In blinding sunlight: We Are Pharaoh

Bethany Prosseda reviews Robert Fernandez's first book of poems, We Are Pharaoh (Canarium 2011), over at HTMLGIANT. Prosseda employs "the root" as a framework for Fernandez's lyric--the root has a dual ability to create unity and generate upheaval: "'A tangling of fruits and vases' where 'the shade is verboten.' In this act of tracing, and 'if [we] were to succeed,' we may discover what truths may lie 'in blinding sunlight' above the foundation of this collection (84)." She continues:

Landscape plays an essential role in the creation of lyric fragmentation that pervades the poems in We Are Pharaoh. Throughout the collection, Fernandez’s poems are in conversation with specific works of art by artists such as Velázquez, Sir Stanley Spencer, Botticelli, and others. The first such ekphrastic reference appears in “Polyhedron,” which is the first poem of the collection. Fernandez states, “Think of the bardo as forty-one or 2,700 intersecting tiles. The mosaic has a fundamentally Caribbean soul. The under-flesh of a fugue, of cosmic background radiation” (3). A polyhedron, like a mosaic, is a solid figure that possesses many faces. Given this definition, Fernandez subtly steers us to a method for reading his fragmented and comparatively mosaic-like poems; similar to a fugue, each fragment is an inchoate face or theme that gains definition when considered not as part, but as whole. The emergence of many roots or motifs throughout Fernandez’s collection is in direct conversation with the book’s title: We Are Pharaoh, which posits the notion of unity. While the lyric implies singularity—the lyric “I” versus the lyric “you”—the title signals a collective, represented by “we.” In this sense, the individual is pitted against the collective; the act of which suggests a struggle or upheaval in which absolute power is ultimately yielded to the collective. In this sense, art serves to represent the collective that is present within this collection.

In the poems’ ekphrastic moments, Fernandez often chooses to engage with landscape paintings by artists not known for their work with landscapes. In this detail alone there is an act of upheaval in the refusal to reinforce a dominant narrative. A common thread that runs throughout these paintings is the emphasis of background over foreground. In these works, background becomes foreground; similarly, Fernandez utilizes the practice of background as foreground throughout the poems in We Are Pharaoh, and in doing so creates an endless struggle in which the many voices present in Fernandez’s lyric are caught in a violent cycle: emerging only to be again subdued.

While many of Fernandez’s ekphrastic references will not be common knowledge for most readers, the gesture feels genuine. These references seem synesthetic in nature; they exist not because the poem seeks to describe these works, but rather because the landscape of the poem is reminiscent of the colors, textures, and qualities of composition depicted in these works of art. These references seek to create cohesion through visualization. However, this attempt to create unity proves contradictory in that these references also fork in another direction: toward an upheaval of the poems themselves. If Fernandez’s gesture is genuine, the involuntary emergence of art within the poems results in a disruption of the poem’s system.

Read the entire piece here.