The New Criterion

The designation “New and Selected Poems” sets up an unequal opposition. New poems are forced to compete with a selection representing the writer’s best work. Thus the odds are stacked against them. This is especially true in the case of The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems by Sherod Santos, whose early work is so exceptional.

Santos’s best poems reflect his high-stakes concerns as reflected by such titles as “On the Last Day of the World” “The Breakdown,” “Hymn to Necessity,” and “A Writer’s Life.” Yet the poems stay on the page. Clear, contained, and illustrative, they remain within the reader’s grasp. Rather than register a brand, Santos exercises control over a variety of forms and subjects.

In “Married Love,” Santos’s gorgeous sonnet from The Southern Reaches (1989), an adulterous couple’s lack of restraint carries the poem:

their summer shadows had detached themselves
from the confusion of those thousand leaves.
But no more than they could call their shadows  
back from the air, could they ignore what they’d undone,
and would undo once more, that afternoon
before giving in to what they knew, had always known.

Santos’s line breaks aid and abet the affair—each line propels their lust forward in headlong rhythms. Thus, while the language is plain, the reader is able to experience the affair’s momentum firsthand. Repetition and an iambic pulse make this poem memorable, and, fittingly, irresistible. One is enticed to read it over and over again.

These shadowed lovers recall those in Donne’s “A Lecture upon the Shadow” (Donne also provides the title for the collection, which is taken from one of his sermons): “We do those shadows tread,/ And to brave clearness all things are reduced./ So whilst our infant loves did grow,/ Disguises did, and shadows, flow/ From us and our cares; but now ’tis not so.” In both poems, shadows are a manifestation of love’s mercurial nature.

Just as “Married Love” concerns an extramarital affair, “On the Last Day of the World,” describes a sublunary sequence of events: “There were// fisherman smoking on the docks,/ and someone was already swimming//, when the sun appeared to sweep/ the beaches clean of their debris.” A shark does not breach the water; a tsunami does not surge ashore. The last day of the world is marked by “the fact that it would never come again” and an eerie resemblance to the one before.

In “A Tulip in Winter,” Santos engages mortality more directly (and personally). The poem takes us to his sister’s hospital room, where an “out-of-season hospital tulip” is imagined to:

… survive this way

a hundred days. A hundred days (imagine
that) to paint out the wallpaper harlequins,

uncane the cane-back rocking chair,
reclaim your green connection to a place

where flowers such as these are grown
to leave the living less impossibly alone.

As the objects in the hospital room begin to deteriorate and unwind, Santos sets up an unexpected relationship whereby the tulips—meant to cheer the patient—leave his sister at once completely alone and eternally connected to the natural world. Santos is a master of last lines. At the end of “Hymn to Necessity,” the poet, adjusting to the view of his yard without the sycamore taken down in a storm, remarks “But how good the sun feels in its absence,/ And how like absence to surprise me in this way.”

Although none of the more recent poems are as successful as the ones mentioned above, Santos continues to break new ground with backward-looking themes. “The Memory-Keeper” begins with an inventory: “The smell of pine and bacon grease,/ a house in a piney tract of land, a kitchen/ in the house, a stove in the kitchen.” Santos’s staccato delivery is surprising, especially in describing a boy who sits “watching the radium dials/ record the backward passage of time, and time itself, the beginning/ of time, and beyond the beginning/ the mind in the act of calling to mind.” The repetition of “time,” “beginning,” and “mind” is hypnotic, and so is the image of the dial counting down. By the end of the poem, we have entered into a state where memories are recovered and stored.

In “An Ordinary Evening in St. Petersburg,” which takes an entry from Chekhov’s notebook for an epigraph (“May 5. Returned Home”), Santos finds a new way to write on the process of recollection. The poem follows Chekhov from an outdoor festival, down a noisy street, to a fountain where he tries to “recall each of the thirteen/ tramway stops/ he’d passed along the way.” (The exercise reminds us of the radium dials in “The Memory-Keeper,” winding down to zero.) After Chekhov records the date and time, he realizes “how gratifying it was … to record it without literature/ to get in its way./ It was as if, between/ what we perceive/ and how we perceive it,/ an adjective had been inserted,// and the world’s work was to erase/ that word.”

In the preface to his collected essays, A Poetry of Two Minds, Santos writes, “In order to become something in the moment, the poem must resist being what it was a moment before.” This is certainly true of Chekhov’s impulse in “An Ordinary Evening in St. Petersburg” and, more importantly, of Santos’s body of work. For all of his retrospective glances, Santos hates to repeat himself. At his best, Santos captures moments of lyric intensity and beauty that feel as fresh today as when they were written.