Book Review: Companion Grasses (Brian Teare)

Reviewed by Sheila Black

It is exciting to review the work of a poet who keeps changing his or her project, keeps growing. Brian Teare when I first read him–perhaps even in poems in journals before the publication of his first collection, The Room Where I was Born, had the large marquee talent and ear of a son of the South–the long unreeling line, the implacable grace of phrase, the pure even lush imagery. That first collection with its stories of incest, abuse, lust was almost confessional or post-confessional in its use of stories--its emphasis on the white-hot heat of love, cruelty, desire. It was risky, daring, honest work that focused on the personal:

If I had what you might call a "heart," it be junked
cars, antique trash whose backseats we fucked in. Vinyl

split by weather and nesting, mouse piss in winter.

"Against Abstraction."

Yet even then Teare appeared unusually concerned with what perspective might give or take away–with how one might assess an experience, and where the self shone out, where the self dissolved. The book used myth and fairy tale to simultaneously enlarge, distort, and explore the boundaries of the personal. Word like "border," "boundary," "liminality" (from the latin word limen meaning "a threshold) seemed somehow vital to Teare's poems–both emotionally, in terms of embodiment and in terms of a kind of geography. Doors, shorelines, fences, bodies. The poems often appeared to ask "where do I end and the world begin" even as–in the first collection–the story was often about the self being suppressed, mutilated, subsumed or consumed, or conversely desired or desirous. If initially, Teare seemed headed for a career documenting the intensity of the encounter with self and world, a love poet, a poet of need and want, in the years since his work has exploded outward. His talent is as Large Marquee–by which I think I mean big and abundant–as ever, but the feel of his language has changed, become sparer, quiete,r though no less lethal. Companion grasses, for instance, takes on as its apparent subject that most humble plant form of our everyday experience–the grasses of meadow, field and marshland:

I've cut from summer
      as if a swatch were possible
      not collage exactly–m

Gnats hovered above dirt
      path between chaparaal
      (pretty word–Spanish–"evergreen oak")

("Quakinggrass")

This work reflects both the Black Mountain influence, and the long Buddhist poetic traditions of China and Japan. These poems present a muscular lineation that echoes Duncan-Olson-and-later-Synder innovations, with a focus on leading the reader through by breath, through their appearance on the page like a musical score. And yet something in Teare remains capacious, lush, almost nineteenth-century in his will to catalogue with an almost desperate specificity the very vastness of being and experience:

in the field   we dream
west;  how poppies up
toward orange;  heliotropic
a word yellow;  edge a furl

("The Field a Song" )

His determination to think hard about this in specific ways–and, even more specifically, how the "we" in our bodies, the "we" in the landscape, experience the "other " of land–makes this an unusually visceral volume of "nature poems," one emotionally grounded by the quixotic romantic and yet somehow for our times, quite essential task of seeing and/or defining our "companionship" –lovely 19th century word–with the non-human, the Companion grasses that organize this volume:

we "have to renounce projecting
      in the solitary manner the horizon

       of a world as transcendence,"
     as Irigaray argues;
       we have to hold it instead

     in our heads & hands
which would seem impossible

("Atlas Peak")

In this volume, the cataloguing becomes a love song and the love song becomes a simultaneous celebration and lament. Last but hardly least, Companion grasses is also a paean to–that other 19th century trope–the imagination. Teare book is Emersonian, but also–and this is where it is even a little heartbreaking to review–limed with loss, which is to say notes from a crisis, notes in which "self" and "land" is an elegiac dance, or one becoming rapidly so, hovering on the edge of collapse. No accident that elegies predominate here:

He died & lamplight
that night brought out against fog its grid of gambits,

each street a perfect winter
dissembled: pure effect,

after that, anything outside
all scumble : marine layer a low hoever

("Star Thistle")

As the book progresses, Teare's listing of and listening to landscape becomes ever more a lament or a reckoning with death. Not only the planetary inconceivable death–the loss of habitat, of our very Companion grasses, but also, as in the poem quoted above, "Star Thistle" and "Atlas Peak" the ambitious elegy that companions it, personal loss. The two poems were written after the deaths of Teare's friend Reginald Shepherd and his father. What is daring or unusual is how these losses are paired so closely with an inquiry into mapping landscape, the natural world, and through this focus, the deaths become more felt, but in a slightly defamiliarized context, one in which, as in the great calm late poems of Basho or Issa, the speaker remains persistently unsurprised by human loss, but instead places it in the larger landscapes of our world.

Perhaps as a result of this refusal to write simply from the personal, familiar "humanist" perspective, the most devastating moments in this volume are often the quietest, the most plainspoken and uninflected–statements which move beyond an argument against grief into an apprehension of otherness as the condition of being:

Whitman says,

Now I am terrified
at the Earth, it is that calm and patient

as it undoes itself, undoing that toughens
to give way relentlessly to nothing

but its own propagation : the Earth
undoes itself as each life undoes itself & to what end

("Star Thistle")

One of the striking things about Teare's work in Companion grasses is his profound, almost, but not quite structuralist consideration of the materiality of language, his focus on the liminality of words–what do they delineate, what do they elide? We see this in the speaker's naming and cataloguing and also in the attention to word play, confusions of meaning, reflected meanings. For instance, in the long poem "Susurrus Stanzas" which anchors the first section of the book, Teare riffs on the homonyms "sight" and "site":

to write sight is itself
site's re-vision a visitor's
signature as plastic is
among stones

Language here really is a body–the speaker meditates on its roots, meaning evolving, meaning buried, meaning uncovered, or unrecovered. The words with which he maps the landscape(s) he moves through become a geography he speaks that is also revealed through the analogue of words. These words are simultaneously promising--appearing to deliver new imaginative vistas or "routes"--and problematic. Where, Teare asks, has the "situation" of "words" or "word pictures" allowed us to brutalize the "others" not only among us, but, equally, the "others" of the land, the non-human? How do the words and their roots help us map, however imperfectly, the history of those relationships–our companionship with earth itself and also its failures, its ruptures?

I was thrilled in this book to feel that these questions were not merely clever, or intellectually driven, but also had an essentially--to use some old-fashioned-words–ethical dimension, a dimension which Teare uses to lay out and amortize the terms of our commitments, our obligations in this regard as well as the breaking or abandonment of them. Not that his world-view does not let in the post-modern sense that there is no fixed position or truth–it certainly does-- but nor does it fall into that lazier position of insistent irony or ironic distance that too often contributes to a kind of weightlessness or play for play's sake in contemporary American poetry. His vision of language instead is somewhat reminiscent to me of what Herta Muller describes in her 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech "Every word knows something of a vicious circle:"

…I ate leaves and flowers so I would belong to them, because they knew how to live life and I didn't. I spoke to them by name: milk thistle was supposed to mean the prickly plant with milk in its stalk. But the plant didn't listen to the name milk thistle. So I tried inventing names with neither milk nor thistle: THORNRIB, NEEDLENECK. These made-up names uncovered a gap between the plant and me, and the gap opened up into an abyss: the disgrace of talking to myself and not to the plant. But the disgrace was good for me. I looked after the cows and the sound of the words looked after me. I felt:

Every word in your face,
Knows something of the vicious circle
But doesn't say it

The sound of the words knows that it has no choice but to beguile, because objects deceive with their materials, and feelings mislead with their gestures. The sound of the words, along with the truth this sound invents, resides at the interface, where the deceit of the materials and that of the gestures come together. In writing, it is not a matter of trusting, but rather of the honesty of the deceit…

In Teare's Companion grasses the interstice between "word" and "thing" becomes a thing of shining honesty in all its elaborate deceit, a way of evoking the othering that is the condition and the plague of being, from which springs curiosity, desire (in this book there are poems that demonstrate clearly that Teare has hardly lost his gift of being a poet of desire) and also tragedy. It is in the tragedy, the elegy Teare pens on the crest of our times–the elegy he simultaneously resists with every fiber of his being ---that makes this book such an alive and moving love poem to the nature in which we "are always striving for elsewhere as we are/ so much among phenomena ("The Very Air"). Paradoxically, this is where the "care" of his elegies to his lovers, loved ones and relations becomes a part of the argument of the book, an argument for the recognition of companionship as necessity, as a form of "being there,," and for the larger romance of a companionship, which tracks the experience of being with such care that one is longer posited as alone or at the epicenter of existence.

It is perhaps too common for reviewers to say you must read this book. We live in a clamorous time when such please are made so often as not to be credible. Yet Teare has the gift–and also–the solidity to create work that truly demands to be read. His mind is quiveringly alert, curious, and also with a kind of 19th century virtue–the type someone like George Elliot might be said to possess, or, to cite a different example, Melville, a virtue I would call simple stubbornness, a determination to look intently and know above all. The ethical concern he expresses is thus not didactic or off-putting, but rather one capable of engaging and pulling the fragmented "us' into a multi-faceted "we," difference preserved but somehow subsumed into the larger excitement of a serious mediation on being. Part of what makes Companion grasses so compelling is that comes from a very particular place and it its stubborn particularity–is he really writing a whole book on grasses?-- articulates the queer peculiarity of the universal. To crib a remark from Cathy Park Hong's often quoted essay on Adrienne Rich, this book was a tonic that "reawakened my fatigued consciousness, " my fatigued writerliness." I read it, and I wanted not merely to write–but to read, to think and think hard. This is the gift one would wish, I think, from any volume, but one only the poets who may truly be essential can deliver.