BOOK REVIEW: Poetry by Larissa Szporluk in "Dark Sky Question" (07/04/99)

BOOK REVIEW: Poetry by Larissa Szporluk in "Dark Sky Question"

by Rachel Safko

BOSTON - Samuel Johnson once described Alexander Pope's poetic genius as "always investigating, always aspiring in its widest searches, still longing to go forward in its highest flights, still wishing to be higher, always imagining something greater than what it knows." While poet Larissa Szporluk has unveiled her own unique and distinctly modern genius in "Dark Sky Question," for which she was awarded the 1997 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, the sentiment, nevertheless, applies. The evidence lies in the poem "Biology of Heaven," where Ms. Szporluk describes herself in heaven without support "where the totality/of light is frightening."

As her description may suggest, the poem has large thematic ambitions, typical of a poetic series that aims for the sublime. Ms. Szporluk frequently inhabits the subjunctive; the voice in this poem literally descends from a heaven she has imagined. Inverting a situation like this is classically Ms. Szporluk. While her approach may seem somewhat oblique at times, Ms. Szporluk is probing a very labyrinthian region between heaven and earth, and actually planting some flags.

Because she is asking some complicated questions about the self's relationship to God, many critics have regarded her as a religious or metaphysical poet. Others suggest she is writing in the tradition of Dickinson or Plath. Metaphysical, no doubt, topically religious, often dark and compressed, "Dark Sky Question" undoubtedly creates its own rhythms.

Poems in "Dark Sky Question" often strain against each, sustaining the volume's atmosphere tension. As a result of this strain, "Dark Sky Question" often feels as if it is revising its own dialectic. In "Benefits of Drowning," Ms. Szporluk uses the following metaphor to communicate this endless emotional struggle: "They say there is an end/but I go round and round/with unscrupulous desires/in regions of my throat."

Once you are caught in this emotional carousel, it is virtually impossible to get off. Despite the frustration that accompanies this sense of bring "half torn in the clouds, half-sated" Ms. Szporluk undergoes an emotional transformation that captivates and ultimately transforms the reader who is "lulled by the sound/of the carriage, pulled by the waist,/then raised, a gift to the hottest place,/life's dark weight/sublimed into violet." The violet Ms. Szporluk describes is no simple region. Like the regions in her throat, this violet sublime is a psychological maelstrom, the unfathomably complex realm of human consciousness pushed to its darkest extremes. A siren in dangerously frightening straits, Ms. Szporluk lures readers to Scylla and Charybdis, but the experience is somehow illuminating, surprisingly redemptive.

No doubt, Ms. Szporluk is aggressive in her pursuit of complicated truth. Describing a character in "Libido," she effectively describes her own poetic method: "asks around, asks how/where do we feel to find who we are." In an effort to find the source of things, Ms. Szporluk "listens to parrots/true inner birds never at rest," a testament to the spiritual momentum in this series which is ultimately that desire hath no rest.

Whether she is or is not a religious poet in the traditional sense, Ms. Szporluk is thoroughly and constantly revising her faith in the human spirit, so ruthless in her revision that these poems are frequently pushed to the edge of despair. In "Ignis Fatuus," translated from the Latin as foolish, clumsy, light, Ms. Szporluk is brutally honest about her own incapacities: "I can't cope in the bog light. I was made big and not great. Moths swarmed in from the plains,/wings of all sizes./And to think I did the same,/half-cry of a star/whose boundaries were torn."

The bog light she describes, this ignis fatuus, is the violet sublime, the maelstrom of consciousness where she is half-torn, sounding her half-cry of a star. Though it is fully submerged in the bog, Ms. Szporluk's voice emerges with blazing clarity. However bog-like or surreal the landscape of her poetry may be, she is brilliantly lucid, a thoroughly impressive achievement considering the elusiveness of her subject.

"Dark Sky Question": the title itself seems to refute all the answers, deny any hope of illumination.

Seems to refute. Seems to deny. But Ms. Szporluk disperses the fog with language so sharp, so incisive, you believe her implicitly when she drives the stake in, the solid word, the solid line which makes her claim for poetry: "Part of the sky is all of the sky./The rest is wasted."

"Dark Sky Question" may not and cannot realize its unattainable spiritual ambitions. Nothing can. But Ms. Szporluk ravages the violet sublime with so much energy that she generates a stunningly vibrant language in the process - so vibrant, in fact, that the half-cry for a star is enough.

Rachel Safko received her degree in English from the University of Virginia. She is currently enrolled in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

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