Owen Boynton
Reveries and Restorations

a review of Ben Mazer's Selected Poems (MadHat, 2017)

Ben Mazer's poems are controlled reveries. The reverie lends them their content; the control is achieved by both form and the manner, and occasional mannerism, of Mazer's voice. The touchstones for understanding the mannered style of reverie in which Mazer writes might include Edward Fitzgerald, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and Anthony Hecht. At times, they can seem buttoned-up, dandified, detached in their cosmopolitan perspectives. But the poise they maintain-and the poise that sometimes, dramatically, designedly, falter in their poetry-is required, we are felt, to master, and at times resist, the drift of imagination, which can threaten like an undertow or like mermaids singing from the waves.

Mazer's reveries move frequently towards thoughts of eternity, emptiness, the soul, beauty, and love. The words are worn, and some would say they are outworn; they have been retired from the field upon which many poets practice. Mazer lovingly restores them, vintage artefacts, which possess a functional grace as well as an antique aura.

Your long thin hands are warm and free
and dust of snow blows from the tree
that focuses the wind and light
from the far away of a winter night.

It seems to blow from the North Pole,
touch many an individual soul
in wooded houses far away,
where other lives and people stay.

But we are snowed in in the dark
when everyone is fast asleep
and all the world seems bare and stark
and buried in fresh snow very deep.

We light a candle, and surmise
the wonder in our gleaming eyes,
cast into an eternity
of love's bright lonely sympathy.

Mazer lets himself be brought there, to that final line, exposed and vulnerable in its romanticism, and he brings us readers with him. But he does not drown in the thought, or wallow there. The poem moves carefully, cautiously, self-consciously catching at "surmise" and in the off-rhyme of "eternity" and "sympathy." What's more, and what is perhaps the necessary grace for poetry that would achieve and sustain a sense of poise, of self-aware manners, is the presence of a natural, speaking human voice in Mazer's lines. Without voice, poise detaches from person; without voice inherent in its lines, a poet's attempt at poise will yield a lifeless exercise in diction, form, and style. Mazer politely insists that we hear. In the penultimate stanza, "snowed in in the dark" cannot be comprehended by eye alone, since only a voice can properly distinguish the doubled preposition. Similarly, the "very" of "fresh snow very deep" demands a sharp calibration of tone in the mind's ear.

Where Mazer's reveries are most intense, their lull and drag strongest, the poems can come wonderfully, momentarily unmoored and disoriented, and then recover themselves with dramatic effect. Take the first stanza of "Land's End":

The broad outlies shrink and descend
into the grotto where at land's end
the many pallored wait by the wall
of night blooming jasmine to recall
the terms of kisses and of promises
that no one misses fading to a turn
of honey briars where the shadows burn
an evanescent moment at the last
resort the present breaks into the past.

Something shifts in the syntax of the final line, setting it at odds with itself. But where does it alter? "At the last resort/ the present breaks into the past" or "where the shadows burn/ an evanescent moment at the last/ resort" followed by the final statement, "the present breaks into the past"? The return to the present resolves the stanza in an irresolution of syntax. It is possible to see in the moment either a reassertion of control, the poet dissolving a reverie that threatens to subsume the poem, or else a loss of control, the poet unable to sustain the reverie any longer.

Reverie, in this collection of poems, is what happens to Mazer; it is not an achievement or a curse, though it might feel blissful or terrifying. Most of the time, though, the effect is to displace the poet, to detach him from the particular situation or environment or world, so that the poem hovers above it, looking down, or looking out, before returning:

I thought of falling out into the sea.
The ocean is blue, but many shades of blue
and white and green, and black and grey, combined
in motion, rising towards us on a page
behind which light hides echoes of nothing.
Nothing is all we know of what is there.
It seems so heavy, heavier than dreams,
as deep as dreams would ever think to go,
in the black murky movement that's not there.
What ever comes behind has come before
and either is or has or hasn't been,
it's not for us to say. If we're not here
historically, life is happening elsewhere.
All is a paradigm, the diver's bow
is nothing if not everything we know.
I want to turn the page. I am afraid
of what is out there, the horizon, ships-
depthless darkness, uncertain vantages.
I pulled back from the wind as from a nail,
and turned to go. There on some long tables
(I had been squeezed between them and the wall
when I had had my vision of my fall)
whose sides were built up so that they were bins,
I saw enormous quantities of slips
of paper, very thin, filed in long rows.
I opened one to see what slips they were.
Upon each one, and now I saw the ships
that must have been as real as you or I,
the name recorded of each voyager
transgressing the horizon on a ship
who entered here, each entry had a slip-
a continent of ghosts had landed here,
thick on the tables, only the fog moved
and the long wharf stayed up and swayed in place.

The risk of complacency is courted in the cinch of the couplet: "All is a paradigm, the diver's bow/ is nothing if not everything we know" but then the next line refuses to let the thought settle, or to settle into the rhythm of the thought: "I want to turn the page. I am afraid/ of what is out there, the horizon, shops-" The statement of that fear is coldly diagnosed, so that the experience of the fear is surveyed rather than relived in the poem. The poem is free to visit and depart even from the poet's feelings. In that freedom, we are asked to feel the poet's isolation as well as liberation. As he peruses the records of passengers who have disembarked, we are reminded of the gulf between Mazer and those travelers, propelled as they were by necessity or desperation; but the consequence of that gulf is to make Mazer too seem a ghost, whose reality in the scene fades even as he allows his imagination to wander into the reality of their lives. The ambiguity of "swayed in place" speaks to the experience of the poem: to remain in one place oscillating, directed by an external force, inspiration or chance; but also to sway in regards to place, oscillating from one place to another, swaying through places, while remaining centered in self-identity.

If I were to recommend a single poem to a reader who wanted to understand Mazer's trajectory and sources, his idiosyncrasy and his intentions, I would point them to "An After Dinner Sleep," which imagines a figure very much like T.S. Eliot, both addressing him and inhabiting his imaginative space:

Unreality is not pushed back,
but like a fiction emerges, unreferenced
except in qualities or sense-data,
unverifiable in their own closed systems.
This is enough to posit they are true,
or in some sense neither true nor false,
but welcome enough, for their indications.
Take for example two ends of a street,
from one end which (and which end is it really)
out of the London fog our man emerges,
a complex of unbound hallucinations,
completed bearings or desires
that can't account for outside precedence.
Why should the dream not murder the real man,
or seem to do so, if but fractionally,
as if to say I've of it what I can,
when there's no reader but in lucubrations.

The discursive voice of the lines is common to Mazer's work, so that even when they speak of "a complex of unbound hallucinations," or "uncompleted bearings or desires," they do not submit to their logic and control; the poetry calmly assesses its own reverie. That curious detachment on reverie, curious both because the detachment is strange and because the detachment permits Mazer's extended attention, is Mazer's version of Eliot's early, Laforgue-derived irony. Although the gap between reverie and reflection-on-reverie is found everywhere in the poems, it is made a subject of indirect focus in "An After Dinner Sleep" because it is a poem that dreams about Eliot dreaming, sometimes in lines that are intended to recall us to Eliot's poetry.

Reverie, then, is Mazer's subject matter, and not his mode. The mode, his attitude towards reverie, is instead something akin to stoicism, though it can feel indifferent and bemused, often at once, as if unsure of what to make of the disorientation he experiences. In this, Mazer sometimes seems a traveler through his own dreams, not possessing them, but also not self-possessed enough to disown them or to suggest an alternative. He is helplessly, but not unhappily, beholden to them like a man waiting for a train that arrives late and offers an itinerary different from the ticket purchased. Mazer is divided from his dreaming self, without conflict or un-ease, but without the complacency of being at home. The fate of the figure in "An After Dinner Sleep" is Mazer's, and the record of learning to live with that fate, not overcoming or denying it, but accepting it as the terms of existence, is the Selected Poems he has written:

The headlines of the newspapers averred
a unified delight in the deferred
long hour of homecoming. All were heading home:
by days, and hours, changes at railway stations,
out to the provinces, with a little patience.
He closed his book, and leaned back in his seat,
and saw the thousand images repeat.
For him there never could be going home.
There was the eucharist. There was the poem.

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Owen Boynton teaches English at Morristown-Beard School in Morristown, NJ. He received his PhD in English from Cornell University. He writes wide-ranging, informal literary criticism on his blog, Critical Provisions.

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