reviewed on December 4, 2024

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The second full-length collection from The Song Cave co-editor Alan Felsenthal—which makes the book self-published, perhaps—Hereafter is the rare work which pursues across its trajectory a single more or less explicitly articulated question, namely whether its contemplation of the afterlife sets the human species apart from other forms of being.

 

Or, as Felsenthal asks, “Is my higher soul speaking?”

 

Though the object of that question is the speaker’s own existential status, Felsenthal concerns himself just as much in Hereafter with the hereafter, imagined throughout as a kind of annihilating non-being, often associated with the darkness of oceanic depths.  Evacuated in death of its language and consciousness, the human body, Felsenthal suggests, is gathered back into and rearticulated through the material world.  “Before I was eaten,” he writes in the astonishing “Memory of the Deeps,”

 

before they could rive flesh from my bones

 

I considered my first home

 

and final bed

           

my last abyssal zone

 

the depressed sea floor

 

where Hades poses over

 

plunging trenches of sediment.

 

Haunting in its scale, the passage recalls Odysseus’s image of the underworld in Emily Wilson’s  2018 translation of The Odyssey, the wayward Ithacan describing a subterranean “house of Hades, where the doors are always wide open.”

 

Indeed, a pagan animism haunts Hereafter in immediate ways.  Imagining the afterlife as a decomposition of the body into “writhing” and “loamy soil,” for instance, Felsenthel takes up the vitalist ecopoetics of Annie Dillard and Jane Bennett, among others, attending with close regard to the fecundity of the natural world.  As he observes a young fox, Felsenthal notices “a thumb-sized hole where white mice hide, / to show us life, alert and destructive,” characterizing the warren as a “fount of spawn, / an altar upon which relentless gifts / of existence resurge.” 

 

Crucially—and sometimes ignored, I think, in ecopoetic poetry and scholarship—Felsenthal’s ecopoetics is also an economic ethic. “[W]ithout meaning to / people buried here / bought their plots,” he writes in one long-poem, though “no one owns / what comes after.”  And later: “no plot exists / for what can’t be said,” a tactical echo evoking not only the etymology of “plot” as a “secret plan or scheme,” but the word’s association with the plot of language itself: syntax.  Appropriately, then, Felsenthal revels in the almost annihilating materiality of the word:

 

a new sound

the bees emit

pollinating

or caught in

a spider’s web

pitches shift

limbed-up

maples

line the roadway

to the crematorium

 

As The Gettysburg Review used to brand itself, the lines are “pure delight, every time,” as is the characteristic wit with which Felsenthal explores the mediation of reality in language.  “It was hard to learn / the word copse,” he writes, “after corpse.”

 

Like the species’ contemplation of its own afterlife, language marks for Felsenthal—as it had for countless others before him, from Wordsworth to Wittgenstein—one form of alienation from the “natural” or material world, meaning that the afterlife of Hereafter involves a necessarily “obliterated landscape, dead reckoning.”  Drawing once more on etymology—“ob-littera,” or “against script” in Latin—and punching his enjambment, Felsenthal questions “what is it like / to not believe / world symbols / speak to me.”

 

The cost of Felsenthal’s often stirring spiritual reckoning, however, is a too frequent seeping into sentiment, especially in poems that linger one line past their welcome.  Here, for instance, is the end of the otherwise evocative “Before Lighthouses, God Wrecked Ships”:

 

the sun abided the days

a clod of smog lingered

there was no there to return to

there you were

the future was memory

and that was enough for God

 

Unless I am misreading, that last line misses on a number of levels, not least because of its self-satisfaction.  Likewise, Felsenthal is capable in Hereafter of such fustian fare as “[t]hrough the shadow of the Earth / the soul wafts” and “[a]cross the waning crescent // as silver pennies drop, // a poppy speaks // to me.  What does it say?”  One does wonder.

 

If its grandeur sometimes becomes grandiloquence, Hereafter nonetheless achieves an existential ambition reminiscent in some ways of the Ben Lerner of The Lights.  Before I noticed that Felsenthal thanks Lerner in the acknowledgements, I had recognized the latter’s influence in the spiritual ethos of Hereafter, especially in its approach to light.  For Lerner, light functions as a kind of “flickering” between earthly and spiritual or utopian realms, while for Felsenthal its translation between wave and particle, as well as its delimiting of dark spaces, stands in for the ambiguous materiality of the body.  “[E]asily seen shooting out mid-sea,” Felsenthal describes in “In Silhouette,” a lighthouse “summons them with hints of night.”

 

A smart sophomore collection from a wondrously dark mind, Hereafter answers its own central question—about the relation of life to afterlife, of here to hereafter—with its speaker bequeathing himself to the material beneath his boot-soles.  “Bury me somewhere I can stink,” Felsenthal implores, “without being / ashamed.” 

 

In place of Whitman’s perpetually reanimated hubris, that is, Felsenthal offers humus. 

 

Instead of singing himself, Felsenthal “drinks mud.”