poetry book club: a review of rae armantrout's ‘next life’

by Jessica Fox-Wilson

Rae Armantrout starts out Next Life with a “Tease,” which hints at structure, idea and form, but barely fleshes it out.

The poem juxtaposes images of a cop imagining a serial killer, a tree that is also a skeleton, a black sedan and a knit red cap, asking readers to draw the parallels between these seemingly disconnected things. In Armantrout’s universe (as well as ours), they are connected because they exist, if fleetingly, in the here and now. This opening poem serves as a preview of Armantrout’s larger project. In Next Life, Rae Armantrout uses spare, specific language to explore the big ideas: the nature of identity and all existence.

For me, Armantrout’s language style was challenging to dissect. While she uses very few words, she manipulates these words through placement, line breaks and context to reveal their complexities. For instance, in the poem “Tease” her second section reads: “Bare tree/is to human skeleton//as the holy spirit/likens objects//briefly//to make the world up/of provisional pairs.” By placing tree, skeleton and holy spirit together, between expanses of white space, she reveals their connections. They are structure and spirit, living and dead, holy and common.

As in “Tease,” it seems like much of Armantrout’s language is concerned with the act of definition, or distinguishing a singularity out of the multitudes. It is an interesting task in these times to define individuality, since we seem to be inundated with details and masses of things. In the poem “Two, Three,” the poet wonders how many details must be shared in order to create a specific instance. As she ponders, she lists people’s details, as if she’s watching a crowd pass by. A few poems later, she defines the existence of a pet cat as more than a thing, despite the cat’s lack of self awareness. In this poem, the language is still spare, but she extends her attention on the image.

Throughout the book, she uncovers the nature of identity through a sustained attention to images. In some poems, like “Short Story” and “Clear,” she presents fleeting moments shared between people that define identities. Through observed interactions, like a woman chatting on airplane or an elderly woman guided by two younger women, she reveals the frailty and vulnerabilities in lives. In one of my favorite poems, “A Distance,” Armantrout cycles through various identities, inhabiting and discarding them as she tries to find the right one. In fact, they are all her, “a woman/ age 56.” The poem is intriguing because she again finds commonalities between children and adults, the frail and the brave. Identity becomes a communal and public experience.

Even later in the book, her attention turns to the larger question of existence. In “Visits,” she begins with doubting Thomas, thrusting his hand into open wounds. Then, she switches to a wholly modern context, someone who collects Statue of Liberty figurines, showcased on the local news. After these two unrelated scenes she writes, “It is from this wound/that humans first emerged.” Did humans emerge out of the wound of doubting, the wound of needing to prove existence through experience, or the wound of surrounding ourselves with the detritus of our culture? It seems that Armantrout defines existence in spite of culture, not because of it. Ultimately, existence is hard to define, because we have surrounded ourselves with mediated experience. We collect figurines of Lady Liberty, rather than visiting the real statue itself.

Next Life is a challenge to read. Many of her poems are collages of imagery and it is the reader’s responsibility to discern the larger picture. At times I struggled with making connections between sections or stanzas of poems, and between poems in the collection. As with a lot of poetry, it took several readings and a close attention to the poet’s linguistic choices for me to understand her ideas. But once I began to pay attention, I started to look at the world slightly differently, as if everything could be connected.

Armantrout, Rae (2007). Next Life. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Rae Armantrout’s website.