these poems [End Page 125] "ana-lyrical," as they engage both analytical critical thinking and lyrical musicality in their wording. "Crescendo" and "Circles" are two of the many clear examples of this approach in Finalists.

There are many dozens of other fine, enjoyably intelligent poems in the book. They often play one kind of diction against another. "Hang On" opens the volume with an "unlikely eye" and what it notices: like an empty shopping cart / parked on a ledge / above a freeway." The poem moves from this social-symptom image to contemplation of the beauties of a barnacle. "Ceremonial" juxtaposes some chemistry of poisons with a critique of communion. "My Place" examines emotion as if "from a call center perspective." But the one the New Yorker put right in the middle of their article on Paul McCartney's premiere party for Peter Jackson's Let It Be (2021) film presents the complexity of Armantrout's analysis right where it is born—in "languaging." They show how something gets put into words and what the words have to do with how we see that thing. A little close reading can unfold this process in those two two-part poems for us, and show us how to sense it throughout Finalists.

The two parts of "Crescendo" are called "The Light 1" and "The Light 2." Both parts seem to look at the same striking light on some garden shrubs, part 2 perhaps benefiting from the more detailed portrayal of it in part 1. Part 1 turns from this perceptive portrait of late-afternoon light toward the emotion of missing something or someone. "I'll miss you," it says, "so much when you're gone"—a phrase worthy of a Hallmark poem, but then the "you" seems to refer to the view of the ornamental pear and mock orange in the light of a moment. "I'd miss you if I looked away / or if a cloud covered the sun" suggests the ephemerality of the pleasure subject to the light and its way of changing things. And following that, the poem declares "I miss this moment / as it goes on happening," and so it takes us to a larger philosophical or phenomenological framework of how we "miss" in a couple of ways all that is in the moment. That is certainly a whole poem right there, the kind we have been led over the years to expect: image, insight, and further perception—all within the "unlikely eye" and mind of the disciplined poet, laid out simply so that there is little doubt we "get it."

And then comes "The Light 2." Maybe it's the next page in the poet's notebook, the next take or attempt to not miss...