The Sentence
By Morri Creech
(LSU Press, 100pp., $19.95)
Flip over a copy of the average poetry book today and you will find a twenty-year old photo of a comfortable academic who was long-listed for a biggish book prize in the late ’90s or early ’00s and settled for a handshake deal with a university press to put out a spiritual Xerox of the almost-winner every six semesters. Thumbing through the pages of this overgrown sub-genre’s latest specimen, you will find that you can almost hear the poet’s inner voice concocting every poem in turn: I don’t suppose I’ve put my spin on the Large Hadron Collider yet… I could probably squeeze one more poem out of Granddad’s run-in with those union busters… Oooh, what about a sequence of epistolary COVID poems? Encountered on the same shelves as a couple dozen books like this, Morri Creech’s new collection, The Sentence, stands out like a coyote in a dog park.
Despite his timeline and his teaching perch, Morri Creech does not read like a typical university poet of our era: Creech grumbles like a prophet of the locust-chewing old school. While his comrades in the poetry/drama/large print section are busy cranking out erasures of the tax code and wry odes to their benign cysts, Creech has harder questions on his mind. He calls his shot in the first two lines of The Sentence: “Death is a nagging grit, that grain I keep / worrying furiously into the pearl of art—” The rest of the book bears out this promise. In the best poems, the result is mesmerizing:
He focused on his work, his kids, his wife,
as though he didn’t trail its wake behind
the half of him he’d come to call “my life,”
the part that had a job, three kids, a wife,
and, here and there, a good time with his friends.
This was the half he’d come to call his life;
the other kept pursuing its own ends.
On nights when he was out late with his friends
it opened beneath the streetlamp like a rose
and seemed to be pursuing other ends;
where does it go, he thought, when my eyes close?
It opened beneath the streetlamp like a rose
and followed him to sleep without his knowing.
What happens to it after my eyes close?
The question troubled him. And it kept growing.
These lines are from “The Shadow,” one of two pantoums in the collection. The pantoum is a form so tedious and cumbersome that it is usually relegated to fourth-grade poetry “units” and MFA-sanctioned experiments in mimetic repetition (It’s supposed to be annoying, because climate change is annoying). And yet Creech has found a way to make this stale form haunting. In The Sentence, he takes up a variety of forms, some voguish (ghazals, prose poems, unconventional sonnets) and some decidedly square (heroic quatrains, blank verse, conventional sonnets).
But whether he’s flirting with free verse or stropping his meter like a razor, Creech’s vision never falters. As often as not, its focus is, as in “Grievance,” the emptiness of the poet’s own identity:
I am tired of having a name.
Every time I wake
it grinds its teeth
like the gears of a moving van,
and it smells of soot,
like the sweat of being a man,
and it weighs like a stone
I carry for no one’s sake.
At times one gets the feeling that, for Creech, poetry is a means not so much of self-expression as of self-preservation. Rilke asked his young poet if he would die without writing poems. Without writing poems, one fears, Creech might wink out of existence altogether.
At times this dire pitch has its drawbacks, as when the poems veer into loopy conceits—“I wait to feel the present / raise anchor again slowly / / from dark estuaries / of pockets and silk collars” (“Suit”)—or glib street-preacherisms—“I’m the shrine of late-night masturbation. / I’m the postmodern version of God (“Search”). But such excesses are rare, and if they are the price for the eerie intensity of the book as a whole, then they are more than worth it.
Creech occasionally writes poems that take part in the tradition of Western religious poetry, and more often than that, he writes poems that address this tradition without declaring their commitments. And even in his most explicitly religious poems, consolation can be hard to come by. For Creech the action of the divine seems to render the world more—not less—bewildering, as in his sonnet “Beginning,” which recounts the final moments of the biblical creation:
That day God spun the wind to tick time forward.
It teased gold from the leaf, flung spores and seeds.
The beasts’ fur billowed. A long-legged shorebird
swung its hunger above a froth of reeds.
The restless trees leaned—bent—all pitch and wring.
Not yet the serpent’s tryst in the grass. Not yet
Abel slain in the field, the Lord’s voice calling.
Still, earth toiled at its purposes…
One hears, in this acknowledgment of suffering to come, an echo of the Trojan War as Yeats foreshadowed it in “Leda and the Swan”: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” Like Yeats, Creech adapts the form to his own purposes, combining an English sonnet’s opening quatrains with an Italian sonnet’s closing sestet. Also like Yeats, Creech incarnates life’s cruelties in the figure of a bird. But where Yeats attributes such violence to the gods directly, Creech’s watchmaking divinity is more catalyst than cause: “And when the vole twitched in the marsh hawk’s gaze / God turned away from that place of moth and rust / as wings beat toward the heaven of the blood.”
The Sentence is both a beautifully written book and a tastefully designed object. Creech’s last three collections were put out by Waywiser, an honorable poetry press which—in spite of its miserly design template and baffling commitment to Optima—has managed to publish a great number of outstanding poets in its twenty-odd years of existence. The Sentence is the first of Creech’s books to be published by LSU Press, a university press with the kind of robust production team that comes with a century of institutional support. But even if, for instance, “Beginning” is a flawless poem, its corresponding end note mistakenly attributes the phrase “moth and rust” to Matthew 16, rather than to Matthew 6—a trivial error, though one of two (“Dalia Lama”) I found while preparing this review. In any case, as a long-time admirer of Morri Creech’s poetry, I confess it is a relief to pick up a book of his that looks like it was designed by a human being. Small matter if it was also edited by one.
I have written elsewhere that Creech’s collections often favor ambition over unity. In The Sentence, he uses two of three eponymously titled poems as bookends to the collection and the third—a longer sequence about Osip Mandelstam—as a sort of ballast in the middle. But here, as in Creech’s other books, it is the individual poem that leaves the deepest impression, rather than any framing device or book-spanning conceit. Take the epigram “Perils of Wisdom,” one of seven that make up the sequence “Twilight”:
Though honeybees retreat into the hive
and lilies’ throats constrict at close of day,
the best of fates is still to be alive
for all the honeyed words the ancients say.
With such a dense and seamless use of assonance (-bees/-treat, lil-/-strict/still, Though/throats/close, day/fates/anc-/say), consonance (hon-/hive/hon-, -bees/best/be, -treat/-to/throats/ fates/-cients, lil-/still/-live/all, con-/close, -strict/best/still), meter (unvarying iambic pentameter), and rhyme (abab, all true), these lines are so crisp and harmonious, so convincing upon contact with the ear, that it hardly bothers me that I cannot quite disentangle their analogy. Though day finds simpler organisms at their best… life finds us at our best? Yet to replace “Though” with the more logical “As” would somehow rob the poem of its charm. The last line, “for all the honeyed words the ancients say,” directs the reader to classical antecedents (the author’s note cites Yeats’ rendering of Sophocles, though lines from Theognis and Alcman also come to mind), but the mention of daylilies sends me back to Creech’s earlier poem, “Night-Blooming Cereus,” which lent its subject to the cover of his first book and made a reappearance in his second. As with Homer’s Achilles, who chooses a glorious death over a quiet life in one epic and recommends the opposite in the next, Creech’s speaker seems to mean what he says in the moment, if only in the moment. Even the punny title, on second glance, suggests there is danger in overthinking such a question. Cleanth Brooks would tell us the poem is rightly unparaphrasable, and if it is unanalyzable to boot, then I count this a victory of readerly pleasure over critical approbation.
The longest poem in the collection, and perhaps the best, is “Near the Summer Pavilion,” a loosely narrative sonnet sequence in which a middle-aged man takes his wife and sons on vacation to the same beach where he spent summers as a boy. The subject may be ho-hum, but the formal choices are brilliant. “Near the Summer Pavilion” is not quite a crown of sonnets, but it includes the “master sonnet” conventional to the heroic crown. Creech’s innovation is to place this master sonnet not at the end of the sequence but at the beginning. Thus nearly every line of the poem’s first sonnet reappears as the first line of a subsequent sonnet, just as one’s memories of a place seed one’s experience in the present. The full power of “Near the Summer Pavilion” emerges from the constellation of its fourteen parts, but having spoken elsewhere about the poem as whole, I will focus here on the exemplary seventh sonnet:
The fortune tellers don’t have much to tell:
you met a girl in school and married her,
then hunkered down, a diver in a bell.
The years from then to now are just a blur.
You glimpse her leaning out on the deck rail
and close your eyes. She’s still the girl you knew,
isn’t she? Brown hair. Willowy and pale.
Sometimes you wonder what she thinks of you.
As for the future, it’ll look much like this,
except you’ll both be older, and she’ll seem
reserved somehow, more distant, like she keeps
a secret to outlast your carelessness.
This afternoon you’ll watch her as she sleeps
and reach for her, then leave her to her dream.
The remark “The fortune tellers don’t have much to tell” serves as a reminder not only of the speaker’s past but also of the poem’s, having first appeared as a line in the opening sonnet. The speaker’s milestones have been so unremarkable, so seemingly foregone, that even fortune tellers seem unable to distinguish his present from his past, and the reader is made to struggle in like wise. (Reading “Near the Summer Pavilion,” I more than once heard the last line of The Great Gatsby lapping at my inner ear.) But while such games with form and framing would be sufficient stimulation for some poets, Creech is not content merely to write a poem about which smart things might be smartly said. He seems to care whether it will actually make the reader feel something: “This afternoon you’ll watch her as she sleeps / and reach for her, then leave her to her dream.” His portrait of marital alienation is agonizing in its restraint, all the more so for suggesting that things might—almost—have gone a different way.
The Sentence came out in September of last year, and to my knowledge it has received just two small reviews in equally petite publications. Such neglect is appalling, but I can think of three possible explanations.
First, Morri Creech the person is not a very interesting character. A middle-aged family man who teaches poetry in Charlotte, North Carolina, he has no gripping personal history to speak of, no personal or artistic schtick. He is not active on social media. He does not publicize his political views. As a poet, it would seem, he has little to offer but the quality of his poems.
The second reason I can imagine that so few reviews of The Sentence have appeared is that the book itself lacks a readily pitchable premise. It has one or two identifiable themes (the opacity of the self, the inescapability of fate) and it possesses a loose formal continuity (meter, rhyme, poems in sections, poems called “The Sentence”). But as a whole, The Sentence is less a project than a compilation. There is no obvious hook, or moral, or identifiable occasion for talking about this book. What is its special relevance today? Nothing. Worse, one imagines these poems will possess no less urgency ten, or twenty, or fifty years from today.
The third explanation for such a critical oversight is the simplest and the most dispiriting. The poems in The Sentence are not merely good, they are good in a way that does not especially require critical interpretation. As John Gardner suggests in The Art of Fiction, it is to the distinct disadvantage of poets like Morri Creech that his poems, though skillful and complex, are more or less available to the average thoughtful reader, leaving unlucky reviewers with little to add. A critical darling like Ben Lerner, whose latest collection was rapturously endorsed by at least a dozen outlets, including every major national periodical, might be likened to an inventor of ingenious puzzle boxes, accessible—and of interest—to none but the elect. By contrast, Morri Creech is closer to a brilliant pastry chef, whose one-of-a-kind confections, replicable by none, are thoroughly enjoyable by all.
In the eponymous closing poem of The Sentence, the speaker considers a poet and his reflection: “the truth was a sentence they composed together / for no one else but the quiet of the house.” Reviewing poems, like writing them, is generally a thankless, solitary task. For this reason, most reviewers—Who can blame us?—take it chiefly as an opportunity to show off their own dazzling style. But to review Morri Creech’s The Sentence is to admit that one can do only so much to relate the book’s effects at second hand. You will have just to read it for yourself.