House of Words by Jonathan Potter

I admit an affinity for the cover of House of Words: Mr. Potter and I share the image of a rather ominous-looking barn cast in a field on our first books of poetry, and it makes me wonder about the significance of a first book, the expectations (mostly cast from the writer). First books are sometimes pegged as rushed, raw attempts: the shadow of talent rather than the gravity of learned experience. I've read several strong first books in the past year--Traci Brimhall's Rookery, Keith Montesano's Ghost Lights--and I'm looking forward to Eduardo Corral's forthcoming book from the Yale Series of Younger Poets series. First books carry the weight of possibility, and all too often they are seen as prescriptive of the poet's future career and content.

House of Words is a first book, but it is an especially well-arranged one. The architecture of the book defines our reading: we are given allusions to, and epigraphs from, Kierkegaard, Percy, and various Biblical excerpts. Each of the three main allusions moves the collection in a different direction, nudges the reader toward another focus. All are connected, of course, as Kierkegaard is one of our most important philosophers of the self, and his sometimes labyrinthine prose are some of the best attempts at locating the physical person with the indeterminate soul. Percy used Kierkegaard as a locus and axis point, a way to present Binx Bolling as a man representative of a moment and location, a wounded capitalist wavering between the free market and free will.

Potter's collection is certainly not bound by these three considerations; rather, they arrive in the text at certain moments, welcome reminders that he is dealing with a world bigger than the instants of his poems. House of Words, for me, is marked by two main themes: the (sometimes) inadequacy of words to represent the real and the spiritual (certainly a concern for Kierkegaard), and a focus on narrative. The first poem in the book, "Wordsong," ends with the lines "because / all words here lie." The duality works as an introduction: here is the house of words constructed by the poem, structured by the poet, and yet also these words lie as in created untruths. Can words lie, though? Of course in the practical sense words misdirect and can be misunderstood, but at the same time Potter is adept with description, and those sketches can be quite concrete. Are we to question that specificity? "River's Gift" is a good example: "And manmade things, / a music of manmade motors. / Cars caress the air. I wait / for what the river brings, stoop down / to its frothy shoreline and touch / my hand reflected and restored." Do those words lie? This brings up questions of connections between word and world (can a house be of words? certainly--if we adjust our definition of house, as well as our definition of word).

"Madonna of the Sirens" arrives like a prayer, a column of words, and its rhyme in-part works best because of the truncated nature of the lines--the aren't long enough to develop into the sing-song, and they remain at a high chord. "Thanksgiving 1987" is a great narrative elegy, and its proximity to "Madonna of the Sirens" speaks to the width of this book's range. The poem progresses with such a great sense of internal repetition, words like "season," "well," and "we" arrive with the newness usually reserved for sestinas.Potter is able to move from prayer to narrative to comedy with "The The," with some amusing consonance ("he could have been a pimp in primary colors"). The poem shifts from comedy to observation: "Anyway the The looked around and surveyed the scene: / people waiting, reading magazines, children / playing with broken toys, a lady knitting something red, / her fingers and the needles loopedly-looping so fast, / so fast, a fish tank embedded in the wall, / only a single fish to be seen, / and that one not looking well--is what the The was thinking."

I also loved two later narrative poems--"Under Chub's" and "Self-Portrait with Truck"--in part because I was reminded about Potter's ability to slow down in other poems. There is sometimes nothing worse than the vacuous comedic poem, and Potter's strength here is in specificity of moment, truly unfolding an action so that the reader believes in his integrity as a poet-observer.

The fourth and final section of the book is a collection of love poems, and they work quite well; again, besides the genuine nature of the works, their strength is in Potter's ability to inhabit a line. My favorite was "We bend each other to the point of laughter" from "Heart-Shaped Tin." A nice way to conclude a collection: this house of words ends, or perhaps is grounded in, that most eternal and complicated emotion.