Remedies for Vertigo

Books go in search of their right readers, and Walter Bargen’s poems are looking for readers who understand the need of giving them the time and space to deploy their often oblique verbal machinery. Bargen’s poems usually seem plainspoken on first reading, straightforward narratives of working life, reflections on history or encounters with animals, mostly birds, that verge towards an uneasy recognition of the danger inherent simply in being alive. The poems, however, open up to deeper associations and subtleties on second and third readings.

The first poem in the book, “Playing Chicken,” from a sequence titled “Experiments in Flight,” serves as a sort of half-ironic ars poetica , though ostensibly an anecdote about a farm boy sent to catch a chicken for dinner and forced to approach the wary bird slantwise, as Emily Dickinson says one should stalk the truth of a poem.

He must act
as if he were headed in another direction,
and only coincidentally walking past
toward the shed for a shovel or to the storm cellar
for potatoes, all the time edging ever-so-slightly
sideways while staring straight ahead, but really
watching from the corner of his eye, then springing
and bending in one scooping motion into his arms,
a squawking, flapping chicken….

By the time a reader gets to the sixth and last poem in this opening sequence, it is clear that Bargen is thinking about more than the roundabout ways of slipping up on a poem. In “Flying on Instruments,” a man tries to rescue a trapped bird that misunderstands his kind intent and attempts to escape through a “shed’s cobwebbed window, leaving dusk/ streaked with dust and stars.” In a clear echo of the earlier poem, the man approaches the bird and “fails/ at rescue before grabbing it with one hand/ rather than scooping with two.” The man carries the caught bird to the shed’s door for release into the night and is

surprised
by its weight, or lack of weight, and feels
uncertain how tight to hold a handful of air.
He steps from the door into the dark
and he almost doesn’t notice his empty hands.

Bargen is not a poet who resorts to the easy moral, but this “door into the dark” and the man surprised by his “empty hands” surely suggests something about the ambivalence of weighing action and the significance of action against the world’s tendencies towards destruction and chaos, especially as a reader moving through Remedies for Vertigo encounters other “fail[ures]/ to rescue.” People in these poems try to save baby birds from cats, small snakes and nesting phoebes from cats, bumblebees from a glass jar, a cat from cold weather and a fallen tree. The best these attempts can do is to succeed temporarily. An “eight-inch-long, pencil-thin/ ring-neck snake,” rescued just before it is “playfully eviscerated” by a cat, “slithers into a brush pile and into another ambush” (“Minor Gods”).

In the human world, people often seem in need of rescue that never comes. “Civilized Sacrifice” moves from the attraction of climbing mountains—”I have climbed the backs of gods”—to a portrait of an Inca girl found naturally mummified in the Andes, five hundred years after she tumbled down a rocky slope to wait

in private, as we all do to speak with our gods, hoping
to appease, to know, to secure the illusive cosmic
machinery, and in that last numb moment her left
hand gripped her dress for the intervening centuries.

“Photographing the Wind” brings the potential rescuer’s powerlessness in the face of human tragedy into the contemporary world in a particularly harrowing way. The poem starts calmly, far from disaster, “sitting on the porch” and enjoying “a wholly comfortable wind,/ tailored and too expensive for the end/ of a ragged century,” but the century’s dynamics of danger and damage intrude on this peaceful scene in the form of a photograph of an African child dying in a famine, while a vulture waits nearby for a meal. Photographs, to borrow from Susan Sontag, are problematic, implicating the viewer as consumer of the image, while rendering intervention impossible, and this photograph refuses to avert its gaze, the poem’s precision becoming a sort of penance for the speaker’s comfortable distance from pain.

The naked child has drawn her knees up
to her chest, her forehead pressed against
years of parched ground, her forearms
stretched forward and away from either side
of her thinning body, her back to the steadfast bird,
guardian of this warring, drought-stricken plain.

And there is nothing to be done. The speaker knows “the bird can’t be blamed./ This is simply what it knows best,” and all we are capable of is to

want to believe in a wind
such as this one crossing the porch,
that refuses to carry a cry or spread
the scent of finality, and instead braids
strands of warmth through the cool
of evening, between the spaces of outspread
fingers, our hands failed kites,
our lives falling through this luxurious air.

It is a pleasure to watch the way Bargen’s repeated returns to his thematic interests (others include flight versus falling, flight as longing for the sacred) develop the overall structure of Remedies for Vertigo , so that it is a book , not merely a group of poems that happened to find their way between the same end-papers.

Walter Bargen has quietly produced ten collections of highly achieved poetry during the past couple of decades, and Remedies for Vertigo may be his best. Readers who live with it long enough to grow a feel for the echoes between poems and for the music of Bargen’s voice—which underpins the book’s larger architecture—will be more than satisfied.
For those of you who are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to have a copy of Remedies for Vertigo, you might find this review interesting.  No, I do not know this person and I did not pay to have this written. This review appears in www.Thepedestalmagazine.com , issue No. 38.