New Reviews Up at Jacket2 Include David James Miller on Joseph Massey

David James Miller reviews Joseph Massey's latest book, At the Point (Shearsman 2011), for Jacket2. Astutely, Miller notes that "this collection finds not just an increasing awareness of the immediate presence of the Californian coastal landscape where he lives, but an active restraint in the face of the landscape." More:

...In Massey’s refusal to speak for the landscape, the world is left with its own sense of immediacy and power. While the “impulse / to speak” is acknowledged in the opening lines, this impulse is restrained in the face of the overwhelming presence of the landscape itself. There’s no melodramatic touch lent to the lines; there’s no symbolic import: the quiet insistence of the world speaks for itself. At the poem’s close, we are left with the acknowledgement that:

… The impulse

is enough.

Though the poem’s core is framed by an admission of the desire 'to say,' Massey’s refusal to take something away from the environment by speaking for it and bringing something else into the space of the poem, marks a crucial aspect of Massey’s work in At the Point. Here, it is enough that the impulse itself exists; nothing more need be said.

A similar moment appears in “The Dunes.” After a handful of couplets given to the description of a beach and the debris found there in the morning, Massey writes:

The panic
that would

pull me
under

somehow
recedes as

something’s
shadow

clambers
from a tire-

flattened
tuft of

bush lupine. (66–67)

Again, we find the recognition and tension of the meaning-making self again giving way to the sheer presence and fact of the surrounding environment — in this moment, a shadow clambering “from a tire- // flattened / tuft of // bush lupine.” Massey navigates the temporal space in which the environment and the self take part. In this space, little is fixed. Yet what remains is the fact of the world itself, its presence in the face of all else.

Read the full review here. Other new reviews just up include Lawrence Giffin on Jon Leon, Elizabeth Savage on Colleen Lookingbill, and Jeff Alessandrelli on Joshua Ware's Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley.