There’s a dreamy and appealing naturalism to Alan Felsenthal’s elegy, Hereafter. The poems are electric and vivid, but the book never romanticizes suffering. Voices in these poems have a sadness to them, a melancholy that retains some almost mystical buoyancy. But never treacly. Or maybe it’s just that this mourning is still tempered by a hard sweetness, the sweetness of a friendship that doesn’t end even though one friend has passed on. Here’s how “Cover Letter” begins:
just say my subject is grief
it comes as a strike
leaves stricken
like an aircraft
afflicted
as Jupiter is
in opposition to Mars
and a few lines later, ends:
I can keep this up
as long
as death
a book
unreadable from this distance
go try anyway
the rain heaves
something is not shut
the library downstairs only goes to S
Against closure. But not out of indignancy, out of the necessity of representing that. Mourning itself opens onto a gorgeous braiding of themes: not only the past—“the library”—but also the self’s relation to that past, and the way it bonds us, like it or not, to the present. This partly accounts for the sea-faring themes, the sense of a voyage throughout the book—a voyage begun, just finished, or never taken. Poems like “Memory of the Deeps,” “A Man at Sea on Earth Undone by Disturbance When He Appears Most Anchored,” and “Earthward” catch the longing of being caught in time, in time’s motion and time’s taking. “Hereafter” refers to both a place, life after life, and a marker in time—a signal that what comes next will be changed by a great change.
Felsenthal’s sense of humor hotwires the whole project: there are darkly—heartbreakingly—funny poems, like “Ordering a Casket from Amazon Prime,” or poems that respond with a smile to other poets’ visions of the Hereafter, like “If You Want to Live Alone in a Bee-Loud Glade.” Self-reflection holds these themes together such that they veer away from narcissism, and don’t lose a painful but tender concern for being:
In the ailanthus tree I saw myself
wafting between branches and their
unfallen flowers. I balanced
in the air, perfecting a kind of nonchalance
nobody needs anymore. I lacked the
analogy for what I hadn’t felt yet. I tried
to make myself predictable, banal, and
for years was my own analyst. In front
of where I waited I could hear rumbling
like water rushing through a canal …
In the book’s stunning third and final section, “Is My Higher Soul Speaking?” the poet leaves us awash in language that is both ironic and earnest, dreamy and grounded—and it’s a culminating feat:
The spellbinder
childhood mind was
when we
whispered behind paper masks
when we
faced east without knowing
Could be the invisible forest
surrounded our family tree
Could be
what we
longed for
our neighbors had
respondence
a mind of knowledge indestructible
to father the central fire
to discharge
luminously
thought as a weapon
Here Felsenthal has drawn from the resources of elegy and pure description a kind of philosophical lyricism. Over the dozen pages that follow, he tries to locate living after a hard goodbye. Friendship a bond, he writes earlier, that holds together the universe. He does not posit mind versus body, but the calculating willful mind as having a particular power over the dreaming, unambitious, vividly alive beingness we might call “soul”:
The mind’s the soul’s landlord
No wonder the soul moves on
and a page later:
Mind flogs the heart
How can the heart tend
a garden in our time
The green thumb in a
thumbscrew as the earth melts
and yet still, Felsenthal sees the promise in living, and it’s the promise of his somehow untrammeled sensibility, his poetry both preface and catharsis:
The air dressed up in prayer
has no age
carries bliss
and in the same
gust sadness
JESSE NATHAN: Your poems wander in the cities and the country. The sensibility feels capacious and dreamlike. The imagined world is our real and various world. I’m curious, what does “pastoral” mean to you?
ALAN FELSENTHAL: I think the pastoral mode is too varied to be reduced to a static definition. Each generation defines the pastoral for their time. Virgil didn’t live through the Industrial Revolution, but the Romantics did. We’re living into a future in which the Arctic Ocean is ice-free. Critics have claimed that the pastoral is dead, but I think its requirements have evolved and it would now be called something else. Is it anti-pastoral, necropastoral, post-pastoral, urban pastoral, radical pastoral? These terms already exist. Someone else can tell me which one applies to Hereafter.
Whatever the pastoral is, it must be more than simple and nostalgic. I first started thinking about this because I loved reading William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, which regards that mode as “putting the complex into the simple.” Joyelle McSweeney has written about the necropastoral as a political-aesthetic zone where human depredations are inseparable from an experience of “nature” as toxic and mutable. She is showing how the pastoral mode can evolve in opposition to, and acceptance of, human catastrophe. These aren’t simple concerns.
I came to the pastoral elegy by wondering: What is the mode that will help me grieve? I’m not looking for closure, just a way to get through, to continue living among the dying. Grief has always been linked to the pastoral—like the dirge in which the mourner appeals to Nature. The mourner wants Nature to do something, wants the flock to learn to weep. My approach, on the other hand, involves how indifferent the wild is to the mourner, and how that indifference is also beautiful because it is autonomous and more accurate to life. That life continues despite how complicated grief can be.
I like what Aldo Leopold called an “ecological conscience”—a person as a citizen of the earth, not a master of it. The sea is unmasterable, which makes it an infinite spring of metaphor. Shelley’s phrase—“the unpastured sea”—there’s something there that speaks to what we’re talking about.
The sea appears quite a bit in this book. So does the moon, which beckons it. A surging wave may look harmless until its backwash pulls you under. There are forces we should never mess with, whose powers eclipse our own. I grew up near the sea. It’s always somewhere in the background, even when I’m in New York City writing about the desert.
In between the images in this book, collapse awaits—emotional, physical, ecological. Paraphrase is the enemy of poetry, so I won’t try to explain these poems. The hope is for the reader to be moved by a world imagined distinctly.
Jesse Nathan’s first book of poems is Eggtooth.