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Ann Fisher-Wirth

Five Terraces

Wind Publications, 2005 Paper, $ 14.00.

Review by Tom Pynn

And what do you want? Where is your house?

Or do you walk among the rocks, beneath the trees?

--“Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll”

The philosophical premise of the Yi Jing (“Book of Changes”) is that change is due to the harmony of yin and yang (Ta’i Ch’i) being disturbed. In the living stream of ten thousand things that is always already happening, ta hua (“Great Transformation”), the Daoist aims at establishing and maintaining a harmony between the field of one’s experience, dao, and the unique particulars, de, that comprise the field. The trick is to let things come naturally (in accord with Ta’i Ch’i) of themselves (ziran). Allowing things to come of themselves naturally gives one the clarity and tranquility to act in accordance with the way of things (wu-wei). Wu-wei is noncoercive action in accordance with the de (“unique particularity as a focus of potency or efficacy”) of things; it is non-coercive activity that makes it possible for one’s true nature to emerge. When one is acting in accordance with the way of things, then one is at home and living a significant life. It is therefore significant that Ann Fisher-Wirth brackets her newest collection with the poem entitled “Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll,” a meditation on the painter Wu Wei’s Ming dynasty landscape. In doing so she establishes a meditative frame around poems fraught with the discordances and concordances of human life. Oscillating between the poles of discordance and concordance inevitably leads to a sense of being lost, estranged from those we are with and the places through which we move. Thus, Ann Fisher-Wirth’s choice of a by Eudora Welty to serve as epigraph to these poems is also fitting: “When you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.”

In “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll” the poet notices something rather sublime about our experience of being in the world: we come to ourselves, we lose ourselves, and we come to ourselves again and again. The oscillation of time—of heart, breath, pleasure and pain— is the context of being alive. We know change as intimately as we know anything and yet it is change that so confounds us. She writes,

Out of silence, the brimming lake, spills the waterfall.

Behind mountains, other mountains fade

until we cannot tell

what’s stone, what’s cloud,

and what the mark of time upon the silk.

A Chinese landscape is a map of the world. We move through it like we move through our lives: one moment we are standing outside the door of a house, the next moment we are at the edge of the land where mountains “cannot be distinguished from shadow.” That mountains and rivers dwarf the human is not a comment about the insignificance of the human, but an acknowledgement that when the human takes its place among the ten thousand things, there can be clarity and tranquility. It is the emptiness of shadow that allows the myriad forms to emerge. Thus, the poem can be read as a meditation on emptiness.

If we lose ourselves in the crevices between waterfalls and mountain passes rising into cloud cover in Wu Wei’s scroll and by that are invited to contemplate the mystery of Ta’i Ch’i, then in “The Trinket Poems” we are witness to the austerity of absence—of a breast, of love—desire outdistancing aging bodies, where “pain is infinite.” Yet, these poems are also poems of emptiness in the sense that they invite the reader to consider impermanence through a sustained look into the mind-body of an aging prostitute and a woman who plays her in a theatrical performance. The dramatic tension of these poems is that the two women’s lives threaten to converge and do when, in “There Is a Diary Open to the Words,” “Arlene wanted/ to do my makeup I just stood there weeping.” This is the moment of aporia, a feeling of helplessness when what we thought we knew appears as self-deception. The rug is pulled out from under us and we are, as the poet suggests in “Speak These Lines,” in “the heart’s/ nakedness.” Time wears away all bodies, all forms, even the mental forms of ideas, beliefs, opinions, and projections. Things give way to their opposites only when they have left their mark upon us; as spring yields to summer so does pain yield to pleasure. The poet rightfully questions those who “tell me past the change we grow serene.” It is never that easy, never a matter of being in change and then being outside of change while still in time. Yet for those who seriously consider the great matter of life and death, transformation becomes inescapable: “I would not be carried/ unmarred untorn to the river.” Transformation, however, is not without cost as the poem “Answers to April” reminds us.

It could be said that all the poems in this collection tend toward the great matter of life and death. There are poems that grapple with the death of innocence, the death of a child, and the death of parents, but in all of these poems there are revealed technologies for reversing death into life, like “un maestro del flamenco” in “Bacalao” who “summoned, lashed, tried to outrace dawn.” Sometimes the “magic” is a kiss, sometimes it is the terracing of a “back yard in Berkeley, sweat-drenched,” and sometimes it is an unnamed force (compassion?) that emerges between sentient beings. Whatever the “magic” is in these poems that work to reverse death into life, the “magic” is understated is always unspectacular, ordinary and, therefore, indisputable and unfathomable. Yet fathoming the depths of things is what poets do.

It is tempting to believe that the traces in these poems of what is being sought is a “magic” we have access to only through coercion. There are moments in many of these poems where the poet finds herself slipping in and out of the past as if trying to recover something that is lost. It would be facile to explain these as moments of nostalgia. In poems such as “Kisses,” “Rain,” and “Mississippi” what may appear at first reading as nostalgia, or repetition born of nostalgia, is a hermeneutics of facticity. If nostalgia is one of the weaknesses of confessional poetry (of which some of these poems can be classed), then catharsis may be one of its strengths. I am not simply referring to the therapeutics of poetry here. Calling our lives into remembrance can be a source of understanding, and because we all share the same repressive boundary situations of death, struggle, suffering, and guilt as well as the interactive boundary situations of birth, love, sacrifice, and redemption, to come upon these poems with a willing suspension of disbelief can open our hearts to our own respective conditions. As T.S. Eliot reminds us, it is not pain that is infinite—or pleasure for that matter—but humility, humility is endless.

The book ends with “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” but with the order of stanzas and sections reversed-- the yin to the first poem’s yang. The exigencies of time, “the cries of their pain or pleasure are lost in the fog . . .” and we are only as close to transformation as our humility brings us. Indeed, these poems sometimes give me the sense that a little tenderness may be the “magic” that will help us realize the uniqueness of all living things within the field of experience in which we all live and move and have our being together. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous, of self with no self, which Wu Wei and Ann Fisher-Wirth offer us.

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