Ed Roberson’s new book

Ed Roberson’s new book of poems, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), opens with these lines:

I entered as a man enters

a labyrinth,      seeing

from hairline fracture to abyss

the magnified whisper

of memory      not finish its sentence

whole [...]

Roberson is the master of a hauntingly meditative rhythm of thought and perception, precisely scored (musically) by means of the poetic line. How can thought and perception be anything but meditative? you ask. What I am trying to articulate is my sense of an utterance that unwinds syntactically not in the order of the expected narrative structuring of a personal anecdote or of reference to a personal circumstance, but rather, in the form of the poet telling what he (or I should say his poetic alter ego, his poetic self, the self created in and by the poem) is thinking while simultaneous questioning and responding to his own thought.

Roberson’s interiority makes it possible for him to write “Somewhere I’m the disappointment in myself,” when he is in “A Bout Of” (the title) “One of those malarias of memory” (the first line). “Somewhere” seems somewhere else, still within him. “You’ve gained the language used for not speaking” (“A Small Residue”), he writes to himself–ruefully yet not without a hint of the achievement of this. He does not say that it is a language not used for thinking.

He has a gift of startling and just metaphors. To characterize the sudden access of an unexpected thought, he writes of a “Manic Tack” (which in the poem eventuates in manic talk):

When you flip the side of the sail

the wind is in     –I’ve heard you use

the word–     but the pop      that whack sound

it makes and the boat jumps forward

what is that?       –that’s how it feels

when      what one opinion says is a chemical

change in my brain and next thing

I know my clothes are all over

the room like angry whitecaps

my face near being a wave off

my head [...]

And he writes:

The shadow barcode of the tiger–

scanned through

the grasses

we are just now understanding

that we too register in

the deeper darkness–

turns up a receipt

statement of experience

somehow we know

has some due.

This poem makes several turns, bringing into articulation additional metaphors for what is finally a sense of existential, even if not political, freedom.

Roberson has produced acrobatic leaps and counter-leaps of thought, including a somewhat startling arrival, in some poems, at a bluntness about race in America. “The Depths of an Old Wrong” and “A Small Residue,” which I quoted above, are mostly about “what white folks will say” and what, in response, Roberson will … “sing.”

In other poems his compressed, sometimes halting, sometimes rushing syntax and thought reach inward from episode and image to the very edge of being, and of being alive; I’m thinking of the five short poems that follow the overall title of “Rush,” and also of the autobiographical sequence “’There are many stops along the way ‘.” Roberson’s sense of the ultimate justification for and of a life is at once a kind of doubt and an exhilarating doubleness of thought; he says one thing and his very own lines may both fulfill it and oppose it, in the way they move.

And all of that is in part one of this two-part book. Read into part two and you will find much more—a way of writing that seems to have gone around a corner from part one. Graceful, and no less a close study of the edge between life and death, but different in tone.