Boston Review Reviews Caroline Bergvall's Drift

At Boston Review, Dana Levin writes about Caroline Bergvall's Drift (Nightboat Books 2014). To the point: "Bergvall has an ear for how the archaic and contemporary guises of English sound akin: a contemporary compound such as 'nightwacko' doesn’t sound odd in a work that uses the words 'wrecan' and 'gewacked.' In presenting these guises of English across Drift, Bergvall creates a sense of the past’s linguistic presence in the now." How else we drift:

Letters begin to drift, stutter as if buffeted, vanish as if hidden by fog or sea. By “Hafville 4” we come to dissolution: “c ld sc rc ly s th p p r th pr w f th b t t t t t t t t t t.” Once that “t” is unmoored from “boat,” it stutters alone for two and half pages. The resumption of words a few pages later is thrilling: “t t t t t t / t go / t go off / t go off course / t go off course hafville.” The engine of the poem tries to turn over, to get us going again. In this vein, the last Hafville poem attempts to call forth (with some anxiety) a way to escape the doldrums and sail forth:

When will the wind come? Where will the wind from
       come? . . .
Will it come from the soot, bringing droughts and
       epidemics? . . .
Will it come from the leak, bringing mass dispersion
       radiation?
When will the wind come? Where will the wind from come?

The poem asks: Are accident and catastrophe the only methods by which we move out of drift and stasis? It is a question that resonates in these times of being ecologically, technologically, on the brink. Though well aware that disaster can move us as strongly as rescue, Bergvall ultimately invokes “rumbly love!” as ignition’s exuberant key.

When we leave the “Seafarer” section, we encounter more flummoxing visuals. One looks like a grainy photographic close-up of an orange, but I was otherwise stumped and moved on to the enormously jarring “Report.” Instead of songs of drift, Bergvall here presents a factual report: “On March 27, 2011 a ~10m rubber boat overloaded with 72 migrants departed the port of Gargash . . . bound for Lampedusa Island, Italy 160 nm (nautical miles) to the north northwest.” It is a horrendous story: nobody rescues the people on this faltering raft, out of fuel and drifting off course, even though the Italian government and many other ships and aircraft track the raft’s travails. Only ten migrants survive. The story of such an event must be told, but I am not convinced Drift is the place to tell it. While “Report” is another lost-at-sea story, its abrupt swerve from the focus of “Seafarer” interrupts what I find is Drift’s most penetrating aspect—the way Bergvall appropriates and makes resonant for contemporary readers the timeless dreams and diction of the Viking-era skalds, those poets who gave us Beowulf and the Icelandic Edda.

More at Boston Review. At top: Bergvall in the live performance of Drift, courtesy of her website.